Susan and David had been drawn to one another by the qualities that made each of them difficult for everyone else. They were intelligent, profane, generous, insensitive and deeply attached to Roosevelt Island. They believed a second drink restored perspective and a third made everyone else less disappointing. Most of the people around them accepted the arrangement.

I came to know Susan through David and eventually became her friend. She was not gentle, but she was often kind, with a gift for making generosity sound like an order and an insult almost companionable. Their idea of sensitivity was remembering which insult belonged to whom.

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Affection Was Not Permission

Susan’s warmth had a hierarchy. She once cut off Chief Financial Officer John O’Reilly while he was explaining the pressure of finishing an audit, then called him a “warrior.” She praised Shelton Haynes for controlling expenses. Then she turned toward Comptroller Muneshwar Jagdharry. “Listen, if we left it up to you, we wouldn’t spend a penny.”

On another occasion, when Muneshwar told her which financial documents required review, Susan called them bedtime reading and reminded him how interesting he was. Muneshwar answered, “Yes, Susan,” and laughed like a man who had just remembered she also approved the payroll.

Susan heard Muneshwar’s laughter as permission without considering what it might cost an employee to withhold it. That was her most consequential flaw: she was present for her intention and absent from its effect. Her affection may have been real. So was the power.

While Susan Planned the Future

Susan fiercely defended Shelton Haynes, Gretchen Robinson and Tajuna Sharpe, but her faith in Shelton ran deepest. A friend close to Susan says Chief Financial Officer John O’Reilly tried more than once to raise concerns about him; she refused to reconsider. When Shelton said family pressures had left him needing somewhere to escape, Susan reportedly gave him use of her Long Island home. She offered more than professional trust. She offered refuge.

By June 2020, Shelton seemed to be listening differently. During a public meeting, Susan interrupted him to praise his work. He laughed, then cut off his camera. The laugh sounded affectionate; switching off the camera looked like an effort to keep that affection from being seen. Susan later began one passage, “Like Shelton said,” still treating him as a partner. The recording later disappeared from the RIOC website, taking with it her praise, his laugh and the instant his face vanished. What disappeared with it was a relationship in transition: the affection remained, but Shelton no longer seemed willing to leave it on display.

She misread Howard and David differently. Howard Polivy knew more of the financial machinery than Susan did and enjoyed making that knowledge visible. He knew every number in the budget except how many times a man could say yes before it became his title. Susan underestimated how useful Howard would become when Albany changed direction. David was her kindred spirit; she mistook shared irreverence for shared loyalty.

The directors were not entirely unaware of trouble. A June 12 complaint had reached the Governor’s Office, and a friend close to Susan says it circulated widely. Yet the June 18 Audit Committee does not sound like directors expecting a firing. Howard anticipated a “very smooth board meeting,” David spoke of working under “combat conditions” and declared himself satisfied, and Chief Financial Officer John O’Reilly told the auditors there had been no significant subsequent events. Less than a day later, the most significant event of Susan’s public life arrived.

What Juneteenth Made of Her

On June 19, 2020, Susan was fired by telephone and barred from the office. It was Juneteenth, two days after Governor Andrew Cuomo had designated it a paid holiday for state employees. By evening, the New York Post had Albany’s explanation: an investigation had substantiated racially and sexually offensive language. Susan later denied the allegations, saying the complaint established no policy violation and that she had not been allowed to examine the evidence Albany used, including recordings. Before any of that complexity reached the public, a phone call ended her job and a tabloid ended her reputation.

Susan prided herself on being a civil-rights advocate who had promoted Black employees. In her final days as president, she thanked young Islanders for marching against racial injustice. Her history could not settle the allegations, but it explains why the accusation felt less like losing a job than being told her life meant its opposite. Afterward, what had been social drinking became anesthesia.

David avoided Susan and moved toward Shelton, Gretchen and the new order. I came to believe that David’s repentance required only one sacrifice. Fortunately for David, Susan had already been selected. Defending her would have required him to confront the parts of himself their friendship had permitted. Howard required less torment; Albany moved, and Howard moved with it.

Betrayal does not always arrive before the knife; sometimes it is measured by how quickly friends make room for the successor.

What a Flawed Woman Is Owed

On August 10, 2026, the Second Circuit vacated the dismissal of Susan’s due-process claim and sent it back for further proceedings. The court neither found her allegations true nor cleared her name. It held only that this claim had not already been adjudicated on its merits and could not be dismissed as litigation she had already lost. Albany believes deeply in due process: first it decides what you are, then it gives you six years to object.

Theo will explain what the court reopened, what Susan must still prove and why the missing recordings and disputed investigation matter. My concern is what readers must carry into those pleadings: What does a state owe a flawed person before it uses its authority to define her publicly?

Due process does not become important only after someone proves herself innocent, sensitive or pleasant. A woman can be difficult and still have rights. Men have built entire careers on that combination. Susan’s flaws may explain why people abandoned her. They do not excuse what the state denied her.

Susan may not have been innocent enough for a lamb, but she was useful enough for a sacrifice. A lamb would have been easier. Lambs rarely spend six years in federal court demanding the recordings and their names back.

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The demolition began on paper long before the City invoked emergency authority to carry it out. In RIOC’s fiscal 2013-14 budget, the Corporation set aside $7 million for fiscal 2015 for the complete demolition and cleanup of the Roosevelt Island Steam Plant. RIOC called that figure its worst-case scenario, meaning the State corporation might be left responsible for the entire cost.

That entry changes the starting point of the current story. The public has been asked to understand the Steam Plant demolition as the response to a July 2024 emergency order issued after the Department of Buildings identified deteriorating masonry, visible cracks and dangerous conditions at the building and smokestacks. What the budget establishes is that demolition was already a foreseeable public obligation more than a decade earlier.

The question is therefore not whether officials could have predicted that an unused industrial building would eventually require a decision. They did predict it. They gave the prediction a price and a year. The unanswered question is what happened after the prediction became inconvenient.

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Abandoned Twice

The plant was first abandoned as a working system. In 2014, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation informed RIOC that the Steam Plant had been decommissioned and would no longer provide steam heat. The plant had served the island’s hospitals and at least one RIOC facility, Sportspark, where a temporary boiler was installed to replace the lost steam service. RIOC’s budgets then began carrying the smaller, recurring costs of a shutdown whose larger consequences were left unresolved.

The larger obligation did not follow the same path. In the next budget, the clear $7 million demolition line gave way to a revenue entry labeled “Steam Plant Redevelopment,” with no projection because negotiations remained unresolved. Demolition had not been completed. Redevelopment had not been defined. The public record had moved from a priced obligation to an unpriced possibility.

That was the second abandonment. The building remained physically present, but responsibility for its future stayed suspended between governments. The City had operated the plant. RIOC controlled much of the surrounding Island. Each could point to the other’s role while time continued performing the one task no agency had funded: deterioration.

The “Emergency” Arrives on Schedule

By July 2024, the Steam Plant had acquired a new designation: an “emergency.” The timing is notable. As the State and City were negotiating the future of Roosevelt Island, including the lease and redevelopment of this part of the Island, the long-neglected Steam Plant suddenly received sustained official attention. DOB issued an emergency order, and the City later placed HPD’s Demolition Unit in charge of removing the structure. By June 2026, HPD had begun demolition work, air monitoring and environmental procedures under a formal project process that had been absent throughout the preceding decade.

But DOB’s later explanation drew a narrower line around what had occurred. Deputy Commissioner Yegal Shamash described the underlying condition as a failure to maintain and identified securing the dangerous perimeter as the immediate emergency response. That did not withdraw the order. It did, however, leave an important question unanswered: how did the urgent need to protect the public become authority for the complete demolition of a structure government had already contemplated removing more than a decade earlier?

The plant obtained what it had lacked for years: an agency with authority, an action and a procurement path. Emergency powers allowed that machinery to move without the public process that might have examined stabilization, demolition scope and alternatives before the outcome was settled. The strange part is not that government acted. It is that the same broad outcome RIOC budgeted for 2015 returned nine years later under emergency authority, while DOB later described the underlying failure in considerably less sudden terms.

The demolition continues at emergency speed, bypassing the ordinary public process, while the records explaining the nature of the “emergency” and how it came into being remain sealed from public view.

What the Budget Proves

What is clear is that demolition was not a sudden idea. RIOC identified the plant for removal nine years earlier as part of clearing the site for future redevelopment. The Governor’s later announcement also makes clear that the State and City reached an agreement tied to extending the island’s land lease and planning the property’s next use. What remains unexplained is what happened between those points, who made the decisive commitments and when the demolition outcome became fixed.

The unanswered question is the “emergency.” DOB Deputy Commissioner Yegal Shamash publicly described the underlying condition more narrowly as a failure to maintain, without withdrawing the emergency order or the accelerated process it enabled. Demolition now proceeds under emergency authority, outside the ordinary public review that might test its scope and necessity, while the records showing how that emergency was defined, justified and connected to the State and City’s broader plans remain undisclosed.

More than six months ago, we began filing FOIL requests seeking the records that might explain how this “emergency” was born. Substantive responses have not arrived. DOB has since produced a structural assessment dated 2026, not the contemporaneous engineering record that would explain the 2024 authorization.

We are not prepared to jump ahead of the documents. But the public record already contains a decade of demolition plans, State-City negotiations and a governor’s announcement describing the site’s future after demolition. What remains missing is the record connecting those plans to the emergency authority used to carry them out.

A reader might conclude that the emergency was manufactured or later justified retroactively. We are not making either claim without the records. What can be said is that the documents needed to test those possibilities remain undisclosed.

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“Mr. Kraut here,” someone says. Then his name is called again. The room keeps addressing him as though repetition might restore connection. I want him to look up, not because the meeting requires his vote, but because I know how much of Southtown he once carried in his head. No recognition comes. Someone confirms that the Board has a quorum, and the room relaxes before David does. He has been reduced to the minimum unit required for motion.

Vice President and General Counsel Gretchen K. Robinson steps into the confusion, soft-spoken but precise. She has learned how to move through a room shaped by male urgency without borrowing its noise. Outside counsel is available only until 6:15, so Robinson proposes taking the seven Southtown Building 9 items together. “One vote for all,” someone says. I have seen Vegas marriages with more due diligence. No one separates the ground lease from the dog run, Firefighters’ Field, the crosswalk, sewer work, commercial garbage or RIOC’s future offices. The Board has found efficiency before it has found understanding.

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David Kramer, President and CEO of Hudson Companies, approaches the microphone and announces that he is pro-pickleball. In real estate, foreplay is mentioning pickleball before asking for the land. As he moves through the long history of Southtown, naming the people who have carried the project forward, he nearly leaves Kraut behind. Then he catches himself and looks toward the screen. “Nod your head if you heard me, David.” No nod comes. The painful thing is that Kramer is not alone. We have all begun to forget David because, by then, the man who once filled every argument has become a shell of the man he had been. Kramer returns to overhead protection, while I remain with the forgotten man on the screen.

The Men Who Understood

Kramer reaches the building itself: 28 stories, 357 apartments, the lower eight floors reserved for Memorial Sloan Kettering staff and the remainder market-rate. RIOC will lease the public land to the developer, then rent 7,000 square feet back for its own offices. That is selling your bra and paying rent to keep the support. Kramer calls it “an interesting sandwich of relationships.” The developer gets the meat, RIOC gets a private dining room, and the public gets a garnish with the bill for keeping it fresh.

Howard Polivy knows the details. That is what distinguishes him from the ordinary bobbleheads beside him. REDAC failed to achieve a quorum the previous evening, so there was no committee meeting and no vote. Polivy nevertheless delivers the committee’s “sense” that the transaction should be approved, wrapping the missing process in force majeure, refreshed transactions and financial considerations. I have seen cheap gift baskets with less cellophane. David Stone recently called B.J. Jones a master of the Ambiguous Word Generator, but Howard was fluent years earlier. He is a bobblehead with knowledge, which is more useful to power than an empty one. Most bobbleheads sit on the dashboard. This one drives the car. “Congratulations, David,” he says. “It’s about time.”

Michael Shinozaki is the only resident director whose knowledge produces friction. He asks about Main Street disruptions, accessible ramps, RIOC’s office space and the missing public comfort station. Each question has a person behind it: someone crossing the street, entering with a wheelchair, searching for a bathroom or wondering why the public authority must rent offices on land it already controls. Shinozaki does not accept polished language as an answer. He shakes his head and asks again. In a deal this full of crap, you would think plumbing came first. Yet his questions never harden into a refusal.

When Shinozaki reaches affordability, the bargain shows its shape. Building 8 carried the affordable units so Building 9 could arrive at the market unburdened. Affordability has been treated as baggage: place it in one building, then declare every building that follows free of the obligation. When Valella observes that affordable and market-rate apartments work better when integrated, I almost mistake his voice for the one inside my own head. But the thought changes nothing. Polivy moves the package, Director Conway Ekpo seconds it, and the ayes follow from those who asked nothing and, finally, from Shinozaki. Polivy uses his knowledge to carry the deal forward. Shinozaki asks sharp questions and then votes yes, intellectual foreplay followed by an arranged marriage. Everyone else needs to know only when to say yes.

The Public Hours*

That night I dreamed the Sportspark had reopened, although no one knew its hours. A sheet of paper was taped to the glass doors, but the numbers had run together before the ink dried. Families waited outside with towels and swim bags. Behind a folding table sat three men. One held a binder. Another held a pencil. The third held nothing. He was old and silent, but I knew he had once understood every door, drain and pipe in the building better than either of the others.

The binder man explained, in a voice polished soft enough to sound kind, that public access had been preserved through a flexible model responsive to usage, staffing and the evolving needs of the facility. He smiled as though the explanation had settled something, never looking toward the doors or the people waiting beyond them. The pencil man recognized the kindness in his voice for what it was: condescension too incurious to notice it had failed. “How many hours of lifeguard coverage were purchased?” he asked. The hours, he was told, belonged to a broader operational envelope.

The pencil man pressed his eraser against the page, then lifted it without erasing anything. His next question came more slowly, each word placed carefully so it could not be misunderstood. “Are they written down?” “Coverage is embedded in the framework.” The binder man answered with the same patient smile, mistaking restraint for confusion. Then he gave the silent man’s shoulder a practiced shake. “That is our understanding, isn’t it?” The old man did not move.

I remember more questions, though not their wording. What remains is the pattern: the pencil man asking for something solid and the binder man answering with polished sentences that produced nothing he could write down. The binder man’s kind facade never slipped because he never noticed it had failed. The pencil man did. With each answer, his jaw tightened and his questions grew slower, his calm becoming something he had to hold in place. At every pause, the binder man tapped the silent man’s shoulder and asked for agreement. The silent man occupied the chair without inhabiting it. I counted nine taps and nine requests for confirmation, each answered by the same absence.

