This summer, coop board president Lenny Greher resigned from his office. Gary Altman was selected to replace him.

Why were shareholders not notified?

It’s part of a pattern: no financial update since a memo in March; no reply to our open letter in April; and now this.

In June, shareholders pledged to reaffirm the guiding principles of cooperative living: democratic governance, shared responsibility, constant education, and mutual respect.

We seek to improve communication among cooperators and with our board of directors, increase participation in our annual shareholders’ meeting, and help elect board members who demonstrate a commitment to these cooperative principles.

If you support the mission of Cooperatively Yours and want to help us achieve our goals — or if you just want to know what’s going on around here — please sign up here.

Volunteers are needed for cleanup of the embayments in East River Park on Saturday, September 20th from 11:00 to 1:00 as part of the International Coastal Cleanup Day supported by the Ocean Conservancy.

Meet at the Field House on the track side. Work gloves will be provided.

Please note: This is not a project for anyone under 18, or with any physical constraints. Volunteers have to climb a fence and work on uneven and sometimes slippery, craggy rocks. All are encouraged to wear closed-toed shoes and comfortable work clothes, and to bring along water and sunscreen.

Essex Crossing is coming … but not for years. Until then, we still have to look at acres of parking lots between Grand Street and Delancey, crumbling chain-link fences, and, if you dare look down, broken glass and doggie deposits.

Enter the community art project LES History Fence, sponsored by the LES BID, to spruce up the pedestrian area along the south side Delancey.

An opening party is set for this Wednesday, July2 at 5:30 pm at Delancey Street between Norfolk & Clinton, with drinks and Russian tapas to follow at Moscow 57 (168-1/2 Delancey) at 7 pm.

The mural is designed by LES -based Boym Partners, whose Babel Blocks — toys representing the great diversity of NYC — have been featured at MoMA.

For this installation, Boym created a few new characters:

The Lo-Down NY, as always, has more details.

To reaffirm the guiding principles of cooperative living: Democratic Governance, Shared Responsibility, Constant Education, and Mutual Respect.

Abraham Kazan, the father of cooperative housing in the United States (and on Grand Street), charged all members of cooperative communities “to exert their efforts to run this cooperative and make it more useful and more interesting for all who live in these apartments.”

Cooperatively Yours chooses to accept that invitation at East River Coop.

Together, we will work to increase participation in our annual shareholders’ meeting with the goal of engaging cooperators more fully in the ongoing betterment of our community.

We will endeavor to improve communication among cooperators and with our board of directors.

We will help elect candidates for the board of directors who demonstrate a commitment to these cooperative principles.

If you support the mission of Cooperatively Yours and want to help us achieve our goals, please sign on below.

If you are ready to take on a leadership role, please indicate your interest by marking “Floor Captain” (responsible for connecting with your immediate neighbors) or “Section Chief” (managing the volunteers in your column).

Heavy rain right now, with a chance of more all day — but the radar shows the rain moving steadily northeast, already having cleared Philadelphia. The ground may still be damp at 7:00, and the sky still cloudy, but we should stay dry during our open meeting tonight in the courtyard behind building 2.

Bring a chair, bring an umbrella — rain or shine!

We’ll take advantage of spring (and our coop’s ample free common space) for our next Open Meeting on Monday at 7 pm.  Please join us behind Building 2, in the nook between sections D and E.

Board member have not yet indicated they will attend — in fact they haven’t even acknowledged our invitations — so we may not be getting any answers to our the questions raised at our last meeting.

Instead, we’ll start to take responsibility ourselves by organizing around the guiding principles of cooperative living: democratic governance, shared responsibility, constant education, and mutual respect.

You might need to bring your own chair to our next meeting on June 9.

After our recent open meeting on April 30, we were informed that any subsequent use of the community room by Cooperatively Yours would be subject to the same $325 fee required of anyone making a reservation.

Tommy Loeb, who had arranged the April 30 reservation, wrote the board on our behalf to request that the fee be waived in order to facilitate the free and open meeting of cooperators. This weekend we received the board’s reply: our request has been denied.

The board argues that Cooperatively Yours is not any sort of official shareholder committee, and that no private group should get special treatment. You can read their letter here.

We appreciate the board’s sense of fairness, and agree that Cooperatively Yours has no official designation here at East River. But we do still think there are grounds to expect free use of the community room. As Tommy Loeb cited in his request to the board for a waiver, NY Real Property Law Section 230 is clear about our rights:

Tenants’ groups, committees or other tenants’ organizations shall have the right to meet without being required to pay a fee in any location on the premises including a community or social room where use is normally subject to a fee which is devoted to the common use of all tenants in a peaceful manner, at reasonable hours and without obstructing access to the premises or facilities. No landlord shall deny such right.

The board replies, “shareholders of the cooperative are not tenants,” and therefore are not protected by this statute. But the legal protection of cooperators under New York’s landlord-tenant laws is one of the fundamental distinctions between a condo and a coop.

So we’ll find another way to meet. Please mark Monday, June 9 at 7:00 pm on your calendars — we’re inviting board members to address the questions raised at our last meeting, and hope to have another productive conversation. Location TBD!

Essex Crossing will be a transformative project for our neighborhood, turning six acres of under-used land into 1.9 million square feet of residential, commercial, and community space. Nothing between here and the F train will ever be the same again.

Though the overall development plan has been approved by our local community board and by the City Council, specific designs have not yet been finalized. Next Wednesday, community members are invited to a second visioning session for the park that will be nestled right in the middle of the development along Broome Street. The new park is planned as part of phase 1, set to begin construction spring 2015.

The public discussion takes place on May 28, starting at 7:15 pm at Grand Street Settlement, 80 Pitt Street.