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.

On May 8, 2026, another fire came to Roosevelt Landings. This time, mercifully, no life was lost, which is how one is supposed to begin, I think, with gratitude placed neatly on the table before fear is allowed to sit down. The family survived. The building still stands. The official language may therefore remain calm, as official language so often does, having never once had to descend a smoke-filled stairwell with weak lungs and sensible shoes.

I am not as fast as I once was. My breathing is weaker. My steps are slower. I have become, against my better judgment, the sort of person who looks at stairs and performs arithmetic, which is a terrible hobby and not one I recommend to the young. The fear of being burned alive is not theatrical when you live in a long corridor. It is practical, intimate, and rude enough to arrive without asking whether one has already had enough excitement for the decade.

At a recent meeting about the steam plant, B.J. Jones offered a sentence I have not been able to put down: “That’s not a question. We absolutely, absolutely care.” He was not speaking about this fire. He was not speaking about the earlier fire, or about my friend, or about the surviving family members whose lives were left in pieces after everyone else resumed their schedules. That, perhaps, is why the sentence keeps finding me. It is a very polished thing, official care, especially when it does not have to carry clothing, comfort, or consequence down the hall.

After the earlier fire, even the clothing drives meant to help the surviving family members were taken away. I suppose there is a policy somewhere for such things. There is always a policy somewhere. It may even have a table of contents. But tenants learn to distinguish between care as a word and care as an act, between the kind spoken into a microphone and the kind that leaves someone with a coat, a chair, a door, a place to sleep, and the dignity of not being treated as a disruption.

That is why I cannot separate the latest fire at the Landings from the next RIOC board vote. The board is being asked to approve Lance A. Polivy as General Counsel. By the time one finishes saying “General Counsel and Secretary/Vice President for Legal Affairs,” the board has already voted, adjourned, and blamed the tenants for not reading faster. But tenants do not live inside titles. We live inside buildings, and the lawyer in that seat will help decide how RIOC understands its obligations, how it negotiates with buildings, how it handles the steam plant, how it responds to fires, and how it treats residents who keep asking why the room always seems so comfortable before the public is allowed inside.

A title that long should not be approved by a board. It should be inspected by the fire marshal.

The Job Is Not a Courtesy Title

RIOC’s General Counsel is not merely the person who checks punctuation in contracts, although I am sure punctuation has ruined many afternoons. This is the lawyer who sits close to the center of the corporation’s judgment. The title carries influence over leases, real estate negotiations, public authority rules, conflicts, board process, litigation risk, and the quiet legal architecture beneath island life.

That matters because Roosevelt Island is not in a quiet season. The steam plant has raised serious questions about safety, demolition, planning, and candor. The Landings has faced another fire. Long-term tenants worry about the future of their homes, not in the theatrical way officials sometimes imagine residents worry, but in the ordinary way people worry when rent, safety, age, and displacement begin to appear in the same sentence.

A General Counsel in this moment must be more than competent. The person must be seen as independent, and that independence must be shown rather than politely assumed. Public authorities have a charming habit of asking residents to trust them just after they have finished withholding the thing that would have made trust easier. The word “trust.” is so much shorter than “documents,” and apparently much less expensive to provide. “Trust us” is not governance. It is what a magician says before your watch disappears.

RIOC has a wonderful talent for transparency. You can see straight through the promise and all the way to the locked file cabinet behind it. The board keeps asking residents to assume good faith, which is adorable. At my age, I do not assume good faith; I assume calcium deficiency and let Theo, my editor, ask for the paperwork.

The proposed appointment may involve a capable lawyer. That is not the point. The point is that this job will likely touch the very matters residents fear most: building negotiations, ground leases, rent obligations, tax structures, development pressure, emergency decisions, and the future legal posture of RIOC toward buildings like Rivercross and Roosevelt Landings. That kind of role requires daylight before the vote, not explanations after it.