When the questions had exhausted everyone but answered nothing, the pencil man placed his pencil beside the blank page. The binder man smoothed the cover of his binder and declared public access protected. Then, for the tenth time, he pressed the silent man’s shoulder. “You agree?” he asked. The silent man stirred at last. He looked beyond them, toward some roll call only he could hear. “Yes,” he said. “I’m present.”

The Contract Not Yet Written

I surface from the dream to find Howard Polivy operating the Ambiguous Word Generator so skillfully that the harder I try to follow him, the more sleep pulls me back. Haynes will take a turn at it later, but Howard is the trained operator. While I fight to keep my eyes open, Judy Berdy rises from the seat beside me, walks onto the stage and whispers to Michael Shinozaki. I do not need to hear her; she has spent half the meeting talking about the missing public bathroom, a speech she still gives today. Broadway productions have closed with shorter runs and more bathrooms.

The StandGuard contract is worth nearly $867,000 a year, but Shinozaki is less interested in its ceiling than in what it promises the public. He turns the same edge toward the administration. Will the guards cover early mornings, evenings and weekends? Did StandGuard price a nine-hour day while RIOC imagined twelve? Haynes answers with flexibility and future programming. Shinozaki shakes his head before Haynes has finished. Haynes interrupts him; Shinozaki interrupts back. For several minutes, nobody succeeds in putting his question to rest. Robinson promises that the final contract will contain the necessary protections, but Shinozaki keeps returning to the same inconvenient fact: the contract before them has not yet been written. Acting Chief Operating Officer Mary C. Cunneen finally finds the proposed hours in the original request for proposals. Robinson offers to table the vote or condition its approval. Shinozaki has forced the room to produce clarity in public, but his questions still do not harden into refusal. The contract passes unanimously.

Then Assistant Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Akeem H. Jamal asks the Board to give Haynes the power to issue proclamations and citations. The transition is almost too neat. The directors have just struggled to define what the public will receive, and now they are deciding who will define what the public should celebrate. Jamal describes the proclamation as RIOC’s highest honor. Haynes will make the final decision, choose the recipient and retain control over the wording. Is this power expressly authorized in the bylaws? No. Better safe than sorry, the room concludes, and another vote begins.

David remains visible in the small square, staring beyond the room into a distance no one else can see. They call his name, wait and call again. Hands rise around the table and wave toward the camera, less to request his vote than to discover whether he is still with them. Someone explains that the item concerns proclamations and citations. No recognition comes. They repeat the item, ask whether he can hear them, ask whether he can see the chat and finally ask him to type his vote. The words keep failing to reach him. More than two minutes pass. Then an aye appears, followed by two raised thumbs. It has taken longer to confirm this one aye than to approve 357 apartments. At least the Board still has priorities. The room accepts the movement immediately and declares the vote unanimous. The Board simply asks until it gets a yes. In dating, that earns a restraining order; at RIOC, it produces unanimity. Whether David has answered the question or merely the repeated demand that he prove he is there no longer matters. The machinery obtains the gesture it needs.

What Honor Could Not Give

RIOC’s agreement with Status Labs is dated October 25, 2022. It commits $168,680, exactly $1,320 below the amount requiring a public Board vote. Transparency was available as a $1,320 upgrade, but management chose the base model. Looking back at the meeting, only Polivy and Shinozaki appeared to possess the knowledge and access that might have reached beyond the public agenda. Polivy, the longtime chair of both the Audit & Budget Committee and REDAC, occupied the center of RIOC’s financial and institutional machinery. On Thursday, RIOC gives Haynes authority over whom the Island officially honors. On Tuesday, his administration hires a firm to influence what the public finds when it searches for those already in power.

The New York State Inspector General later finds that Status Labs used public money to manage the reputations of Haynes and members of his executive team, including efforts to push critical local reporting lower in search results. A proclamation elevates a chosen story; Status Labs obscures stories the administration would prefer people not to find. One manufactures recognition; the other obstructs discovery. Both manage what the public can see.

The proclamation power proves more durable than the administration that requested it. By June 2025, Haynes and Jamal are gone, but the resolution remains. Interim RIOC leadership uses it to honor David Kraut for more than thirty years of service. The machinery that once spent more than two minutes extracting his aye now turns toward him and says thank you. David deserves that thank you. I remember the man who could hold the Island’s systems in his head, who remembered promises after everyone else had misplaced them and who could make a weak argument regret approaching him. By the end, many people saw only the outbursts, the failing connections and the shell on the screen. I still remember the mind inside it.

Later, I see David’s name again, not in a board packet but on Facebook. He is writing from a hospital bed without a computer, asking whether anyone has an old laptop he might use. The request is so modest that it carries more weight than any proclamation. RIOC had found the words to honor David’s service. David was asking the rest of us for a way back into the room.

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David Stone - The Umwelt Gazette

BJ Jones - The Worst RIOC CEO Ever?

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2 months ago · 2 comments · David Stone

The Red Bus is one of Roosevelt Island’s most popular public services, and for good reason. For residents near the subway and Tram, it may be a convenience. For residents at Manhattan Park, the Octagon, Coler and the northern WIRE buildings, it can be the connection that makes the rest of the Island accessible. A discussion about its cost cannot begin by pretending everyone uses the service equally, or that losing it would affect every neighborhood in the same way.

The bus is free only at the moment a passenger boards. Drivers must be paid. Vehicles must be insured, fueled, repaired and eventually replaced. Roads wear down beneath them. Managers, mechanics and dispatchers are required to keep the system moving. A public service may properly be subsidized, but a subsidy is still money collected somewhere and spent on someone’s behalf.

RIOC abolished the 25-cent fare in its fiscal 2015 budget. It did so while acknowledging that the Bus and Motorpool department had lost money every year and that its projected annual loss would rise from about $1.2 million to nearly $1.7 million. The same budget forecast that the Tram would earn a $1.08 million profit. Even under RIOC’s own favorable assumptions, the Tram was not expected to cover the full bus deficit.

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The Tram Was Supposed to Help

The rebuilt Tram was repeatedly presented as the stronger side of RIOC’s transportation operation. Ridership was growing. Operating costs were described as relatively predictable. Its profits were expected to rise. Years later, RIOC projected that adopting OMNY and increasing ridership would lift annual Tram revenue by $2.46 million, or more than 53 percent.

Revenue did rise, but it did not remain at the level RIOC projected. Tram revenue reached about $6.27 million in fiscal 2023-24, then fell to $5.49 million the next year and $5.20 million in fiscal 2025-26. RIOC’s latest departmental accounts place that $5.20 million against $7.79 million in direct Tram expenses, producing an operating loss of approximately $2.59 million. The Red Bus lost another $1.93 million. Parking generated a $1.14 million profit, but the three transportation operations together still finished roughly $3.39 million short before depreciation and new capital purchases.

That may help explain RIOC’s conflicted posture toward tourism. The Tram is one of New York’s most marketable attractions, and tourists bring fares. They also bring crowding, additional staffing demands and complaints from residents who cannot board. Without a dedicated transportation fund, RIOC has little visible mechanism for deciding how much tourist traffic the Tram should attract, what that traffic costs and whether the resulting revenue actually supports resident mobility. The Corporation depends on tourist volume for revenue, but manages that same volume as an operational strain, and its accounts do not clearly reconcile the two.

When the Fleet Became One Bus

RIOC knew the Red Bus fleet would age. Its fiscal 2015 budget said the seven-bus fleet was scheduled to begin replacement in 2018. The next budgets described plans to purchase one replacement bus a year, warning that maintenance costs were rising and that newer vehicles were necessary to keep the fleet in a state of good repair. The need was not discovered in 2024. It had been written into RIOC’s own plans nearly a decade earlier.

Yet by the summer of 2024, Roosevelt Island was reduced at times to one operating Red Bus. The Octagon Express and Shoppers Bus were canceled, routes were shortened, and service hours were reduced to preserve the last functioning vehicle. RIOC eventually sought outside assistance and temporary vehicles while mechanics struggled to keep the surviving fleet on the road. The residents most dependent on the service absorbed the consequences of a replacement schedule that existed on paper but failed in practice.

RIOC is not the MTA. It is a public-benefit corporation asked to manage transportation alongside parks, roads, public safety, real estate, historic structures, the AVAC system and numerous public facilities. That breadth makes competent planning more important, not less. A subsidized bus is a policy choice. Allowing a predictable replacement cycle to become an emergency is a management choice. The new budgets now set aside millions for old-bus replacement and Tram overhauls, but those are not unexpected new costs. They are the delayed invoice for obligations RIOC already knew were coming.

Free at the Door, Paid at Home

Only Manhattan Park and the Octagon currently pay fees explicitly identified with Red Bus service, according to RIOC’s June 2026 ground-lease presentation. Other buildings contribute through widely different combinations of ground rent, tax-equivalency payments, public-safety reimbursements and transaction fees. Some pay no current ground rent or tax-equivalency payment at all. The result is not merely an uneven system. It is a system in which no ordinary resident can determine what share of the Island’s transportation costs their building carries.

There are only a few realistic ways forward. RIOC could manage and market the Tram more deliberately as a tourist revenue source while protecting resident access. It could restore a Red Bus fare, placing more of the cost directly on riders. Or it could negotiate an islandwide building formula through ground leases or service fees. That last option might keep the bus free at the door, but owners would likely treat the charge as another housing cost. Residents could eventually pay through rent, maintenance or common charges instead of through a farebox.

That is the approaching conflict. The question is not whether the Red Bus should remain free. It is whether RIOC will openly identify the cost, the beneficiaries, the funding sources and the service standards before deciding who receives the bill. A bus can be free to board. It cannot be free to operate. When government refuses to show the difference, the fare has not disappeared. It has only moved somewhere the rider cannot see.

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When the Journalism Was Flowing

In September 2018, the Columbia Journalism Review came to Roosevelt Island and found a headline so perfectly arranged that it sounded fictional: “Roosevelt Island has three news outlets, but no working water fountains.”

The headline referred to the Main Street WIRE, the Roosevelt Islander and the Roosevelt Island Daily. Roosevelt Island had three publications for roughly 12,000 residents. That sounds excessive until RIOC begins explaining something. The WIRE arrived in print every two weeks. Rick O’Conor operated the Islander with the restless efficiency of a man who could turn a comment beneath one story into the next story. David Stone had started the Daily in 2016 after his proposed succession at the WIRE collapsed. The WIRE printed the news, Rick posted it and David delivered it with enough heat to eliminate the need for a second water test. They did not share a format, temperament or opinion of one another. They did, however, share an Island where even the drinking water had developed a communications strategy.

The singular fountain in my title is a convenience. RIOC had shut down outdoor drinking fountains across its parks and playgrounds after questions arose about possible contamination. Ten fountains and a splash area were tested. Two fountains at Capobianco Field, directly across from PS/IS 217, later produced abnormal bacterial counts associated with low chlorine, although no coliform or E. coli was found. The journalism was flowing more reliably than the water, which was not an especially high standard, but it was ours. The fountains went out together. The piers later developed structural problems together. Roosevelt Island infrastructure does not deteriorate; it networks.

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What interests me now is not only the absurdity of that moment. It is the picture CJR preserved. Three small publications were watching the same narrow strip of land from different windows. When water was cut off at the Wildlife Freedom Foundation’s cat sanctuary and the fountain questions followed, each publication pursued the story. Their combined attention did not repair the plumbing, but it made the failure considerably harder to bury.

That is one of the values local journalism offers that cannot be measured by circulation alone. A broken fountain may appear to be a maintenance complaint. Three reporters looking at it can reveal a water system, a public agency and a long history of decisions made without expecting anyone to check the connections.

The Paper That Stopped Arriving

For years, the WIRE felt less like a publication than part of the Island’s weather. It appeared at apartment doors and in building lobbies, folded into a shape that made the important story compete with whatever advertisement had landed on the reverse side. Residents carried it into elevators, left it on benches and argued over letters written by neighbors they would probably encounter before dinner. Online news is faster, but it meets each reader alone. The WIRE was something the Island opened together. Sometimes we even read it before checking whether our names were in it.

I do not remember a final issue arriving with the dignity we assign to endings after we know they are endings. The WIRE continued beyond the 2016 transition, under Briana Warsing’s leadership, and remained one of the three publications profiled in 2018. By 2019, it was still covering Island events. Then its presence thinned. Printing, mailing and distribution cost money. Online competitors published before ink could dry, assuming anyone still had ink.

By April 2021, the agenda for a Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee meeting included a revealing item: “Resurrect the WIRE initiative to bring back our local paper.” No obituary had appeared. Instead, the newspaper’s death arrived disguised as a committee agenda item. Roosevelt Island institutions rarely receive funerals. They receive working groups, the Island’s preferred form of grief. Nobody cries, but everyone agrees to circle back.

Its gradual disappearance also left the archive problem Stone had anticipated in 2016. He had proposed storing the historical issues, finding them a permanent home and making the digital collection searchable. That plan vanished with the succession. The paper stopped arriving, but decades of Island memory did not suddenly become less important because nobody had budgeted to preserve it.

The Daily Wins the Clock

The Daily did not defeat the WIRE by becoming a better printed newspaper. It prevailed because it did not need to be one. Stone could publish when an elevator stopped, a meeting ended or RIOC produced an explanation that explained everything except what had happened. The Daily belonged to the clock local news was becoming. Its deadline was whenever Stone stopped typing, which occasionally appeared to be never.

For nearly nine years, he reported on public meetings, Island personalities, neglected infrastructure and the internal behavior of RIOC. His style could be severe, personal and openly impatient. Readers did not need to agree with him to recognize the function he performed. The Daily made silence newsworthy, which was unfortunate for an agency that produced so much of it.

Eventually, “daily” began describing an obligation more than a publication. Stone stopped regular operations on January 31, 2025, and prepared to leave Roosevelt Island. Theo Gobblevelt called it the end of an era, although the ending proved less final than it appeared. Stone left the Island and later the country. After a break, he returned on his own schedule through The Umwelt Gazette. Roosevelt Island had apparently retained forwarding privileges. Geography accomplished what RIOC never could: it slowed him down slightly.

Four Thousand Articles and One Useful Word

Before leaving, Stone had to decide what would happen to the Daily. The March 2025 correspondence is striking for its lack of drama. The WordPress subscription had been paid, and the website contained roughly 4,000 articles. Stone asked how to transfer control. Theo supplied the instructions.

Stone completed the first step and replied:

“Done.”

When the ownership transfer followed, Stone wrote again: “Done. Good luck with it!”

