Upper East Side Community Paper Our Town Describes Roosevelt Island As "Cuomo's Colonial Island"

Image Logo From Our Town 

A September 15 Our Town article profiles Roosevelt Island and reports on the recent controversial appointment of Child School/Legacy High School Executive Director Sal Ferrera to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corp (RIOC). An excerpt from the Our Town article regarding Mr. Ferrera's appointment:

... the law was changed to require that five of the board members be residents of Roosevelt Island. On top of that, governors Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson both chose board members from groups of nominees presented to them as the winners of popular elections on the island. While it wasn’t a perfect democratic structure, it worked. Until Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed an outsider to the board this June.

Salvatore Ferrera lives in Brooklyn and has worked for the past year as the executive director of The Child Legacy High School on Roosevelt Island. He was nominated to the board by State Sen. Martin Golden, also of Brooklyn, with whom he has worked in his history as a teacher and principal. (Golden’s office did not return calls requesting a comment on the nomination.) According to Ferrera, his appointment was a surprise even to him, but it was a bigger surprise to many people on the island and the elected officials who represent them.

“I find it sort of frustrating that this was done—not only without the consultation of the residents, but I didn’t get a phone call,” said City Council Member Jessica Lappin of Ferrera’s appointment. She stresses that her objection has nothing to do with Ferrera personally, but thinks that the governor should have respected the process that had previously been followed.

“We worked for years to get a process in place that Spitzer agreed to back in 2001, to hold these island elections just to suggest people, to give the governor a sense of who people would like to see on the board, with the understanding that they would have to be background checked and vetted,” said Lappin.
Ferrera admits he barely knew anything about the island’s governing structure before he was appointed (which he said happened following a series of phone interviews with members of the governor’s staff) and that he had no idea how upset people would be at his appointment.

“If I had known it was going to be this contentious before, I never would have taken that first step,” said Ferrera. But he insists that his position as the head of a major school and his plans to build a new athletic and equestrian center will enhance the island. “I see myself coming in from the outside with a different perspective. I’m able to broker compromises,” he said....

Read the whole Our Town article here.

An error in the article states that Spitzer was Governor in 2001 - he was not. His term began in 2007.