Can You Hear Us?At the first public RIOC board meeting after Susan Rosenthal’s dismissal, a longtime resident had to borrow an official’s voice to ask whether the people governing Roosevelt Island could hear us
In earlier meetings, a bright light behind Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Vice President and General Counsel Gretchen Robinson had left her face nearly invisible. On July 2, 2020, with Susan Rosenthal gone and a new administration forming, Gretchen appeared fully lit. One woman had moved into the light of the new administration; the other, The WIRE Circulation Manager Sherie Helstien, a longtime resident and former RIRA officer, had to borrow her voice to be heard. Public comment arrived already excluded from the board meeting. When Susan presided, she would ask the board for permission to respond. Those taking her place stayed quiet, a habit that would become more familiar in the years ahead. There was one exception, and it would become the focus of this memory. The administration on the screen had been born in procedural shadow. Rosenthal was fired on June 19 after a state investigation said it had substantiated racially and sexually offensive language. According to Chair RuthAnne Visnauskas, a partial board met after her dismissal and appointed Shelton that day. RIOC treated the transition as accomplished, then brought Shelton’s appointment back for public ratification. David Kraut and Conway Ekpo were absent. Apparently even plausible deniability needs two empty chairs. July 2 was less the birth of the new order than an effort to place a public seal on what had already been done.
Residents were permitted to speak, but only after surrendering their voices. Their words passed through an executive who now looked more visible than she ever had. Gretchen did not flatten Helstien’s letter. She paused where the thought required it, gave the questions room and allowed the anger to remain anger. For a few minutes, a process designed to contain the public produced something unexpectedly alive. Sherie Helstien’s PleaHelstien had worked on the letter. You could hear it in the architecture of the sentences, the movement from memory to warning and the discipline beneath its fury. Gretchen understood the writing and read it accordingly. She gave the letter breath. If Sherie could not speak in her own voice, this was as close as a borrowed voice could bring her. She began by reminding the board that Southpoint Park was not simply a state parcel awaiting improvement. Roosevelt Island residents and the Trust for Public Land had collaborated on its design. Southpoint’s wildness was intentional. RIOC saw nature and assumed somebody had forgotten to improve it. When RIOC later cut down the seagrasses without public input, Helstien wrote, the agency “basically denuded the park and shaved away its character.” Then came her warning: “I suppose we should be grateful RIOC left any grass at all, and, up to now, the trees. But wait, there’s more.” Helstien agreed that the deteriorating seawalls needed repair. She called that work “a good and necessary thing.” She distinguished between repairing the seawall and rebuilding the park. RIOC distinguished between residents who agreed and residents who needed more information. RIOC turned the repair into an opportunity to add a pathway residents had not requested and remove what she described as 325 trees. Then Gretchen read the lines Helstien had built to be impossible to mistake:
According to Helstien, the pathway answered Hudson Related developer David Kramer’s desire to bring more visitors to Roosevelt Island more faithfully than it answered residents who wanted their park left wild. She spoke of the shops, but the larger commercial value of more arrivals was clear: more people seeing the Island and what Related had built there. The resident directors could hear Albany, developers and commercial ambition perfectly while refusing to listen next door. Apparently their hearing improved with distance. “What is your purpose for sitting on the board?” she asked them. A RIOC board meeting was not the community’s meeting, she concluded. “It’s yours.” The Trees They Counted AfterwardsResident director Michael Shinozaki responded “for the record.” RIOC was not removing 325 trees, as far as he knew, a qualification that provided more shade than any tree. He said the design had already changed in response to community comments and that similar vegetation would be planted. At RIOC, a tree becomes “vegetation” the moment somebody wants to remove it. Of all the public comments read that evening, Helstien’s was the one that earned an immediate board answer.
Shinozaki was entitled to challenge her number. Helstien’s 325 appears to have come from the Save Our Shorelines petition, which warned that more than 320 trees would be lost but did not publish a tree-by-tree inventory. After the comments ended, resident director Jeffrey Escobar said misinformation about Southpoint needed correcting. The shoreline merely needed clearing. Nine days later, RIOC said the project would remove roughly 99 small trees, not 325, and plant 79 replacements. It did not show residents how it reached that number. Helstien may have overstated the count, but for those who loved the untamed Island promised by Southpoint, 99 was not an acquittal. It was a confession with better arithmetic. The seawalls needed repair, but the pathway did not become necessary merely because RIOC attached it to necessary work. Helstien had asked who was entitled to decide what the park would become. RIOC answered by arguing about how much of it would be destroyed. The Fog MachineAfter the public comments, Director David Kapell identified detachment between the board and the community as the common complaint. He blamed some of it on RIOC’s basement boardroom, calling it the “antithesis of what a public meeting space should look like.” Apparently residents would accept powerlessness if the room had better windows. At RIOC, that qualified as transparency: a basement window useful mainly for proving daylight existed somewhere else. Shelton agreed that meetings should feel more open and inviting. He promised a communications plan, greater engagement, more transparency and better information about projects. The administration born in shadow announced itself with a promise of light. I remember Sherie asking for feedback on her writing. That is why hearing Gretchen read this letter hurts. The words were not the reflexive outrage of someone unwilling to accept change. Sherie had considered the history, conceded the necessity of the seawalls and worked to make the distinction between repair and destruction impossible to miss. RIOC listened closely enough to locate the number it could attack. The project proceeded, the shoreline was cleared and the pathway was built. Recently, Theo asked me to watch the second and third Steam Plant Community Advisory Group meetings. I declined. They were too boring even for me, which may be the clearest evidence that the machine has been perfected. Everything is orderly. Everyone is permitted to speak. The only human drama left is watching Kalin try to make someone hear him after they have already listened. The process is so well oiled that it produces no friction and, therefore, no movement. David Stone calls it the fog machine. It does not silence residents. It lets them speak, repeats enough of their language to create the sensation of recognition and then proceeds unchanged. Their objections do not enter the official minutes because public comment is not part of the meeting. They leave instead as Island memories, carried by the people who remember when something might still have been different. Sherie Helstien asked, “Can you hear us?” RIOC listened closely enough to correct her. Six years later, it may have perfected listening as a way of never having to hear. Your concern is important to us and will be ignored in the order it was received. Subscribe for free to receive updates on new posts and support our work.
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