I laughed when I first read that exchange, partly because history had developed timing. In 2016, Dick Lutz sent Stone a mailing file described as “your list,” two words that later carried enough disagreement to reach New York Supreme Court. In 2025, Stone transferred the Daily to Theo using the actual language of ownership and confirmed when the work was finished. No one had to determine which meaning of “your” applied. WordPress had already supplied a permissions menu.

The audience handed forward was also substantially larger than the one Stone had received nearly nine years earlier, roughly twice the size by the time of the transfer. He had taken a dormant collection of addresses, built an independent publication around it and eventually passed along the expanded readership with the site. The mailing list that once divided two newspapers had become part of the infrastructure keeping another one alive.

There is a quiet generosity in that decision. Stone could have shut down the website and allowed its thousands of articles to disappear behind an expired subscription. Instead, he transferred the publication, its archive and its audience while the machinery still worked. He even identified when the plugin subscriptions would expire. Eight years older and several arguments wiser, Stone understood that a successful handoff should end with “good luck,” not discovery.

What the Island Carries Forward

The WIRE did not receive the succession Stone once planned for it. Its printed archive remains scattered, its disappearance difficult to place on a single date. Yet a future imagined during that failed transition survived in another form. The Daily’s articles remained online, searchable and capable of being carried forward by others.

Rick O’Conor continues publishing the Roosevelt Islander. Theo assumed responsibility for the Daily. The Lighthouse emerged with a different rhythm and purpose. Stone writes again from abroad when he has something to say, The names and formats changed, but Roosevelt Island continued producing more local journalism than many neighborhoods with working fountains and fewer lawsuits.

I used to think the survival of a newspaper depended on writing. The older I become, the more I suspect it depends on unromantic things: passwords, subscription renewals, storage, mailing systems and someone willing to assume responsibility before the previous person disappears. Journalism may concern great truths, but its existence often rests on remembering which email address owns WordPress.

The first handoff left an unfinished argument over “your list.” The second left an archive, a larger audience and four unambiguous words: “Done. Good luck with it!”

On Roosevelt Island, that qualifies as a complete succession plan and possibly an infrastructure improvement.

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The Clock Has Started

For months, the Roosevelt Island LightHouse has resisted taking a position on whether the old Steam Plant should be demolished or preserved. That restraint has been deliberate. There are reasonable questions on both sides. The building has been neglected for years, its masonry has deteriorated, and the smokestacks are enormous structures standing beside active public spaces. Demolition may ultimately prove to be the correct engineering decision. Or it may not.

The problem is that residents still have not been given enough of the underlying record to make that judgment for themselves. The structural assessment relied upon by the City has not been publicly produced. Questions about alternatives to demolition remain unresolved. The relationship between demolition and the City’s announced interest in redeveloping the property remains inadequately explained. Environmental problems emerged after work began. And the official description of the project continues to blur an important distinction between an emergency order to secure the property and a separate failure-to-maintain order directing demolition. RIOC’s own project page still describes the demolition as proceeding by DOB “Emergency Order,” although HPD has previously distinguished between emergency securing work and the separate demolition directive.

That distinction is no longer merely semantic. Roosevelt Island residents Rachel Dowling and Tibor Krisko filed a court challenge on July 3 seeking review of the City’s decision and the March 3 permit authorizing removal of the two smokestacks. The matter is scheduled to return to New York Supreme Court on September 23. Meanwhile, the work continues.

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RIOC’s newest contractor schedule stretches from August 17 through October 9 and includes asbestos work, contaminated-soil activity, scaffolding, openings and structural support work at the stacks, and air-quality controls. What it does not presently list is the actual demolition of the smokestacks. For once, Roosevelt Island may have been given something this process has rarely offered: a little time. The question is whether the court can use it.

What They Are Actually Challenging

According to the petitioners’ description of their case, the larger challenge is to the process that produced the demolition decision. They argue that the City failed to undertake required environmental and land-use review, separated demolition from the larger redevelopment planning surrounding the property, and lacked a rational basis for concluding that complete demolition was necessary.

The questions underneath those allegations have been sitting in public view for months. DOB’s July 2024 paperwork identified deteriorated masonry and failure to maintain. One order required securing work. Another directed demolition through the permitting process. What the publicly released orders do not provide is a structural engineering analysis showing calculations, material testing, quantified collapse risk, or why stabilization and repair were rejected.

Residents have repeatedly asked for that record. The Community Advisory Group(CAG) was supposed to improve communication, but its mandate confined residents to how demolition would proceed, not whether it had been justified. At the August 19 CAG meeting, ArchRI representative Kalin Kresnitchki counted 73 questions or subparts submitted, two answered; eleven commitments, two delivered. He again asked for the DOB engineering assessment sought since December.

The CAG has increasingly illustrated the limitation built into an advisory process controlled by the same institutions holding the information. Residents may ask. Officials decide what is answered, when it is answered, and what documents are produced. The public receives a forum without any power to compel disclosure. That is why the lawsuit matters.

A Lawsuit Does Not Stop a Wrecking Crew

There is one important complication. Filing an Article 78 proceeding does not automatically freeze government action. New York courts can issue stays and temporary or preliminary injunctive relief where the legal standards are met, including circumstances involving irreparable harm while a dispute is being litigated. None of that means Dowling and Krisko would necessarily obtain such relief.

The City has arguments of its own. It can maintain that the permits are valid, that the deteriorated structures present legitimate safety concerns, that extensive remediation and protective work is already underway, and that additional delay brings costs and risks. Those arguments belong before the court with the petitioners’ claims, supported by the administrative record that produced the decision.

But the petitioners have one fact working in their favor that requires very little legal translation: a demolished smokestack cannot be restored by a favorable court ruling six weeks later. Once the structures are gone, the central dispute changes from whether demolition should have been allowed to whether anything can still be done about it. That makes timing more than a scheduling issue.

We have therefore asked Dowling and Krisko the question that now matters most: “Do you intend to seek a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction before September 23? If not, why not?” As of publication we have not received a substantive response. Their answer will tell residents whether September 23 is simply the next date on the litigation calendar or whether the petitioners intend to ask the court to preserve the physical status quo long enough for that litigation to mean something.

The First Forum With Teeth

We are not asking readers to conclude that the Steam Plant should be saved. We are saying something more fundamental. Government should not be permitted to make an irreversible decision about publicly owned property, resist releasing the engineering record supporting that decision, limit public participation largely to managing the consequences, and then point to that participation as proof that the process was transparent.

Transparency is not a public meeting, a presentation, or an email address for another question. It is the ability to examine the evidence on which government acted. RIOC says HPD is committed to “transparent communication.” The City and State have had months to demonstrate that by producing the central records supporting demolition. Public meetings, the CAG and FOIL have not closed the gap.

That leaves the court. An Article 78 judge does not need to agree with residents about historic preservation, adaptive reuse, or future development. The court’s job is narrower: determine whether government followed the law and whether its decision has a rational basis in the administrative record. That may finally require the City to defend demolition with something more substantial than reassurance.

For months, residents have been asking government to show its work. Now a judge may get to ask. And unlike the CAG, the court does not have to accept silence as an answer.

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Two days later, Lutz sends an email to the people keeping the paper alive. Briana Warsing will edit the January issues. Lutz will remain listed as publisher temporarily so the WIRE can continue using the Rivercross community room for stuffing and distribution. Dr. Resnick should keep searching for the next editor-publisher. The arrangement rescues January while leaving everything behind it unsettled.

Stone waits for Resnick to respond. By December 29, his patience has thinned enough that he tells Lutz he considers his relationship with the WIRE finished. Lutz writes back the next morning. Resnick has been sluggish and difficult to reach, he explains, and may be considering separate people for the financial and editorial responsibilities. Stone is asking about one chair. Somewhere outside the conversation, Resnick may already be imagining two.

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The discussions revive. By February, Stone is no longer asking about the position from a safe distance. Lutz invites him to Riverwalk Bar & Grill at noon, with the meeting continuing afterward at his apartment. His outline turns the job into a formidable list: editorial staffing, pay, advertising, mailing permits, transportation, budgets, storage and the transition from himself and Warsing to Stone. The chair has acquired weight. “Congratulations” is apparently considered unnecessary padding.

I have watched enough Roosevelt Island institutions to recognize this kind of survival. A role can remain undefined while the work surrounding it becomes very specific. Nobody has decided who owns the circus, but Stone is already following the elephants with a shovel. Lutz needs the paper to continue. Stone needs to understand what he is to inherit. Resnick has not settled the structure. Everyone can keep moving for a while because the next issue still requires more attention than the next owner.

Two Words in an Email

On March 5, 2016, ordinary publishing duties arrive in Stone’s inbox when Lutz forwards a RIOC notice about the Motorgate elevators, suggesting it be included in Stone’s daily roundup, which is already underway. The exchange also prompts discussion of Lutz’s former community email alerts, which Stone wants to revive as part of the new system and use to direct readers back to the WIRE’s website. The Motorgate item becomes the entry point because, on Roosevelt Island, even a future disagreement tends to begin with something already out of service.

Less than half an hour later, Lutz replies with instructions. Go to Mailchimp and open an account. The service is free unless too many messages go out in one day, when the price rises to $15 a month. Lutz attaches the existing list, a chart showing how many recipients open the alerts and information about the current plan. He explains where Stone can obtain the smaller “wonky W” logo and recommends staying on the free plan as long as possible. The WIRE’s future remains uncertain, but its monthly software expense is being handled beautifully.

Then come the two words that will acquire more weight than either man appears to give them that afternoon. Lutz tells Stone that he should be able to import the file into Mailchimp as “your list.” He plans to discontinue the old $15 plan the following week. They have saved $15 a month. Clarity, it seems, was available with the paid version.

The list contains more than 700 addresses, down from an earlier peak above 1,000, and between 40 and 50 percent of recipients open the alerts. Lutz suggests that an advertiser might eventually sponsor them. His purpose appears practical. He wants the dormant service revived without another charge landing on his credit card. Nothing says “we have not decided whether you are the publisher” quite like handing you 700 readers and cancelling your own account. Yet the transfer already functions as more than planning. Without a contract, resolution or formal paper trail, Stone is being handed the infrastructure of the newsletter. By accepting the list and beginning to operate it, he is no longer merely being considered for a future role. He is already performing one.

What holds my attention is how naturally the file crosses between them. Lutz may understand “your list” as the working list Stone will manage for the WIRE. Stone may hear it as another operational asset being placed in his care for the newspaper he expects to run. Nothing defines ownership, limits the addresses to WIRE business or requires their return. They do not need to settle those questions while they remain inside the same future. Trust saves enormous time. Memory sends the invoice later.

Everyone Has a Different July

By April 7, Stone is sending WIRE alerts. Former WIRE legal counsel Ross Wollen replies to one and refers to Stone’s new role at the newspaper, something Resnick has apparently mentioned to him. Stone forwards the exchange to Lutz and Warsing. The alert carries the WIRE’s name, copyright notice and mailing address. Stone’s succession has become visible to someone outside the central conversation, even though the people inside it have yet to settle what that succession means.

A second future is also taking shape. Warsing wants to continue editing through the end of June. Lutz tells Stone that he feels promise-bound to support her and believes the additional time will help him prepare. He also notes that completing the year could matter to Warsing’s résumé. From her side, remaining through June may feel like finishing work she has already been asked to carry. From Lutz’s side, it protects continuity while Resnick remains difficult to pin down.

Stone experiences the delay differently. He has repeatedly asked Warsing to meet with him, but her limited availability begins to carry a more ambiguous weight in his mind. What appears on the surface as scheduling friction also raises another possibility for Stone: that Warsing is not yet emotionally or professionally prepared to accelerate a handover she has not fully relinquished. Everyone agrees the baton must pass. The only dispute is whether Warsing can find an opening in her calendar large enough to fit it. Stone objects to a transition organized around her continued control, and writes that he is putting the brakes on his own efforts until there is a real commitment. July is beginning to mean two different things. Stone sees the date when responsibility becomes his. Lutz sees a date that may still have to accommodate Warsing, Resnick and whatever keeps the paper from missing an issue.

I do not read a secret plot in these exchanges. A conspiracy requires a plan, and these people cannot agree what July means. I read people protecting different versions of reality. Lutz is trying to honor his commitment to Warsing while keeping Stone engaged. Warsing occupies a real role and may not yet be ready to leave it. Stone, meanwhile, is being asked to prepare for authority without receiving enough of it to control the preparation. He has the responsibilities of a publisher, the authority of an intern and the confidence of a man who has been assured the keys are coming. Resnick remains the one person whose decision could settle the arrangement. Until he makes it, his uncertainty has become the only decision everyone can rely upon.

The financial planning continues as though the disagreement can be solved while everyone is moving. On April 10, Lutz recommends that Stone obtain a business credit card for The Main Street Wire, Inc. He says Stone and Resnick should visit the bank so Stone can become a signatory on the new account. Printing charges made in June will come due in July, and Lutz wants the larger expenses moved before the beginning of what he calls Stone’s “reign.” The succession has no contract, but it is already shopping for a credit card.

Making the Future Real

Stone responds to uncertainty by creating motion. On April 13, he circulates a detailed proposal to Resnick, Lutz, Warsing and webmaster Jeff Prekopa. An integrated transition now seems unlikely, he writes, so he lays out another path. The WIRE will continue under Lutz through June 25. Stone will prepare a new publishing system and begin producing issues every two weeks after that.

His plan reaches into every part of the operation. He will develop a new group of writers, rebuild the website, organize editing and layout, work with advertising manager Ellen Levy, preserve the printing relationship and establish a new distribution system. He also intends to store the historical issues until they find a permanent home and eventually place the digital archive online. Stone is no longer waiting for the future to be explained. He is writing it down and sending copies.

The email also allows him to set the narrative inside the organization. Everyone can see the date, the responsibilities and the structure he believes they are moving toward. It reveals how strongly Stone needs to make the transition concrete. He has already experienced one period of silence from Resnick and one delay centered around Warsing. Another vague assurance is unlikely to feel like protection.

Eleven minutes later, Stone sends a separate financial email to Resnick and Lutz. He will invest no more money beyond a few small purchases until after the June 25 issue. Before assuming the expenses, he wants a complete accounting of cash, receivables, payables, taxes and anything not yet recorded. The balance sheet must show at least $15,000 on the positive side, which he understands to represent Resnick’s investment in the paper. The email does not establish whether that amount is a loan, an investment or another form of support. Stone is preparing to accept responsibility, but he will not accept a mystery wearing a necktie and calling itself a balance sheet.

At 8:59 that evening, Resnick replies to the financial email. “We’re not anywhere near an agreement on going forward,” he writes. His discussions with Stone, Lutz and Warsing “have not been encouraging.” Months of practical planning now collide with the sentence Stone has been trying to force into the open. Resnick does not describe a succession awaiting final details. In his mind, the negotiations have not reached anything close to an agreement.