The Search That Was Promised

Earlier this year, RIOC asked its board to authorize a contract with Fusco Personnel Inc. for executive recruiting services focused on two vacant positions: President and Chief Executive Officer, and Vice President/General Counsel. The memo described a process with biweekly updates, collaboration with Human Resources, hiring managers, executives, and the board, and an assessment of candidates’ experience, strategy, outcomes, and integrity. Not perfection, certainly. We are discussing Roosevelt Island governance, not the return of civic Eden. But at minimum, a search suggests that candidates were gathered, compared, screened, and evaluated through something more substantial than proximity.

The President and CEO search was later described publicly as long, thorough, and handled through an executive search firm. The General Counsel position was also posted publicly, which is worth saying because a job posting is not nothing. It is the hat placed on the table. RIOC seems to have conducted the kind of search I conduct for my glasses: I put them on to look for them, then forget what the search was about. The question is who was allowed to reach inside, who watched the hand, and whether anyone thought to mention that one of the names in the hat came with a very visible family connection to the board.

Now the board is being asked to vote on a candidate for General Counsel. The packet provides a name, a résumé, a recommendation, and a salary of up to $230,000. What it does not appear to provide is the story of the search itself. Did Fusco Personnel run the General Counsel search in the same meaningful way RIOC has described the CEO search? How many candidates were screened? How many were interviewed? When did Lance A. Polivy enter the process? Who evaluated the conflict question, and when?

That is the first turn in this story. If public money, or even public authorization, was used to create an independent executive search process, then residents should know what that process produced. Perhaps everything was done properly. Perhaps the firm searched widely, the candidates were compared, the conflict questions were examined, and the best candidate emerged after rigorous review. If so, RIOC should enjoy the rare pleasure of showing its work.

But the more visible the conflict, the more visible the process must be. A clean independent search can, in theory, land on someone with a conflict concern. Life is untidy, and families have been known to produce more than one lawyer, a phenomenon for which society has not yet developed an adequate vaccine. But when the result of an independent search is a family member of a sitting board member, the institution does not get to shrug and call that independence. It must prove it.

The Name in the Room

There is another matter RIOC should not leave for residents to discover through rumor, inference, or the island’s traditional method of governance by hallway whisper. Lance A. Polivy has been identified to us as a family member of RIOC board member Howard Polivy. That fact alone does not decide the appointment. Family relationships do not make a lawyer incapable, and a surname should not be treated as an indictment. Even on Roosevelt Island, where names sometimes enter rooms before their owners do, fairness still matters.

But fairness also requires disclosure. Howard Polivy is not a casual observer of RIOC. He is a board member and has been part of the corporation’s leadership structure. He is also a long-standing Rivercross shareholder, close to figures in that building’s orbit. Rivercross has significant future interests before RIOC, including legal and financial questions that may involve ground rent, taxes, lease obligations, and the broader structure of what buildings owe and what residents may ultimately be asked to absorb.

That is where the appointment becomes more than a personnel item. If the future General Counsel will help negotiate or advise on matters involving Rivercross, and if the proposed General Counsel is a family member of a board member with ties to Rivercross, then the public deserves more than a confident nod from the dais. The dais can nod all it likes. My neck also moves, and no one has offered me $230,000 for legal judgment. It deserves to know what was disclosed, who recused, what conversations occurred, and what safeguards will exist if the appointment is approved.

A Plea to Marc Jonas Block

If you know Marc Jonas Block, ask him to read this before the vote. He is one of the newer board members, and newer members still have the small advantage of not yet being fully mistaken for furniture. No one should assume he came to the board intending to be a rubber stamp. That would be unfair. But appearances do have their little habits, and at the moment, the rubber-stamp theory has not suffered much public embarrassment.

Mr. Block does not need to accuse anyone. He does not need to give a speech fit for marble. Even an abstention, or a refusal to vote until the record is shown, would tell residents that he understands the difference between joining a board and being absorbed by one. It would be a small gesture, yes, but small gestures count when the larger ones have been misplaced in committee.

Mr. Block, you are new enough that this vote can still tell residents something. Ask for the record. Ask how this search was conducted, how the conflict was reviewed, and what safeguards will exist if the appointment is approved. You do not need to make enemies. You do not need to overturn the table. It would be enough to prove you are not being stored under it. A refusal to vote without the record would not be rebellion. It would be hygiene.

