Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) Monthly Meeting Wednesday Februry 2 At Child School Gymnasium, Come Learn What Is Happening On Roosevelt Island - Censorship Motion Still At Issue

Image Of January 2011 RIRA Common Council Meeting

The Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) will be holding it's February 2011 Monthly meeting Wednesday night starting at 8 PM. The RIRA monthly meeting will take place at the Child School Gymnasium (566 Main Street) and not at the Good Shepherd Community Center. As always, prior to the start of each meeting there is a public session in which any resident can come and address the Common Council Delegates on any issue of concern.

Below is the Agenda for the January 2011 RIRA meeting.
February RIRA Aganda

In the past, I would have included the RIRA Committee Monthly Reports in this post but due to the RIRA Censorship motion passed at the January RIRA meeting, I cannot share them with the Roosevelt Island community prior to the monthly meeting.

Here's a video of the censorship motion's introduction and rationale at the January RIRA meeting.

You Tube Video Of RIRA Censorship Motion

RIRA Communciations Co-Chair Ava Dawson opposes the censorship motion and writes:

I believe that the censorship motion passed at the last common council meeting was a mistake, and greatly damages the legitimacy and transparency of RIRA. It makes us seem hypocritical in our demands for similar transparency from RIOC if we cannot make our information available to the public, especially when all island residents are technically members of RIRA. 

As co-chair of the communications committee, we have been working to establish a presence on the internet for RIRA (to be available soon), and have been working to make committee reports and RIRA documents available to the public on our website. I am worried about the censorship motion's potential effect on our efforts in this regard.

To comment on Rick's publication of the minutes: It is my belief that committee minutes and reports are public domain, and I feel that he was completely within his rights to publish these documents.  The fact that the documents contained unfavorable viewpoints and harsh wording reflects poorly on those who wrote them. It was not Rick's job to censor this information prior to publication, as he was not the original author of the documents. This responsibility lies in the hands of the elected committee chairs. The public has a right to know the opinions of its elected representatives and how they are reporting these opinions to the organization.

If you do not like the job that your committee heads are doing or you do not feel that you are being adequately represented, please come and voice this opinion at the next RIRA meeting or within the committee meetings themselves.

Please note that this is my personal opinion and does not reflect the sentiment of RIRA or the Communications Committee.

Ms. Dawson's comments were received prior to the RIRA website going live last week.

Former RIRA President and current Planning Committee Chair Frank Farance also opposes the RIRA Censorship motion and believes that the vote was procedurally invalid. According to Mr. Farance:

Subject: Request for Interpretation to void "censorship" vote result because it required a 2/3 vote
Date: 2011-01-28
From: Frank Farance

I request the RIRA Common Council to formally interpret its constitution, by-laws, and rules of order with respect to the apparent approval of a "censorship" motion at the January 5, 2011 RIRA Common Council meeting. Based upon the following reasoning, the RIRA Common Council did not follow its own procedures, which require a 2/3 vote for approval of such a motion; the motion was inconsistent with the present RIRA Constitution; and the motion implied a change to the present RIRA Constitution. Thus, the 17-12 vote on "censorship" did not meet the required approval criteria and did not follow the required procedure and, thus, is null and void.

The following is background information that led up to the vote and a motion I will make at Wednesday's RIRA Common Council meeting.

1. I request the following motion at the February 2 RIRA Common Council meeting:
Whereas the RIRA Common Council at its January 5, 2011 meeting adopted a motion by a vote of 17-12 on censorship, which included restrictive policies for distribution of documents;

Whereas RIRA Constitution Article III, Section 4, "Meetings" implies that all RIRA meetings are public when not in Executive Session ("However, the Council may be called into executive session by a Two-Thirds vote of the Council Members. Executive sessions are not open to the public and no votes may be taken at any executive session.") and the said censorship motion, by virtue of its controlling the flow of information, would imply non-public meetings of the RIRA Common Council and its committees;

Whereas RIRA Constitution Article IV, Section 3, "Secretary" states "It shall be the responsibility of the Secretary to take and report minutes of all meetings of the Common Council and the Town Meeting, to maintain the archives of RIRA, ..." and creating non- published reports would a change in the constitution by requiring the Secretary to keep two kinds of archives: one for publicly available documents that reached the 2/3 criteria of the said censorship motion, and another archive for non-public documents that did not achieve the 2/3 criteria of the said censorship motion;

Whereas RIRA Constitution mandates the use of the current edition of Roberts Rules of Order that requires a two-thirds vote to "Amend or Rescind constitution, bylaws, or rules of order" and the 17-12 tally did not achieve the two-thirds criteria;

Whereas RIRA Constitution Article X mandates a Constitutional Amendment process for such changes, and this amendment process had not been performed;

Therefore, RIRA did not operate according to its Constitution, Rules of Order, and Constitutional Amendment Process;

And Therefore, the January 5, 2011 censorship motion is null and void.