Stone answers at 10:15 p.m. He will not be backed into a corner. His single intention has been to keep the WIRE viable. “So, I’m out.” I cannot know whether Resnick believes Stone has moved beyond what was authorized, or Stone believes the terms have remained vague until he is too invested to retreat. The record establishes the result. Seventy-six minutes after Resnick says there is no agreement, Stone ends the succession attempt. The transition has finally produced something everyone can understand. Unfortunately, it is the exit.

The Night “Your” Changes Meaning

Twelve days after Stone withdraws from the succession talks, another RIOC alert arrives, this time about emergency repairs on the Roosevelt Island Bridge helix. Stone sends a notice through the system under the Roosevelt Island Daily name, although the old WIRE footer remains at the bottom. It tells recipients that they subscribed to receive alerts from the WIRE. The new publication is speaking through a mailing system that still carries the identity of the old one.

I can imagine what Lutz sees when that message appears. The list he supplied for WIRE alerts is now delivering an announcement from a different publication. The old name, address and copyright language remain attached, making the boundary he left undefined suddenly visible in the least comfortable way. At 8:33 that evening, he sends seven numbered instructions. Stone may not use the WIRE bulletin list, name, mailing address or copyright notice. Subscribers must affirmatively join the Daily’s list. Stone must build his audience from scratch.

Ten minutes later, Stone responds, and anger is no longer hiding between the lines. He asks whether he should tell recipients that updates are stopping because Lutz had a “hissy fit.” He accuses Lutz of ruining his assumption of responsibility for the paper and dragging Resnick through the trouble. The language reaches backward. Stone has already withdrawn, yet he is still arguing from the months when he believed he was preparing to take charge. Leaving the succession has not settled what happened to the tools placed in his hands.

Lutz may believe he is protecting the WIRE from a competing publication using its identity. Stone may believe he is continuing a service through tools transferred to him without clear restrictions. The disagreement is no longer about who will publish the WIRE. It is about what, if anything, Stone carried away when that future collapsed. Nobody needs to be dishonest for the result to feel like betrayal.

The handoff has already ended. The April 25 exchange does something else. It turns a failed succession into a dispute over the WIRE’s identity, audience and property. The Daily continues. The WIRE continues under different leadership. Criticism hardens, advertisers enter the argument and the conflict reaches New York Supreme Court in November 2017. By then, each side has built a coherent account. Lutz gave Stone access for the WIRE’s use. Stone received the tools of a succession others appeared to recognize. The space between those accounts is where the lawsuit begins.

Yet Stone’s unfinished plan for the archive remains on the page. Before the succession collapses, he imagines the old issues stored safely and the digital history opened to readers. That future goes with it. Warsing assumes the WIRE’s editorship, Stone builds the Daily, the mailing list acquires two histories and Roosevelt Island’s past waits in boxes for someone to decide what “your” was supposed to mean.

Source note: This article is based principally on New York Supreme Court, New York County, Index No. 656875/2017. Contemporary context is available from the Columbia Journalism Review and the Roosevelt Islander’s November 2017 report. Interior reactions described in the article are presented as interpretation; the chronology and quoted language come from the documentary record.

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Over the last year, the Lighthouse has filed a series of requests seeking RIOC records. The corporation has produced an employee roster, a FOIL log, ground leases and selected board minutes. Records that are organized, public-facing or closely tied to formal reporting appear to move more readily.

Requests that could reveal how decisions were made have followed a different path. Calendars were denied. Public Purpose Fund communications were only partly produced. Engineering records for Eleanor’s Pier were withheld. Records concerning a senior appointment remain open. Steam Plant requests have been met with repeated notices that RIOC is still searching.

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The FOIL record is not simply a list of requests. It is a map of what RIOC treats as discretionary. Not every delay is necessarily unlawful, but the pattern is difficult to ignore: the records that move most slowly are often the records that could show who decided what, when they decided it and what information they had.

The Steam Plant: Still Searching Months Later

The clearest example began on February 24, 2026, when the Lighthouse filed two requests concerning the Roosevelt Island Steam Plant. FOIL 2026-11 sought meeting invitations and calendar files referencing the plant before July 8, 2024. FOIL 2026-12 sought only email-header metadata for messages containing the terms “Steam Plant” and “Emergency.”

RIOC acknowledged both requests on March 3. It requested more time on April 14, again on May 26 and again on July 9. More than four months after the requests were filed, the corporation said it was still conducting a diligent search.

These records could help establish when RIOC officials first began discussing the Steam Plant as an emergency, who participated and how that designation developed. They remained unavailable while demolition planning continued, public meetings were held and work advanced at the site.

The public was being asked to accept an emergency narrative while the records needed to examine that narrative remained somewhere inside an extended search. At some point, “we are still searching” stops functioning as a temporary explanation and becomes the agency’s standing position.

The Records That Explain Who Decided What

The Steam Plant requests are not isolated. In July 2025, the Lighthouse sought calendars and meeting records for several RIOC officials and directors. RIOC later denied access to the requested “calendar and meeting reports.” Those records may contain entries that require redaction, but calendars can still establish that meetings occurred, identify participants and show the sequence in which public business unfolded.

A request concerning the selection and board appointment of Lance A. Polivy as vice president and general counsel also remains open. The request does not assume that every personnel or deliberative record must be disclosed. It asks whether a public corporation can document the process used to select and appoint one of its most influential executives.

The Eleanor’s Pier request raises a related issue. RIOC withheld structural or engineering material under the intra-agency exemption. That exemption may protect recommendations or deliberative analysis, but it does not automatically shield factual findings, measurements or observations simply because they appear in an internal document.

None of these examples proves an improper motive. The delays may reflect staffing, recordkeeping, legal caution or institutional habit. But the effect is measurable: the information most useful for public oversight is often the information least available when it matters.

Transparency Delayed

Members of the public do not need to be journalists or lawyers to use FOIL. A useful request asks for identifiable existing records, such as emails, reports, calendars, contracts or meeting invitations, and includes a clear subject, date range and likely custodians. Requesters should ask for electronic copies, save every response and track each promised production date.

When access is denied, the agency should identify the legal basis and explain the right to appeal. A requester can also appeal when an agency fails to respond or repeatedly misses its own deadlines without a reasonable explanation.

Transparency delayed is not always transparency denied as a matter of law. But records that arrive only after a contract has advanced, a structure has been demolished, an executive has been appointed or a controversy has passed may no longer perform FOIL’s most important public function.

RIOC may eventually produce some of the records now caught in repeated searches and extensions. The larger question is whether Roosevelt Island residents will receive them while they can still understand, question and influence the exercise of public power. A right that arrives after the decision is no longer a right. It is a record of exclusion.

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RIOC has ten years of public value to negotiate, and its own budget explains why the stakes are higher than another round of real-estate bargaining. The corporation projects only $23,649 in operating profit against more than $42 million in operating expenses for fiscal year 2026-27. Its cash forecast, stated in thousands, falls from a projected $28.6 million in March 2026 to $12.3 million one year later, $3.2 million the year after that, and below zero by March 2029. The same projection includes a $24.8 million present-value payment.

That is not a distant problem. It is the familiar Roosevelt Island cycle approaching again: a large payment arrives, reserves rise, projects move forward, and the immediate crisis appears to recede. Then the money runs down. The officials who accepted the deal may be gone, but the Island remains, along with the services, infrastructure, contractual concessions and future revenue surrendered to produce the check.

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The City has now extended RIOC’s master lease from 2068 to 2078. Most building owners have no contractual right to demand an early extension, but RIOC has invited proposals and says it will evaluate them for fiscal responsibility, certainty and affordability. That gives the corporation leverage it rarely possesses. The question is whether RIOC will use those ten years to repair its financial model, or sell them for another temporary fix.

Living Off the Next Deal

Roosevelt Island was not conceived as a conventional profit center. It was a state-led public project intended to create a stable, mixed-income community near Manhattan at a time when government still accepted responsibility for building housing and supporting the people who lived in it. Its success depended on strong public financing, state-backed bonds, federal assistance and political leadership willing to fill the gap between social purpose and market return.

That model weakened as public support receded. RIOC was left to maintain transportation, parks, roads, seawalls, public safety, sanitation and other Island services without the broad taxing authority of a municipality. Southtown became the great test of the replacement theory. New development would generate ground rent, tax-equivalency payments, transaction fees and other revenues. Roosevelt Island would no longer return to the State every time its finances tightened. It would use the value of its land to support itself.

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · David Stone

Development did bring money, sometimes in very large amounts. But a large present-value payment is not the same thing as a sustainable revenue system. It can make the next several budgets look secure while exchanging decades of future value for cash today. That arrangement may be excellent for the private party, whose job is to secure the most favorable terms available. The obligation to think beyond the next budget, the next president and the next Board meeting belongs to RIOC.

Public Land Requires Long-Term Management

The REDAC presentation shows the financial structure that accumulated from those separate bargains. Some buildings pay substantial annual ground rent. Some paid lump sums. Some make tax-equivalency payments, while the payments from the original WIRE buildings go directly to Empire State Development. Some leases contain transaction, conversion, resale, Public Safety, bus or Island-service charges. RIOC also acknowledged that certain Island-service and community-facility fees are not currently collected.

The problem is not that every building pays a different amount. Different uses, affordability obligations, financing structures and development periods can justify different terms. The problem is that RIOC has never demonstrated a durable financial policy connecting those differences. Instead, the Island appears to have a series of contracts designed at different moments to solve different immediate needs. One administration receives cash. Another inherits the consequences.

The ten-year extensions should be judged by a longer public-asset test. What recurring revenue will the Island receive? What infrastructure and service costs will the property create? What affordability protections will survive? What capital obligations will the owner assume? What value is RIOC surrendering by fixing terms now? A large check at signing may still be the right bargain, but only if RIOC can show that it is better for the next twenty years, not merely easier for the next two.

Set the Rules Before Individual Bargains

The State and City described the extension to 2078 as an initial step. They also promised a community planning process whose results would inform a later, longer extension and other changes intended to strengthen Island operations. That makes the next ten years a test period, not a conclusion. It is the public’s opportunity to demand that fiscal sustainability become part of the plan before individual bargains harden into another generation of contracts.

Residents do not need to sit across the negotiating table from every building owner. They do need a role in establishing the rules RIOC takes to that table. How should recurring revenue be valued against an upfront payment? How much should affordability, infrastructure, transportation, building conditions and climate resilience count? What reserve level must RIOC protect? Those are public-policy choices. They should not be decided by whichever owner arrives first with the largest check and the most experienced negotiating team.

That safeguard is especially important because RIOC is not a locally elected government. Seven of its nine directors are Roosevelt Island residents, but residency alone has not produced effective local stewardship. Being seated as a resident representative does not automatically mean challenging management, setting long-term priorities, or treating Islanders as the public shareholders RIOC is supposed to serve. Over the years, too many resident directors have acted less like an independent governing board and more like passive participants in decisions shaped elsewhere.

The problem is therefore not simply how many residents sit at the table. It is whether they use the authority of their seats. A board can be locally populated and still fail to provide local accountability, especially when members are appointed by the governor, leadership turns over frequently, and the institution supplies most of the information on which directors are expected to act.

The longer some members remain seated, the more they resemble bobble heads present, visible, but largely reactive to whatever direction the system around them is already moving. At the same time, newer board members have begun to ask deeper and more structural questions in public, but often in near-empty rooms, without sustained community engagement or pressure behind them. The issue is not that private developers negotiate aggressively within the rules they are given. The issue is that RIOC must be required to govern with a longer horizon than any single administration. The next president should inherit a financial system that is stable by design, not another fiscal cliff disguised by the last large upfront payment.

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Committee Chair Howard L. Polivy had just stumbled over RIOC Board Member Melissa A. Wade’s name when he reached a woman seated beside RIOC Chief Financial Officer and Vice President Dhruvika Patel Amin. Her face was new to him and to me. This time, Polivy paused, “Introduce yourself again,” he said.

That was all we received. Felina. One name, like Cher, if Cher spent her evenings reading infrastructure agreements. She sat on the same side of the table as Patel Amin, Wade and Dr. Michal L. Melamed, whose questions have made that side the more reliable place to look for signs of intelligent life.

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RIOC Chief Operating Officer Mary C. Cunneen eventually reached the Westside Pier. Built in 1995, it now has two areas of structural collapse. Repairing or rebuilding it could be expensive and complicated. The structure sits above tunnels and within the interests of several government agencies, each certain to arrive carrying its own permit application.

Wade interrupted with the questions the presentation had somehow neglected.

I have watched Cunneen meet questions defensively before, particularly when they arrive before she has finished presenting the answer she intended to give. But she has softened. She laughs more easily now and appears less threatened by the possibility that someone else in the room may know more.

Cunneen did not construct an answer. She turned toward Felina.

I think I drifted away.

The Hospital That Had Not Yet Been Built*

Somehow, everything had become black and white. People dressed as if leaving the house required effort, even when they were going to a hospital. The men wore hats. The women wore gloves. A calendar on the wall insisted it was 1932.

I was already the age I am now, but I worked as an assistant to a director because women could be assistants then. They could carry scripts, sharpen pencils and locate missing actors. Directing required qualities apparently found only beneath a man’s hat.

My manager had spent the morning explaining radio to the sound engineer, medicine to a physician and women to me. He moved rapidly from subject to subject, arriving at each one as its leading authority.

We were recording a commercial for a hospital that had not yet been built. The director asked the actors to improvise. One was questioned about a medication whose name none of us could pronounce.

He paused just long enough to make the silence seem intentional.

“In the broadest sense,” he said, “it restores the balance upon which the body depends.”

His voice was warm and reassuring. Then he turned toward the actor beside him.

The second actor continued. Nobody apologized. The first man did not appear smaller because another person knew the answer. Somehow, the handoff made him seem more certain.

He did not know. What impressed me was that not knowing had failed to frighten him.

Behind the glass, my manager had begun explaining pharmacology to the physician. I sharpened another pencil.

Somewhere farther away, a woman laughed. The color returned.

Cunneen was still looking toward Felina.

Somebody Built It

Felina had understood the assignment.

The Westside Pier and the Prow, she explained, were built in 1995, probably as a community benefit connected to the disruption caused by construction of the Third Water Tunnel. A T-shaped fender was added several years later. What happened after that depends upon which missing piece of paper one prefers to imagine.

RIOC could not determine whether the city gave the corporation money to construct the pier or built it and later handed it over. The Department of Environmental Protection had a record that the project happened, Felina said, but apparently no clear record existed. “Somebody built it,” she concluded, “but we don’t really know who owns it after that.”

Felina separated facts from assumptions with alarming ease. She explained what the records showed, what she could reasonably infer and where the trail disappeared. The room finally contained someone who could answer the questions. Naturally, nobody knew her full name.

RIOC is still investigating the cause and extent of the structural failure. When Patel Amin asked whether DEP or the state Department of Environmental Conservation might help pay for reconstruction, Felina answered immediately. Without a written ownership agreement, cost sharing was highly unlikely unless the work directly affected infrastructure belonging to one of those agencies.

Her answer was detailed, conversational and easy to understand. Cunneen did not lose authority when she handed Felina the question. She seemed, for the first time, to have discovered where authority comes from. Apparently, authority is not a soufflé. RIOC President and CEO Jones appeared equally content to let Felina own her answers. Both looked better in her light.

Wade kept returning to the parking.

The conversation moved from the pier to the rough stretch of asphalt and gravel beside it. Judy Berdy, the meeting’s lone public attendee, called the area messy and suggested abandoning the damaged pier, preserving the Prow and building a proper promenade.

“It is or is not a parking lot,” Wade said. “It does or does not belong.”

Cunneen acknowledged that it was a parking lot but said its boundaries were unclear. Cars park there during events at the Sanctuary, while anyone trying to follow the waterfront is left to navigate a public realm whose edges have become more theoretical than physical.

Jones revealed that RIOC’s legal team was reviewing its commercial agreements, including boundaries, permits and fees. Some activities might require permits they do not currently have, he said, and the Sanctuary was among the agreements being examined.

Berdy asked, “What are the Sanctuary’s boundaries?”

Then she covered her mouth and giggled, as though she had accidentally said aloud the question that had been sitting quietly at the table.

“Yeah,” Jones answered. “Exactly. Exactly.”

Berdy’s gesture did not prove she knew a secret, nor did Jones’s answer establish that the Sanctuary had done anything improper. The Sanctuary’s boundaries were like perfume on a woman who considered the bottle a single serving. Invisible, but suddenly occupying the entire waterfront. RIOC was still trying to determine where the commercial operation ended and the public waterfront began.

Before We Pick the Benches

RIOC says this is the beginning of a community conversation. Cunneen described a walking workshop, an online survey and opportunities for residents to consider lighting, seating, safer paths and bicycle access. Dr. Melamed asked whether the waterfront could guide visitors north toward Island businesses instead of allowing tourist activity to begin and end beside the tram. “We need to try to monetize these things,” she said, pulling the discussion away from decorative improvements and toward public value. Residents are being asked to improve the tourist experience. Tourists have already contributed by keeping the local economy in showroom condition: untouched.

There is something encouraging about being invited into the process before a finished plan arrives wrapped in urgency. Jones and Cunneen appeared more open than they have at many meetings, and Felina gave that openness substance. She understood the structures, the agencies, the missing agreements and the limits of what RIOC could honestly claim to know.

Still, the community conversation and the legal review are moving beside each other. Their order matters. There is a difference between asking residents what the waterfront should become and asking where to place the chairs after control of it has already been settled.

For years, Roosevelt Island has watched confident people answer questions they did not understand, often protecting their authority by making the answer more complicated. Felina did something more reassuring. She made uncertainty clear, and Cunneen allowed the answer to remain hers.

The pier had no clear owner. The parking lot had no clear edge. Felina, at least, knew exactly where certainty ended.

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Judy Berdy, the only member of the public in the room, asked the question that reduced the entire arrangement to three words:

“Who does this?”

To answer her, you have to go back to 2011.

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Eight Yes Votes

In 2011, RIOC controlled 100,414 square feet of commercial space across 34 Main Street units. More than 22 percent of the above-grade space was vacant. Vacancy was not a problem that emerged later. It was the problem the transaction was supposed to solve.

Jones Lang LaSalle, advising RIOC, recommended transferring the portfolio to Hudson/Related, citing its commitment to address all the retail space and its experience developing Southtown. The Board was told Hudson/Related would invest at least $2.365 million over five years. RIOC would receive approximately $929,100 in annual guaranteed rent, with scheduled increases, and half the remaining profit after Hudson/Related recovered its capital plus interest.

Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Steven Chironis called the deal “above market rate.” President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Torres said she was satisfied. Michael Shinozaki raised the only concern recorded, asking why individual requests for retail space had stopped reaching the Board. Chironis said they were being saved for the future master lessee.

Eight directors voted yes: Darryl C. Towns, Meghan Anderson, Fay Fryer Christian, Dr. Katherine Teets Grimm, Jonathan Kalkin, David Kraut, Michael Shinozaki and Margaret Smith. Howard L. Polivy was absent. The agreement passed without a dissenting vote.

The Capital Account That Ate the Profit

Vacancies were not harmless to Hudson/Related. Empty storefronts produced no rent while the company still owed RIOC its guaranteed payment. But there was no additional vacancy penalty, and Hudson/Related had thirty years, plus its own option for ten more, to recover its costs.

Those recoverable costs extended beyond storefront improvements. Guaranteed payments to RIOC, operating deficits, brokerage expenses and management fees could all become Hudson/Related invested capital. Hudson/Related also received a management fee equal to 4 percent of gross revenue. Its accumulating capital balance accrued a 9 percent annual return before RIOC could share in the remaining profit.

The financial structure therefore made time Hudson/Related’s ally. Weak income or operating losses could delay RIOC’s participation while adding to the balance Hudson/Related recovered first. RIOC expected participation income in year seven. The first payment arrived in 2022, another remains unpaid for 2024 and a reported loss eliminated any payment for 2025.

Vacancies still cost Hudson/Related money. The bargain gave it decades to turn much of that cost into capital accruing a 9 percent return every year before the public received its share.

Everything Except Empty Stores

The 2011 Board approved an arrangement requiring Hudson/Related to revitalize the older Main Street storefronts, improve lighting and wayfinding, attract anchor tenants and maintain inviting storefronts. After five years, Main Street was supposed to reach a standard comparable to Riverwalk Commons, Hudson/Related’s own Southtown retail. Southtown was the model. It was not part of the bargain.

The division was financially selective. Hudson/Related’s stronger Southtown retail remained outside the agreement, while the Main Street portfolio included dependable rent-paying tenants such as the post office, supermarket, Public Safety and RIOC’s own offices. Their rents provided reliable revenue while other storefronts remained empty. RIOC supplied the stable tenants. Hudson/Related kept its stronger portfolio separate.

Yet the Board approved no required occupancy rate, deadline for filling vacancies, vacancy penalty or clear termination right if revitalization failed. The arrangement anticipated violations inside occupied storefronts but did not regulate whether the storefronts became occupied, even though vacancy was the central reason for transferring the portfolio and already stood at 22.2 percent.

RIOC was protected against a pool hall it never received. It was less protected against an empty window.

At the June meeting, Board Member Melissa A. Wade made the separation explicit. Chief Financial Officer and Vice President Dhruvika Patel Amin confirmed that RIOC receives no Southtown retail revenue. President and Chief Executive Officer B.J. Jones confirmed that Southtown cannot be added under the present arrangement. Fifteen years later, Southtown remains the standard Main Street was supposed to reach and the profitable portfolio the public bargain never included.

The Year-Fifteen Switch

Year fifteen triggers a new rent based on 6 percent of the current land value. If that calculation exceeds Hudson/Related’s existing payment, RIOC receives more. But the same reset can increase Hudson/Related’s share of remaining profits from 50 percent to 60 or 70 percent, depending upon the size of the increase.

Hudson/Related also receives a management fee equal to 4 percent of gross revenue, whether the portfolio makes money or not. That fee, along with operating deficits and other cash outlays, can be added to its invested-capital balance. That balance accrues a 9 percent annual return before RIOC participates in any profit. Beginning in year sixteen, half the tax-equivalency obligation also becomes a portfolio expense, further reducing the income available to share.

The structure therefore protects Hudson/Related first. It does not protect the storefront tenants. A higher payment to RIOC does not automatically increase their rents, but it creates pressure for Hudson/Related to recover the added cost from businesses already struggling with the incomplete revitalization it promised.

At the June meeting, Board Member Melissa A. Wade asked whether anything besides rent could change. Chief Financial Officer and Vice President Dhruvika Patel Amin answered no. President and Chief Executive Officer B.J. Jones said stronger performance requirements would require Hudson/Related to renegotiate voluntarily. RIOC can collect more, but it cannot use the reset to demand fewer vacancies, better management or the inclusion of Southtown.

The Leverage RIOC May Still Hold

The current Board is not powerless. Most residential owners want ten-year ground-lease extensions. Only Westview and Island House have provisions requiring negotiations now. Southtown’s extensions remain optional. Related therefore wants something RIOC is not required to give.

That may be leverage, but only if RIOC can lawfully connect the Southtown extensions to retail reform. Before granting another decade, the Board should publicly establish whether it can seek Southtown’s inclusion, enforceable occupancy standards or a new financial structure.

RIOC should also disclose the unpaid 2024 participation amount, publish the appraisal and release the executed master sublease. Residents deserve to compare what was promised with what was delivered.

Judy asked, “Who does this?”

The May 18, 2011 minutes answer the first part. Eight directors did, unanimously. The current Board’s answer will be found in what it demands, what it publishes and what it refuses to give away before adding another decade.

He introduced the committee members, welcomed the staff and described the purpose of the evening as a kind of reeducation. Nothing settles the nerves like being told you are about to be reeducated by the people who helpped design the confusion. There were moving parts, he explained, and decisions would soon have to be made. Howard appeared to know where everything belonged, as though he had watched much of it being put in place while the rest of us remained unaware.

RIOC President and Chief Executive Officer B.J. Jones asked whether he should share his presentation on the screen. On the advice of Chief Operating Officer Mary C. Cunneen, perhaps fearing the public might become dangerously informed, he did not. The board members could see the figures on a monitor in the room, but those of us watching from home could not. The committee received a financial presentation. The public received an audiobook.

It was an unfortunate choice for public transparency, but a useful one for watching people. Deprived of the numbers, I began studying the faces of those who could see them. Without the numbers, the faces became subtitles. Melissa Wade’s expression suggested the translation would not be flattering.

The Usual Mechanism

B.J. started slowly. He stumbled over his introduction and seemed to search for words sturdy enough to carry what he was about to explain. Roosevelt Island’s ground leases, it turned out, were not one system but a collection of individual bargains. Buildings may pay ground rent, tax-equivalency payments, refinancing fees, conversion fees or charges connected to Island services. Some buildings paid RIOC large sums years ago and have paid no continuing ground rent since. I’m unaware of any resident who has received that level of support. My bras have offered support, although never under terms so favorable.

The arrangements were negotiated at different times and under different circumstances, although often with the same developers or familiar development interests sitting across the table from a succession of RIOC administrations. The administrations changed so often that David probably stopped learning their names and simply called everyone ‘New Management.’

Howard leaned forward and explained the “usual mechanism.” An appraisal begins the process. Negotiations follow. Affordability obligations, precedents and existing agreements are weighed until the parties arrive at something he called “rough equity.”

The unevenness, it seemed, had been created by design, but there had been no enduring designer. The system had been redesigned and renovated so many times that nobody could identify the architect. They could, however, still recognize the developer. The bargains appeared unrelated.

When the Numbers Began Speaking

B.J. grew more confident once he reached the numbers. RIOC Chief Financial Officer and Vice President Dhruvika Patel Amin joined him, confirming details and adding some of her own. For months, the two have not always appeared comfortably aligned in public. That evening, something had changed. They seemed to understand the same ledger and, more importantly, to recognize the opportunity concealed inside it.

Dhruvika offered one example. RIOC spends approximately $1.8 million each year operating the Island’s bus service and collects just over $300,000 in bus revenue. Of the residential buildings, only Manhattan Park and The Octagon contribute specifically toward the service. The remainder must come from elsewhere, principally revenues tied to the Island’s land. The newer towers rise beautifully above the Island. It would be lovely if a little of the money inside them occasionally came down.

B.J. then described lease provisions that may permit RIOC to collect additional charges for maintenance, horticulture, AVAC and other Island services. Those provisions already exist, he said, but RIOC does not currently use them. Even luxury, I am told, travels better on maintained pavement.

That was when the presentation stopped feeling like a history lesson. RIOC had finally opened its toolbox and discovered several tools still in their original packaging.

A table comparing selected residential buildings appeared on the monitor. The public could not see the table, but fortunately RIOC Board Member Melissa A. Wade’s face had not been redacted. Her expression changed almost immediately. The poker face she had carried into the room did not survive the figures. She looked toward fellow board member Dr. Michal L. Melamed with a smile containing no happiness. It was the smile a woman gives when her husband announces that he has fixed the plumbing and she can already hear water running behind the wall. Michal returned the glance, then gathered herself behind a more guarded expression.

Howard continued explaining the logic of individual negotiations, but the table appeared to be explaining something else. Roosevelt Island had been divided into separate financial realities. One building might carry obligations that another had avoided. One might help pay for services used across the Island while another contributed little or nothing under the same category. The services were communal. The invoices had been carefully privatized.

This did not necessarily require a single corrupt bargain or one grand act of mismanagement. Something quieter could have produced it. A conspiracy was not required. Institutional amnesia could perform the same work without scheduling meetings.

RIOC chief executives came and went, frequently serving only a few years. RIOC presidents changed so often that the office nameplate should have been written in chalk. Each administration inherited immediate budgets, active negotiations and the promise of revenue from the next development.

The people representing development interests could afford to think in decades. The public officials across from them often had to survive the next budget. The next development was always arriving with money, flowers and absolutely no intention of discussing the maintenance bill.

The invisible hand had been granted a longer memory than the Island’s keeper.

Under New Management*

Perhaps I fell asleep for only a moment. At my age, the border between listening and dreaming has become less territorial.

I was standing inside a store with David. We had gone there because the heater in my apartment had stopped working, and I needed an extension cord for a small electric heater. I remember being very cold.

The store had an UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT sign hanging above the entrance. Behind it, I could make out the pale outlines of older signs, all the same size and all apparently bearing the same message.

Inside were model kitchens, carefully arranged bedrooms and photographs of smiling families beneath a banner promising AFFORDABLE LIVING. The store was being renovated. A manager in a new suit hurried over to apologize for the inconvenience and tell us about his plans. Before he could finish, another manager arrived, removed his name from the desk and began describing a different renovation.

The contractor remained the same.

Workers carried a sofa through a door at the back of the store. A few minutes later, they brought it through the front and placed it against another wall. Someone painted over the price beneath the affordable-living sign. It had been painted over so many times that the wall bulged outward.

David watched the sofa make another trip around the building.

“I think it may be a Ponzi scheme,” he whispered.

I did not think so. The managers seemed sincere. Each was plainly excited about his renovation. They unfolded floor plans, measured the walls and promised that everything would be better when the work was finished.

“What about the extension cord?” I asked.

A shipment was expected soon.