2. At the January 5, 2011 RIRA Common Council meeting, the Common Council reacted to two poorly drafted committee reports. One report from the RIRA Housing Committee contained bigoted and divisive language. The other report from the RIRA Public Safety Committee contained unsubstantiated criticism of an NYPD police officer and baseless criticism of an Island youth services organization (which seems out of scope of the RIRA Public Safety Committee).

3. In my experience as a RIRA Common Council member for 15 years, I don't recall seeing a committee report as inflammatory as the Housing Report. I don't recall seeing a committee report having such baseless claims as the recent Public Safety Report.

4. These unsubstantiated complaints against the NYPD officer were communicated to supervisors at the 114th Precinct, which might cause the loss of the Island's sole NYPD presence.

5. The reports were forwarded to the broad Roosevelt Island community through various people, including the RIRA President.

6. After distribution, it was discovered that the reports contained embarrassing information (the misguided thinking of the RIRA Housing Committee Chair) and inappropriate identifying information (the NYPD officer's name was revealed, which might compromise his work). In one case, the information was posted on one of the Island's blogs, Rick O'Conor's "Roosevelt Islander". Several RIRA Common Council members contacted Mr. O'Conor to have the documents taken down. Mr. O'Conor said that he obtained the information through the normal channels (the RIRA President, as he did for years previously).

7. I and others asked Mr. O'Conor to redact the officer's name in the report, which he did. It is important to note that (1) redacting the name of the officer was appropriate because it was later discovered that the accusations in the reports were unsubstantiated (not known at the time of distribution or posting), (2) the reports were intended for the public (all Common Council reports have been posted publicly previously).

8. It is unfortunate that the Main Street WIRE weighed in on this topic and it was wrong on several counts. It blames the problem on irresponsible journalism when in fact the WIRE has the same policies of publication. For example, the WIRE reported the PSD officer's name in the May 30, 2009 faulty arrest of a parent at a Little League game (just like the Roosevelt Island blog did for the RIRA Public Safety Committee report). This dustup is most likely aggravated by the WIRE now perceiving the Roosevelt Islander blog as a competitor. An ugly competition it's been with the WIRE encouraging RIOC and RIRA officials to prohibit their biweekly status reports from being published in any place other than the WIRE (e.g., not on Rick's blog). The WIRE's position is that publishing in more than place would transmogrify the status reports into a mere press release that it says it doesn't publish, but recently the WIRE publishes PSD's press releases verbatim, i.e., a publishing policy no different than Roosevelt Islander blog on the RIRA report.

9. We are a country of a free press, which means that public officials (e.g., members of Congress) who make embarrassing remarks (e.g., statements that reveal their bigotry) are unable to censor their publication. I think Rick O'Conor had it right: it is newsworthy, to all Island residents to report that the RIRA Housing Committee Chair has such bigoted views. Likewise, it is important understand the low quality of reporting that we the RIRA Common Council are receiving from the RIRA Public Safety Committee Chair, whose reporting includes unsubstantiated complaints (gratuitous bashing) against our only NYPD presence (which we will now likely lose) and against Island youth service organizations (her committee suggests RIOC Board members initiate punitive audits).

10. By shedding light on these actions, we can hold the persons and their organizations accountable. In other words, we gauge RIRA by its own reactions towards these kinds of things. RIRA has performed poorly: rather than the primary focus on better committee reports, the RIRA discussion focused on censoring reports (unless a 2/3 majority approves their release). The RIRA discussion was about an artificial worry about "sensitive information" being published, i.e., the misguided belief that NYPD's officer's name should not have been published because it was "sensitive information". The real problem was the unsubstantiated complaints and gratuitous bashing in the RIRA Public Safety Committee Report. In other words, had the complaints in the report been substantiated, it would have been acceptable to publish the officer's name (no different than the WIRE's publication of the PSD officer's name in 2009).

11. RIRA is a public organization and it is disappointing that all four RIRA executive officers (President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer) voted in favor of this censorship motion. Residents of Roosevelt Island are members of RIRA and have a right to attend and participate in every meeting, i.e., essentially all our business is conducted in public and is fair game for reporting by members themselves or the public attending the meeting. For RIRA Common Council members, the remedy to poor verbal and written statements is *to speak and write better, not to censor*.

12. Although RIRA is a public organization, there are times when matters (hopefully few of them) must be held in private and the RIRA Constitution permits this via Executive Session. However, participation in such a private meeting is not the same as deciding what information can be distributed. For the past 15 years, I have encountered "sensitive information" in only three areas: (1) the personal contact information for the RIRA Common Council members, (2) the access codes and credentials of operations (bank accounts, web sites, etc.), and (3) the proprietary information we were entrusted to hold by external organizations (e.g., Howard Polivy, Matt Katz, and I signed non-disclosure agreements with RIOC to review their emergency planning). The RIRA Common Council and RIRA committees should have a policy on which kinds of information they believe are sensitive and they cannot include information that is essential to the transparency, governance, and Island-wide participation of RIRA, i.e., minutes and committee reports can never be considered sensitive information.