Another manager arrived. The contractor greeted him by name.

David put his hands into his coat pockets and looked around the unfinished store. “I don’t think they sell extension cords here,” he said. “I think they sell new managers.”

That was when I understood. The managers did not need to be dishonest. They only needed to leave before winter. Each was responsible for the next renovation, never for the person who would still be cold when it was over.

Ten More Years, but for Whom?

When I returned to the meeting, B.J. was explaining why building owners want ten additional years. Longer leases support financing and property values. Only Westview and Island House have provisions requiring RIOC to negotiate; extensions for the other owners are optional. For once, the short institutional clock and the long development clock have stopped on the same hour. RIOC has leverage.

B.J. looked directly at Melissa and said fiscal responsibility and affordable-housing protections would remain “top of mind.” Sustainability and resiliency could enter the negotiations, although the details would move into executive session. His look suggested RIOC may be prepared to negotiate assertively. The question is what it will negotiate for.

An extension does not have to be merely an exchange of years for money. If an owner wants another decade of certainty, RIOC can ask what certainty will be offered to the residents living inside the buildings. Will affordability remain meaningful? Will neglected conditions be corrected? Even a luxury tower cannot send its garbage out by Uber. Can lease terms address heating, fire safety, resiliency and the daily quality of life that disappears so easily inside a financial table? A spreadsheet has never shivered in January. Excel, I am told, has excellent heat.

Some of us know the distance between an affordable apartment on paper and a secure home in practice. Paper, unlike residents, is famously resistant to complaining about mold. An old agreement may remain satisfied while residents continue facing recurring fires, sewer overflows, mold and other pleasantries. The building may satisfy the affordability formula, but the formula does not have lungs. Compliance is not always the same thing as keeping the public bargain.

Development interests have long enjoyed the advantage of thinking farther ahead than RIOC’s changing management. Ten additional years give the corporation a rare chance to reverse that advantage. It would be unfortunate to trade ten years of leverage for two years of ribbon cuttings.

The negotiations will happen behind closed doors, and the public will eventually be told what was decided. Until then, remember what the hidden table revealed through the faces permitted to see it. Whether RIOC uses its leverage for the owners, its balance sheet or the people still waiting in the cold will tell us who is finally managing the store.

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David Stone looked at the current state of RIOC this week and wrote, "I watch Roosevelt Island. I know what's coming." For tram riders, that feeling may sound familiar. Residents have spent years hearing that the tram belongs to Roosevelt Island while watching decisions about its future drift further from the people who rely on it every day. When a sitting RIOC board member openly wonders whether the MTA should take it over, the question is no longer whether change is coming. The question is whether anyone is willing to admit how much control has already slipped away.

It Already Runs Like MTA Transit

For years, residents pushed to integrate the tram into the MTA system. The logic was straightforward: reduce transfer costs, simplify movement, and make Roosevelt Island feel less like an outlier and more like part of the city. In many ways, that effort succeeded.

Today, the tram functions as just another access point into the network. You can pay anywhere in the system and use it. Once a rider crosses the weekly fare threshold, additional trips are effectively absorbed, meaning frequent users no longer feel the cost of each ride. Students move through it seamlessly under the same subsidized structures that exist across the city.

On paper, this is exactly what was asked for. That is also the problem.

The integration consequence.

The more the tram behaves like part of the MTA, the less it behaves like something the Island controls. The friction that once defined it, the sense that this was a distinct, local channel, has been removed. What remains is a system that is open, scalable, and no longer bounded by the Island itself.

Residents who once fought for inclusion are now confronting what inclusion actually means. The tram can no longer feel exclusive or protected. It is part of a broader system designed to move anyone who enters it. And that shift has created a tension that is hard to ignore.

RIOC still carries the operational burden.

The staffing, the insurance, the maintenance, and the long-term capital upgrades all remain on its books. The tram, as it stands today, is not a profitable asset. It is a subsidized one, and a significant one at that. And that subsidy is rarely discussed in full, particularly when the conversation turns to what the system actually costs to sustain over time.

The Red Bus sits inside the same contradiction. It is described as free, but it is not free. It is funded. Its purpose is to move people efficiently toward the tram and the subway, effectively acting as a feeder into the broader transit system. If that system were fully handed over to the MTA, the structure would likely shift. The bus would not be free, but it would be integrated, with transfers absorbing part of the cost in a way that aligns with how the rest of the city operates.

Which leads to the question that has been sitting quietly underneath all of this:

If the Island has already accepted the benefits of being inside the MTA system, why does it continue to carry the costs as if it were outside of it?

The Choice We Keep Avoiding

There are only three paths forward. Not ten. Not a hybrid. Three.

The first is to accept what the tram already is and finish the transition. Hand it to the MTA, and hand the red buses with it. Let the system that already benefits from the integration take on the full cost of operating it. Staffing, maintenance, capital upgrades, and long-term risk. All of it.

What the Island gains is clarity. What it loses is ownership. The tram stops being “ours” and becomes what it already resembles, just another line in a system that was never designed to prioritize Roosevelt Island in the first place.

That may be uncomfortable. It may also be honest.

The second option is to take it back, not symbolically but structurally. Remove it from the MTA network. No MetroCard. No OMNY. No quiet subsidies hidden inside weekly caps. Rebuild it as a closed system and price it accordingly. Let the cost of operating it surface where it belongs, directly to the people who use it.

That cost will not disappear. It will move. Into fares, into leases, into the broader economics of living on the Island. Because if the tram is truly a private, local service, then its cost will eventually be absorbed through the only mechanism that exists at scale here: land. Higher costs, just redistributed.

That is not a reason to reject the option. It is a reason to stop pretending the option is painless.

The Third Option: Close It

The third option is the one history leaves sitting in plain view. Close it.

That sounds extreme only because Roosevelt Island has forgotten that access has been closed before.

Long before the tram, there was the old bridge elevator, the vertical connection from the Queensboro Bridge down to Welfare Island. The official story belongs to infrastructure: the Island gained other access, the bridge changed the transportation logic, trolley service disappeared, and the elevator eventually became obsolete.

But local memory has always carried a different version.

In that version, residents tired of being treated as a curiosity beneath the bridge. The Island did not simply lose an access point. It shed a kind of unwanted attention. Maybe the legend is true. Maybe it is not. But legends survive because they explain what official minutes usually avoid.

The tram has become the modern version of the same problem.

It is transportation, yes. But it is also advertisement, postcard, shortcut, weekend curiosity, social media backdrop, real estate brochure, and invitation. It brings people here who do not fund the Island’s quality of life but still consume it. It makes Roosevelt Island more visible to developers, more legible to speculators, and more vulnerable to the old argument that every open square inch must eventually be made useful to someone else.

Closing the tram would be ugly. It would be disruptive. It would be politically radioactive.

But it would force the question that every easier option avoids:

Is the tram still serving Roosevelt Island, or is Roosevelt Island now serving the tram?

Nothing Is Free

This is where the Red Bus brings the argument back to earth.

At the most recent RIDAC committee meeting on June 18th, 2026, an exchange between President Jones and Ms. Patel, RIOC’s senior vice president of finance, made the point plainly enough. The Red Bus brings in only about $300,000 from a handful of buildings against roughly $1.8 million in annual operating costs.

So no, the Red Bus is not free. It is indirectly paid for.

The tram is not free either. Nor are the crowds, capital costs, insurance, staffing, maintenance, wear, political evasions, or development pressure that come with keeping Roosevelt Island permanently open as both neighborhood and attraction.

The only question is whether the exchange is worth it.

Maybe it is.

But that case has to be made publicly, with numbers, with tradeoffs, and with a leadership and a board that can visibly negotiate with the City and State on behalf of Roosevelt Island. Not a board that merely receives the burden after the important decisions have already been made elsewhere.

Not a corporation that functions as a control valve, absorbing resident anger so it never travels too far up the chain.

That is the role RIOC has been left with.

It absorbs.

In the absence of a decision, RIOC has taken on a role no one formally assigned but everyone relies on. It absorbs.

It absorbs the cost of a system that behaves like it belongs to the city. It absorbs the frustration of residents when that system fails. It absorbs the expectations of both, without having full authority over either.

That is not governance. It is insulation.

A layer that sits between the Island and the state, taking the impact so it does not travel further up the chain.

And as long as the structure remains undefined, that role does not change.

Because it is easier to direct frustration at the entity closest to you than the one that actually controls the system. This is why the conversation keeps repeating. Not because the problem is new, but because the responsibility is blurred.

Until the Island decides what the tram is, RIOC will continue to carry something it cannot fully control and cannot fully escape. And residents will continue to argue over a system whose terms were never clearly set.

There is no painless option.

Hand it over.

Take it back.

Or close it.

What Roosevelt Island cannot keep doing is pretending the tram is local when it is convenient, regional when it is useful, tourist infrastructure when it photographs well, and nobody’s responsibility when the bill comes due.

The Community Advisory Group was scoped from the outset to address how demolition could proceed safely, how milestones would be communicated, and how community concerns would be handled. Residents were told the forum was not the place to debate whether demolition should occur, whether adaptive reuse had been considered, or whether underlying engineering and environmental records justified the decision to raze the structure.

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HPD Deputy Commissioner AnnMarie Santiago stated at the CAG that the June 12 DEP inspection had identified additional asbestos-containing materials requiring further sampling, laboratory analysis, and updated filings. Asbestos abatement, which began May 18, was reported as roughly 30 percent complete and expected to continue for another three to four months. Structural demolition of the stacks and main building had no projected start date. Scaffolding around the stacks depended on prior soil remediation and stabilization. HPD committed to a Community Air Monitoring Plan for the demolition phase, with perimeter monitors for dust and organic vapors and work stoppage if thresholds were exceeded.

The Stated vs. the Active Reality

By June 26, according to dated photographs and observations provided by Kalin Kresnitchki of the Architectural Community Alliance of Roosevelt Island, masonry removal and undercutting appeared to be underway on the eastern smokestack. Debris trucks were documented moving material during school pickup hours. A large area of soil south of the visible red separation membrane appeared exposed. The agencies have not publicly clarified whether the DEP stop-work order issued after the June 12 asbestos inspection remained in effect for this activity, was lifted, or was modified. No public notice of the work has been issued.

The photographs and observations Kresnitchki provided do not appear to align with the sequencing and notice conditions HPD described six days earlier. The agencies have not publicly confirmed the permits authorizing the activity shown, the testing performed on stack residue and debris, the engineering controls in place for undercutting without full scaffolding, or the status of community air monitoring at the time.

Questions That Directly Affect Public Safety

The unanswered questions are public-safety questions that directly affect the people who live, work, and move closest to the site. The Roosevelt Island Day Nursery sits directly across from the work and serves children as young as twelve months old. Schools line the Main Street haul route. Older adults with respiratory or immune vulnerabilities live in nearby buildings. The Racquet Club’s air-supported structures draw outside air into enclosed spaces where people exercise. Tram users, pedestrians on public walkways, and visitors to Firefighters Field and the pool are also in the potential path of dust, debris, and airborne contaminants. When permits, test results, air-monitoring records, and stop-work status remain unproduced, those receptors have no verified basis on which to assess their exposure.

Kresnitchki’s June 26 email asked the agencies to clarify several key points raised by the visible activity at the site. Photographs dated March 1, 2026 show an excavator actively demolishing the lower level of the building with substantial rubble already present. Later photographs from June 26 show continued masonry removal and undercutting on the eastern smokestack, along with truck movements removing material. HPD told the CAG on June 17–18 that there was no projected start date for smokestack demolition and that the community would receive five business days’ notice before demolition resumed. The DEP stop-work order issued after the June 12 inspection remained in effect according to the public record at that time. Despite this, material removal continued without confirmation that live community air monitoring was in place.

HPD confirmed at the CAG that stack residue had been tested for asbestos only. In his June 26 email, Kresnitchki asked the agencies to confirm whether the DEP stop-work order remains in effect and what permits authorize the masonry removal and undercutting visible on the eastern stack. He sought clarification on testing performed beyond asbestos, the status of any community air monitoring plan, engineering controls for the sequence shown, and how removed debris is being classified and handled. He also asked what interim protections exist for the area of contaminated soil that appears exposed in the photographs and whether the basement structure visible there had already been demolished during earlier underground oil tank removal work, and under what authorization that structural demolition occurred when the main building demolition permit has not been issued.

As of July 1, ArchRI had not received any response from HPD, DEP, RIOC, DOB, or DEC to the questions raised.

The Record the Agencies Can Still Produce

The agencies announced sequencing, notice, and testing standards in a recorded public meeting. Physical work on the eastern stack then advanced without apparent fulfillment of those conditions. The public record does not yet contain the permits, test results, engineering approvals, or air-monitoring documentation that would demonstrate compliance with the standards HPD itself set. When agencies that establish the rules do not produce the records that would test whether those rules are being followed, the rules become optional in practice. The gap is sustained by the absence of answers.

The fourteen questions sent on June 26 are now part of the public record. The agencies can close the contradiction by producing written answers, the permits in force, the results of testing beyond asbestos, the engineering approvals for the observed sequence, the current status of the Community Air Monitoring Plan, and confirmation of whether the DEP stop-work order remained in effect, was lifted, or was modified for the work shown. Until they do, the clearest fact in the record is the gap between what was stated publicly on June 18 and what appears to have occurred at the site six days later.

Even with the limited information the agencies have chosen to release, some important pieces of the timeline have become clearer. What remains entirely absent is any explanation for why the work proceeded in the manner it did, or why the demolition is happening at all. The agencies have offered no account of why material removal continued while a stop-work order was in effect, why basic safeguards such as community air monitoring were not confirmed during that period, or why the public was left without the notice HPD itself had said would be provided. They have also provided no explanation of whether the decision to demolish the Steam Plant was connected, officially or otherwise, to the land lease extension negotiations between the City and the State. While it is not possible to determine whether this level of secrecy stems from routine institutional resistance or from deeper arrangements to clear the site, the coordinated silence across HPD, DEP, DOB, RIOC, and DEC suggests the full story extends well beyond what has been made visible.

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Update, July 3–6: Post-publication, Kalin Kresnitchki forwarded partial agency responses confirming the full stop-work order was modified to partial. Additional site documentation and slides shared. The core gaps in public notice, sequencing, full testing, and transparent air monitoring records remain unclosed in the public record. We will continue tracking responses to the 14 questions submitted.

What stood out was not what got explained, but what had already been placed off-limits. The meeting had been shaped to stay inside the lines of process and logistics. Still, three women kept steering the conversation toward questions the structure was built to keep out.

It Has Very Good Bones

Zora Boyadzhieva spoke about the building the way some people talk about an elderly relative who still has good legs and will probably outlive half the people trying to get rid of her. She described it as having very strong bones and very strong foundations, built in the 1930s and reinforced in the 1950s. She talked about the steel and concrete the way people used to talk about old New York: it had character, it had history, it could still carry more than it was being asked to carry. Then she asked, as if it were the most obvious question in the world, why it was being demolished at all.

Bryant Daniels, RIOC’s communications director, moved quickly to close the subject. He said this was not the time to question the decision itself. Zora did not argue. She simply noted that it was a public building and that the public had a right to understand why it was being removed. Bryant’s gaze dropped. He stated that the building had largely been found to be unsafe. She corrected him again. There was no structural emergency, she said. That much had already been established. What remained was only the emergency of moving forward without answering questions that had been asked for months.

Her partner, Kalin Kresnitchki, stayed with it longer. He was fighting for a building with actual bones and history while the people who want it gone are probably already designing 300 square foot studios marketed as “cozy” because they couldn’t legally call them what they are: expensive closets with a view of the river or the Queensboro Bridge car traffic. Who needs history when you can get a cheap thrill from the expressway peep show instead?

Who is paying for this?

Later in the meeting, Lisa Fernandez, CBN Director of the Roosevelt Island Older Adult Center, asked the question that had been circling underneath everything else. She wanted to know who was paying for the demolition. Then she went further. She said she assumed the land was being cleared for David Kramer and asked whether he, or whoever would build there, would be required to cover some of the cost.

The question landed with a small, visible reaction. Someone smiled, almost laughed, as if the directness had caught them off guard. Bryant Daniels answered by returning to what could still be safely said. He explained that no decisions had been made about the future of the site. The response was careful and incomplete. It addressed the surface of her question while avoiding the assumption underneath it.

Around the screen, attention shifted in small ways. Some people stayed composed. Others had already begun to look elsewhere. Bryant looked down again like he was checking if his soul was still there. Spoiler: it wasn’t. The conversation moved beyond procedure and into questions of power or money. Lisa did not press further. She had said what she came to say.

What stayed afterward was not the answer that was given, but what it had refused to touch. The work on the site was not framed as stabilization or securing. It was a full clearing, the kind of preparation done when ground is being made ready for something new. By asking whether the party who would receive that ground would help pay for its preparation, Lisa named the arrangement the meeting had been arranged to keep unnamed.

The Weight AnnMarie Santiago Carried

AnnMarie Santiago was the only official who remained steady and visible for the entire meeting. She is the deputy commissioner at HPD whose office is handling the demolition. She spoke in detail about the work already done and what still lay ahead: the soil removal still awaiting final state approval, the additional asbestos areas found during a routine inspection, the stop-work order now in effect, and the extended timeline for abatement. She used the word “emergency” once, even though that framing had already been corrected months earlier by another agency. She did not embellish or soften what she was saying. She also did not claim authority over questions that belonged to other offices.

Everyone else with real decision-making power stayed silent or off camera. She carried what could be carried and left the rest where it sat.

The Ground They Refused to Yield

The building is still standing. The questions about why it must be removed rather than adapted, and who will ultimately benefit from the cleared ground, remain outside the frame the meeting was built to hold. Air monitoring will now include the community air monitoring program during demolition, but residents will only see the results posted weekly by RIOC on a website most people do not regularly check. There will be no live information. You will learn whether something was released only after the fact, if at all. Perhaps in a few weeks, if you feel unwell, or perhaps years later, when you’re too busy dying of something else to bother figuring out which meeting poisoned you.

What remained visible at the end was not the process itself, but the three women who refused to let certain questions disappear inside it. Zora Boyadzhieva brought the forbidden question into the room. Lisa Fernandez named the quiet arrangement beneath the work. AnnMarie Santiago was the only official who stayed present and visible while the rest of the room looked away or turned off their cameras.

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The Nonprofit and the People Behind It

Friends of the Ruin Inc was established in 2018. Its stated purpose is to permanently stabilize the Smallpox Hospital ruins and turn the surrounding grounds into a public “Garden Among Ruins” - a landscaped public health memorial. By early 2022 the organization reported having raised roughly $1.2 million through private donations and some public support. It has commissioned multi-phase studies from Walter B. Melvin Architects, produced renderings, supported a short film, and worked with students from the Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design.

Stephen Martin, an architect who previously served as Director of Design and Planning for the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, is the founder and president. The rest of the board includes professionals with backgrounds in institutional investments, private equity, corporate law at a major firm, academic architecture programs, and medicine. This is not an amateur preservation society. It is an organized effort with access to networks that matter when money is required.

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The organization has moved well beyond advocacy. It has produced stabilization studies, architectural renderings, and educational partnerships, but none of that work can proceed without RIOC’s decision on whether the site will be made available for the project. It has produced concrete technical work and sustained momentum for nearly a decade. That record deserves to be taken seriously.

The Absent Landlord

The ruins sit inside Southpoint Park, which RIOC controls. Immediately to the south lies Four Freedoms Park, run by a separate state entity. Two different governing structures sit side by side, and the ruin falls between them.

RIOC has offered no public position on the nonprofit’s decade-long plan. Nor has it disclosed when it first became aware of the conditions now being treated as an “emergency” at the steam plant. If the same pattern of silence followed by sudden speed is applied to the ruin, the outcome is predictable. Heritage, resident access, nature, and animal welfare would be addressed only after the fact, if at all.

The ruin remains in institutional limbo because RIOC has neither accepted nor rejected the existing proposal. That silence is no longer neutral.

What Happened at REDAC Last Night

The Real Estate Development Advisory Committee is chaired by Howard Polivy, whose long tenure and consistent alignment with management on real-estate matters has been documented across multiple administrations. His cousin Lance A. Polivy now serves as RIOC’s Vice President and General Counsel. RIOC has described the relationship as “distant.” On an island this small, the question is whether the corporation’s general counsel, better known as the “distant” cousin of REDAC chair Howard Polivy, is briefing the chair in private on issues that affect the chair’s own apartment building. No record of ordinary conflict safeguards - disclosure, recusal, or independent review - has been provided.

Last night’s meeting did not address the Renwick Ruin. That is not surprising. These issues rarely appear on the public portion of the agenda until the important work has already been done elsewhere.

What REDAC Is Supposed To Do

A nonprofit, no matter how well organized or well funded, should not be left to shape the future of a public site on its own. That is precisely what the Real Estate Development Advisory Committee exists for. REDAC is meant to give residents and stakeholders a structured way to discuss vision, weigh trade-offs, and advise RIOC on what should and should not happen with island land.

Instead, the committee has said nothing publicly about the ruin. No timeline has been set for public discussion. No criteria have been released for how RIOC will evaluate the proposal. The result is a multi-year, million-dollar effort advancing in the absence of any advisory process. If REDAC is not being used to advise on a site like this, then its purpose is unclear - and the public is left to wonder what it is actually advising on.

The path itself has changed in quieter ways. The railings that once ran along the water’s edge rusted through and were replaced without ceremony. The benches that used to face the wrong direction were eventually turned around, though no one seems to remember when. What remains is the sense that the ground underfoot is still negotiating its own upkeep. The smell of urine-soaked soil rises in patches where the custodians have not yet reached. Small heaps of dog waste sit flattened into the surface. On the Queens-side stretch the garbage accumulates in low, stubborn piles, not dramatic enough to photograph, only persistent enough to become part of the scenery. It is easy to tell oneself that people did not used to throw things down so casually, but that is the kind of sentence every older person learns to distrust the moment it forms. What feels different is not the presence of litter but the absence of the old reflex that once made leaving it feel like a small public failure.

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What the bins reveal is stranger still. There are more of them now than there used to be, yet the ground around them is rarely clean. In Japan the bins were scarce and the pavement stayed spotless; here the bins stand waiting and the debris gathers anyway. The difference is not access but ownership. The mess belongs to no one in particular, and therefore to no one at all.

The Other Stretch

A few hundred yards later the feeling grew heavier. This is the part of the promenade where the Island sends its garbage to die quietly. On the main stretch the trash at least gets noticed before it’s removed. Here it simply settles in, like an unwelcome relative who’s decided to stay.

The path on the Queens side, the stretch that curves away from the tram and the main promenades, was carrying its own evidence. Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that photographs well for a report. Just the steady accumulation of what people had decided did not require their attention: a flattened cup, a torn wrapper, a scattering of small, unnameable things that had been stepped over often enough to become part of the surface. This is not a tourist stretch. The people who walk here are the ones who live here. There is no one else to blame for the state of it, and that is what makes the mess feel heavier rather than lighter.

I have lived long enough to know that dirt is rarely the real problem. The problem is the quiet agreement that someone else will eventually handle what we have chosen not to. On the main promenades the bins are visible and the foot traffic is constant, so the small failures are corrected before they can settle. On the Queens side the bins stand empty because the people walking past them have already decided this is not their concern. The failures are allowed to remain because the audience is smaller and the consequences feel more private. It is the part of the Island that belongs most completely to its residents, and therefore the part that most clearly reveals what those residents have decided is beneath their notice.

A pizza box, left upright on a bench, appeared to be conducting its own quiet experiment in how long the path would tolerate its company.

The pizza box

It was an ordinary morning. I was walking the Queens-side stretch with the modest intention of checking on the pizza box I had been observing for three days. I wanted to see how it had weathered the night and whether the path had grown any less tolerant of its presence. Three responses had occurred to me when I first noticed it. I could have written a small story about the kind of person who leaves a box behind after enjoying a view. I could have removed it myself. Or I could have continued to note its persistence each morning. I had chosen the third.

Before I reached the bench I saw a Japanese couple ahead of me. The man had already gathered a few scattered wrappers from the edge of the grass. The woman, a few steps behind him, held two empty bottles by their necks. She did not call out. She only lifted her chin slightly in the direction of the bench. He turned, saw the box, and without breaking stride or asking a question, collected it with the rest. Three days. That’s how long it took me to develop feelings for a piece of cardboard. They walked together to the bin. The motion was ordinary, almost absent-minded. No one watching would have guessed that anything of note had happened. The box disappeared. The bench was empty again. They continued along the path as if the small correction had been the most natural thing in the world.

I remained where I was. The judgment I had carried about the box now sat differently, but so did something else. Over three mornings I had grown oddly attached to its presence. That box sat there like it was waiting for me to make a decision. Turns out it was waiting for someone with less complicated feelings about public responsibility. I had chosen to watch. They had chosen to act. The bench was clean, and I was left with the sense that something had been settled without my consent, though I could not say whether the loss belonged to the box, to the path, or to me.

What We Decide to Keep

The couple with the bin had already disappeared around the bend. I did not know their names. I do not know whether they live in one of the northern towers or in The Octagon, which still carries different memories in its hallways. What I know is that they treated the path as if it were an extension of their own floor. That is a particular kind of ownership. It does not require a deed or a vote or a committee. It only requires the willingness to bend down when no one is asking you to.

There is a particular kind of courage required to pick up someone else’s mess in public. The rest of us save our courage for complaining about it later. I kept walking. The light on the water had shifted again, turning the surface into something harder to read. I thought about all the mornings this promenade has absorbed without comment: the arguments that happened while people stared at the skyline, the quiet decisions made while watching the current, the small mercies performed when the only witness was the river itself. The Island keeps its own record of these things. It does not publish the minutes, but it does not forget them either.

Some days the path tells you what kind of place this still is. Other days it asks you what kind of place you are willing to let it become. If you see them, say thank you, not from yourself, but from the soul of the island.

Why did some organizations receive large Public Purpose Fund awards while others received little or nothing? Why did certain nonprofits appear to occupy multiple lanes of funding? Why were some long-standing questions about fiscal sponsorships, eligibility, and repeat recipients never fully addressed?

Those questions remain. David Stone’s latest reporting is a reminder that the Public Purpose Fund story did not end with last year’s awards. But the new round raises a different question: not who received the Public Purpose Fund money, but who decided where it went.

Residents were told the process was independent. The New York Community Trust administered the program. Community reviewers evaluated the applications. Awards were announced. End of story.

Except that independence is not something that can simply be declared. It has to be understood. Who selected the reviewers? What relationships surrounded them? What information was disclosed? And what information, if any, was residents expected to simply trust?

Those questions lead to the same place every transparency discussion eventually arrives: before residents can decide whether the process was fair, they first need to understand who was sitting at the table.

Who Chose the Reviewers?

For the 2026 Public Purpose Fund cycle, residents were eventually told who reviewed the applications. The five advisory committee members were Penny Gold, Deolinda Leitao-Greene, Frank Raffaele, Anna Scaglione, and James Shafer. RIOC and The New York Community Trust described the panel as independent and said the reviewers remained anonymous during the review period to keep the process fair and confidential. That gives residents a roster after the fact. It does not give them the path by which those names arrived at the table.

That missing path matters. Who nominated the reviewers? Were applicants invited to suggest names, as they were in the prior cycle? Did RIOC review or approve the final slate? Were any nominees rejected because of conflicts, relationships, or perceived proximity to applicants? What standards did The Trust apply before determining that these five people could evaluate applications for public money? The public announcement does not answer those questions. It tells residents who the reviewers were only after their work was done.

That is where the transparency problem begins. Independence is not proven by calling a committee independent. It is proven by showing how the committee was assembled, what safeguards existed, and how conflicts were screened before decisions were made. The issue is not whether the five reviewers were qualified. The issue is whether residents were given enough information to understand why those five reviewers were selected to help decide where Roosevelt Island’s Public Purpose Fund money went.

What Did Residents Know About Them?

The sharper questions arise where the public record shows obvious proximity to Roosevelt Island’s cultural and civic network. Penny Gold is not an outsider to that world. She is an active curator of art, engaged in the Island’s cultural life, and her work has added real value to the community. Sources have also told The Lighthouse that her partner is an artist featured at RIVAA. That does not make Gold unethical. It does not erase the value of her work. It does, however, expose the weakness in the word “independent” when it is used without explanation.

If independence means residents with no meaningful proximity to applicants, then a deeply engaged cultural figure raises obvious questions when cultural organizations receive funding. If independence means only the absence of a direct financial interest, then RIOC and The Trust should say so. The public needs to know what standard was applied, what relationships were disclosed, and whether the same standard was applied to everyone sitting at the table.

This year’s awards did not present the same clear RIVAA double-lane question we raised last year, when RIVAA and RIVAA Gallery Concerts appeared as separate funding streams. But the new award list creates a different transparency problem. Several grantees are identified by public-facing names without enough information for residents to easily confirm whether each is a separate 501(c)(3), operating through a fiscal sponsor, or adjacent to an existing Roosevelt Island organization already inside the funding ecosystem. That matters because legal separation and practical separation are not always the same thing.

Frank Raffaele presents a different kind of proximity. As co-owner of The Sanctuary, he has supported, hosted, and sponsored Roosevelt Island nonprofit activity over multiple years. That makes him an active civic stakeholder, not a detached observer. There is nothing wrong with caring about community organizations, but a person who hosts, sponsors, and works alongside local nonprofits inevitably develops preferences, alliances, and favorites. If that is the reviewer model, residents deserve to know what relationships were disclosed before those same nonprofits were evaluated for public money.

That is the standard residents were never allowed to see. Not just who sat on the committee, but what they disclosed before they sat there. Not just who won the money, but whether the relationships around that money were tested before the awards were announced.

The prior cycle offers a useful benchmark. In 2025, Susan Haberman did not score RIVAA because she occasionally volunteered with the organization. The Trust reportedly did not strictly consider that a conflict, but accepted the recusal out of caution. If proximity mattered then, residents deserve to know how it was tested in 2026. Did any reviewer disclose relationships with funded organizations? Did anyone recuse from scoring particular applications? Were connections to RIVAA, RIHS, The Sanctuary, Cornell Tech, Touro, or other Island institutions considered? Perhaps every answer is reassuring. The problem is that residents were never given enough information to know.

The Transparency Gap

This article is not asking:

Was the process fair?

Instead, we are asking:

Does the public have a right to understand why public money was allocated?

Those are very different questions. It’s about a philosophy of government.

The old system was criticized because residents believed too much discretion was concentrated in local hands. The new system was supposed to solve that problem. Instead, it appears to have created a different one. The decisions are now further away, harder to examine, and largely insulated from public scrutiny.

When we sought records explaining how Public Purpose Fund decisions were made, we were told that many of those records were not RIOC’s to provide. We challenged that position. The challenge failed. By the time the matter reached the Governor’s office, the answer remained the same: residents could know who received the money, but not necessarily how or why those decisions were reached.

That is the transparency gap.

The question raised by the Public Purpose Fund is not whether a particular organization deserved funding. Reasonable people can disagree about that. The question is whether residents have a right to understand why public money was allocated the way it was. RIOC’s position has effectively been no. The state’s position appears to be no as well. The public may see the outcome, but the reasoning behind it can remain largely hidden from view.

If that is the standard, then residents should at least understand what it means. Public money can be distributed. Public winners can be announced. Public celebrations can follow. But the public itself may never be allowed to examine enough of the process to determine whether the decisions were sound, consistent, or influenced by relationships that should have been disclosed. That is not merely a dispute about grants. It is a question about whether transparency ends when the money leaves RIOC’s hands.

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If public money remains public when it is awarded, residents should ask why the reasoning behind those awards can become private.

The contested appointment of Lance A. Polivy had already drawn its line through the room before the board returned from executive session. Melissa Wade had read her warning aloud. She spoke of protocol, qualifications, conflict, and the old habits RIOC claims to have outgrown. The public heard her. The board heard her. Yet the appointment still came forward as if the machinery had already decided.

The evening carried two central subjects: whether the steam plant was safe to breathe around, and whether governance was safe to trust. Somehow the steam plant felt like the less dusty question.

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For the Avoidance of Doubt

RIOC loves transparency the way vampires love sunrise: conceptually, from a safe distance. The public had heard Melissa. The board had heard Melissa. The appointment, apparently, had noise-canceling headphones.

President Benjamin Jones reached the sentence that was supposed to settle the unease: “For the avoidance of doubt…” That was where the reading changed. His body gathered inward. The words did not sound improvised. They sounded prepared, agreed upon, and placed in the record for a reason. Jones read them carefully, almost too carefully, his arms crossed close to him, his voice hanging on each clause. Watching him, one wondered whether he believed the language or merely understood why it had to be read.

Lance Polivy, Jones said, had “the same last name” as board member Howard Polivy. He was technically accurate, in the same way the Titanic encountered “some ice”. It was careful phrasing, narrow enough to almost disappear into itself, yet Melissa Wade had already called the relationship by its plainer name when she spoke of lease negotiations involving “his cousin’s building.” The sentence arrived dressed as ethics language, but it walked like legal insulation. The law may permit a relationship. It does not make Thanksgiving less awkward.

On the transcript, the language looks polished, prepared, and official. On video, it seemed heavier than that. I cannot enter President Jones’s mind, but I can describe what was visible: the guarded arms, the careful pacing, the hesitation around words that should have reassured everyone if the matter were as simple as the sentence made it sound. Then came the phrase “prevent corruption.” It was barely given air.

The law may permit a relationship. It does not make the relationship disappear. It also does not make prepared language easier to read when the room already knows why the language was prepared. What was clear was the discomfort.

The Missing Doorway

Melissa Wade’s statement mattered because she did not merely object to Lance Polivy. She objected to the path that delivered him. The bylaws, she said, give the board the power to hire officers upon the recommendation of the CEO. The CEO recommends. The board hires. That distinction was supposed to matter.

By Melissa’s account, it had not mattered enough. She said the first time she was notified of Lance Polivy was after he had emerged as the sole candidate, from a process she did not know and one she believed did not include the search firm the board had approved. His name had already gone to chambers. A background check had already begun. Only then did the board receive the person it was being asked to approve. If the board was the hiring authority, it was introduced to its authority rather late in the evening.

Jones answered with order. He listed résumés, interviews, staff reviewers, and Governor’s Counsel. It sounded extensive. It sounded serious. But it did not answer the question Melissa had placed on the table. The process sounded extensive. So does a diner menu. That does not tell you who cooked the food. Did Lance Polivy come through the board-approved search firm? When was the board brought into the process? Why had chambers and background review begun before Melissa says the board was alerted?

That is the space the meeting never filled. Melissa questioned the doorway. Jones described the hallway. Both things can be true, and that is what made the moment troubling. A process can have many steps and still leave footprints going around the board.

When the Rules Learned to Move

Earlier in the meeting, the Governance Committee offered its own kind of lesson. Three policies had been revised: personally owned vehicle use, travel by personnel, and discretionary funds. Some had not been revised since 2013. They had been modernized, cleaned, corrected, and moved forward. The board approved them with little difficulty.

There was nothing wrong with updating old policies. RIOC needed that work. But the ease of it mattered because of what came later. The institution moved quickly when the work made the machinery look repaired. The old rules could be dusted off. The typos could be fixed. The missing Zoom-era language could be added. Penalties could be inserted.

Mark Block and Conway Ekpo helped give the room the language of compliance and the feeling of restored order. When the Polivy appointment came forward, Conway moved it. The motion did not linger. The vote followed.

That is why the later exchange with Lydia Tang mattered so much. Procedure had been flexible enough to clean old policies, orderly enough to bless a contested appointment, and efficient enough to move the room toward adjournment. But when a resident-safety resolution tried to reach the floor, procedure became a locked door.

Nothing wakes a policy faster than the possibility it might serve the room already in charge. The machinery moved quickly once the machinery itself stood to benefit. Procedure could stretch across thirteen years of neglect, dust itself off, and call it modernization. But it could not, apparently, stretch far enough to reach Lydia Tang’s resolution.

The Recommendation That Disappeared

The Operations Advisory Committee had not merely talked about the steam plant. It had acted. Under the newer governance structure, committees were supposed to do more than listen politely and send concern back into the air. Lydia Tang had raised the need for a recommendation, and the committee unanimously supported moving forward on air monitoring while HPD delayed. The same concern extended to soil testing.

By the time the full board met, President Benjamin Jones had already offered one convenient update: HPD, he said, had confirmed that air monitoring was scheduled to begin Monday. That mattered. But it did not erase what the committee had done. A promise from HPD was not the same as a board resolution. A scheduled start date was not the same as resident oversight. And Monday had not yet arrived.

Then came Fay Christian’s Operations Committee report. She acknowledged the committee’s unanimous view. She reported the committee’s concern so gently it almost needed air monitoring of its own. She even called HPD’s responsiveness “lackadaisical.” But the recommendation arrived softened, folded into a report rather than presented as the resolution Lydia believed the committee had authorized.

That is why Lydia stepped in before adjournment. She was not inventing a new demand from the floor. She was reminding the room of a committee action that had been allowed to fade just as the meeting was about to close. The Operations Committee had authorized moving the matter forward as a resolution if HPD did not act. When soil testing was raised, Lydia added that the committee had unanimously supported that as well.

The resistance did not first come from the state’s representative chairing the meeting. It came from Lydia’s fellow board members. The state did not have to silence Lydia. Her colleagues, Marc Block and Conway Ekpo, got there first. Block pointed back toward Fay’s report, reducing Lydia’s objection to repetition: the Operations Committee had already been reported. Ekpo then supplied the procedural wall, backing the chair’s position that a resolution could not be raised without ten days’ notice. Lydia disagreed, saying the bylaws allowed board members to present resolutions and reminding the room that she had been there when they were written. The machinery did not need Albany to push it. It had local hands. The moment was almost efficient: Lydia brought the committee’s recommendation, and the room produced the reason it could not be heard.

That exchange is the heart of the story. Lydia tried to carry a unanimous committee recommendation into the full boardroom. The lawyer panel helped convert it into a procedural defect. Fay, who had chaired the committee, did not rescue the recommendation. Howard Polivy, seated beside the night’s other controversy, did not speak. The room did not need to shout Lydia down. It simply narrowed around her.

Then Fay moved to adjourn. Howard seconded. Lydia voted no. Dr. Michal Melamed voted no. Melissa Wade abstained. The meeting closed, but the committee’s unanswered recommendation remained behind, sitting in the room like resident safety itself: present, inconvenient, and somehow not on the agenda. That is how a public safety concern disappears at RIOC: not with a denial, but with a motion, a second, and the practiced sound of people leaving.

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Last week, Eleanor Rivers asked RIOC to open the door before the vote. The Board voted anyway.

That is not nothing. After the chaos and contempt of the Haynes era, even the sound of adult language from the dais can feel like progress. Residents have heard him speak about process, professionalism, responsiveness, and public concern. They have heard the polished vocabulary of repair.

But care is not proven by the way a president speaks when the microphones are on. Care is proven by what happens before the vote, before the agenda item, before the public explanation, and before a resident director has to say out loud that the process looks like the old RIOC wearing a cleaner suit.

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On May 14, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation Board approved Lance A. Polivy as RIOC’s Vice President and General Counsel. Melissa Wade and Dr. Michal Melamed voted no. Professor Lydia Tang abstained. Howard Polivy, whose family connection to Lance Polivy RIOC has characterized as “distant,” voted yes, along with Meghan Anderson, Morris Peters, Marc Jonas Block, Fay Christian, and Conway Ekpo.

The issue is not whether Lance Polivy has a résumé. He does. The issue is the process used to place him in one of the most powerful advisory roles inside RIOC. A General Counsel does not simply review contracts. A General Counsel helps determine what RIOC believes it may withhold, what it must disclose, what can be moved behind closed doors, how the bylaws are read, and how much public scrutiny the corporation is willing to tolerate.

That is why this appointment matters beyond one hire. It asks whether President Jones understands the resident Board members as governing stakeholders, or as the last stop in a decision that has already moved through staff, Albany, and the machinery around RIOC before they are asked to approve it.

The Board Was Not Supposed to Be the Last Stop

President Jones gave the public numbers meant to signal rigor. More than 500 résumés. Forty-three interviews. Nine second-round interviews. Those figures may be accurate, and they may reflect a serious process. But numbers do not answer the governance question.

The public explanation described senior staff interviews, followed by interviews with President Jones and the Governor’s Counsel’s office. Then Lance Polivy was selected. That is the missing step. The explanation moves from process to outcome without showing when the Board exercised independent judgment over an officer appointment it was later asked to approve.

That distinction matters because the General Counsel is not an ordinary employee. The General Counsel is an officer of the corporation. The Board’s role is not supposed to begin when the final candidate appears on the agenda. If the Board is the hiring authority, the record should show when directors were brought in, what information they received, whether they compared candidates, and whether they had a meaningful choice before the appointment was presented as ready for approval.

President Jones may not have formally taken the Board’s authority away. The more troubling possibility is quieter. The authority may have remained intact on paper while the meaningful decision moved elsewhere. That is how governance gets hollowed out without anyone needing to announce that it has been hollowed out.

Melissa Wade Heard the Alarm

The most important fact in the vote may not be that six directors approved the appointment. It may be that three resident directors did not. Wade and Melamed voted no. Tang abstained. These are not outside commentators. They are the local voices closest to the public promise that RIOC was supposed to change.

Melissa Wade’s dissent should alarm every resident. Not because it proves misconduct. It does not. It should alarm us because it suggests something almost as serious: that a resident director believed the Board’s role had been minimized in the very kind of decision the Board exists to make.

According to public reporting, Wade said proper protocols had not been followed. She said she first learned of Lance Polivy only after he had emerged as the sole candidate. She said his name had already gone to chambers and that a background check had begun before the Board was alerted. That does not sound like a director searching for a fight. It sounds like a director realizing the Board had been invited to bless a decision whose real life had already happened elsewhere.

Then Wade used the phrase that should stop every resident cold: “textbook old school RIOC behavior.” That was not a stray complaint. It was a diagnosis. It suggested that the old culture has not disappeared but has instead learned to present itself with more polished language.

“Distant” Is Not a Disclosure

RIOC’s response to the family-connection concern has been legally narrow. The public has been told the connection between Howard Polivy and Lance Polivy is “distant,” that they do not have a personal relationship, and that the relationship does not make them relatives under the applicable ethics framework.

That may be RIOC’s position. But the word “distant” is doing too much work. The public has not been shown who made that determination, what relationship was reviewed, when it was discovered, whether it was documented, or whether Howard Polivy was walled off from any formal or informal involvement before the vote.

The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse has submitted a narrow FOIL request because these questions should not require guesswork. We have asked when Lance Polivy submitted his résumé, who first advanced him, who discussed his candidacy internally, when the family connection was discovered, who decided it was “distant,” what role Howard Polivy played, when the Board first learned Lance Polivy had become the leading candidate, who decided he was the top candidate, and whether Fusco Personnel or any other search firm actually submitted, screened, ranked, recommended, interviewed, or otherwise evaluated him.

Those are not accusations. They are the ordinary questions a public authority should be able to answer when appointing the lawyer who will advise it on secrecy, disclosure, bylaws, conflicts, and public accountability.

We know the usual FOIL rhythm by now. Acknowledgment. Delay. Extension. Redaction. A templated answer arriving months after the public needed the truth. That rhythm is part of old RIOC. President Jones did not create it, but he now owns the choice of whether to continue it.

This appointment will tell Roosevelt Island something larger than whether Lance Polivy can practice law. It will tell us who President Jones believes he answers to: the Board that is supposed to govern RIOC, the state apparatus around him, the insiders who know how decisions move before the public sees them, or the residents who are usually asked to accept the result after the machinery has already done its work.