Before the Vote, Open the Door

The board should not approve this appointment until RIOC answers the basic questions publicly. Was the executive search firm used for the General Counsel role? How many candidates were considered? What qualifications were prioritized? When was Lance A. Polivy first identified? Who participated in the review? Were candidates with deeper experience in public authority real estate, ground leases, residential affordability structures, or long-term tenant protections considered and compared?

RIOC should also explain the conflict safeguards before the vote, not after residents are told to calm down and appreciate the professionalism of everyone involved. Was the family relationship disclosed to the full board? Did Howard Polivy recuse from every formal and informal discussion? Were there conversations with the President, board members, staff, consultants, or anyone else involved in the process? If Lance A. Polivy is appointed, will he be firewalled from Rivercross matters, and who will enforce that firewall?

These questions are not procedural clutter. They are the furniture of public trust. At the Landings, where fire is not a metaphor, institutional silence does not feel neutral. It feels like a door closing. The steam plant has questions. The fires have questions. The future of long-term tenants has questions. Now this appointment has questions too, and RIOC should resist the temptation to treat questions as bad manners.

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Before the board votes, open the door. Show the search. Show the recusals. Show the safeguards. Then ask residents for trust. Not before.

But the deeper issue is not access to the building. It is access to the rationale. At the April 15 town hall, the public heard a contradiction that should now define the entire demolition fight: agencies leaned on emergency logic to move demolition forward while avoiding fuller environmental review, yet officials also described the condition not as a true emergency, but as a failure to maintain.

That matters. If this is an emergency, the public deserves the emergency record. If it is not an emergency, the public deserves to know why demolition is being rushed while the structural report, environmental testing, remediation plans, community protection plans, and any meaningful air monitoring plan remain outside public view.

The Emergency That Wasn’t

The April 15 town hall changed the frame. Until then, the public had been asked to accept a familiar line: demolition had to move quickly because the Steam Plant was dangerous, urgent, and effectively beyond ordinary process.

Then came the line Eleanor Rivers captured last week. Yegal Shamash, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Buildings, clarified more than once that what brought them there was not a sudden emergency in the ordinary sense, but a failure to maintain. The urgency, as described in the room, was tied to securing the perimeter. The demolition itself sat outside that narrower frame.

That is not a small distinction. An emergency can explain why agencies move fast. A failure to maintain raises a different question: who failed, for how long, and why is the public now being asked to accept demolition without first seeing the documents that explain the claimed necessity?

If emergency action justified moving ahead without the normal environmental review, then the public deserves to see the emergency basis. If officials are now saying the condition is not really grounded in an emergency but in a long failure to maintain, then the emergency shortcut looks less like necessity and more like convenience.

The Elected Officials Did Not Ask for a Favor

On April 22, Congressman Jerry Nadler, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, State Senator Liz Krueger, and Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright sent a joint letter to RIOC President and CEO B.J. Jones requesting that RIOC establish a Community Advisory Group for the Steam Plant project.

This was not a ceremonial note. The letter cited “the scale of this project” and its “significant public health and environmental implications.” It called for a recurring forum that would include city and state agencies, residents, community organizations, and elected officials’ offices, meeting monthly.

That is not a request for better manners. It is a demand for an accountability structure. Because these elected officials sit across federal, city, and state government, RIOC would be reckless to treat the letter as political background noise. They are not asking to be kept in the loop. They are telling RIOC the loop is broken.

The Demand From Inside the Island

The call for a Community Advisory Group (CAG) did not appear out of nowhere. RIOC Board members Lydia Tang and Melisa Wade have already been pressing RIOC from within the Island’s own civic and governance channels to create a meaningful public oversight structure around the Steam Plant.

The demand did not fall on deaf ears. It reached some RIOC board members. It reached elected officials. It reached the people with enough distance from the day-to-day machinery to recognize that the community was not asking for special treatment. It was asking for oversight.

The question is why it has not reached the full RIOC Board in the form that matters: a motion, a resolution, or a public directive demanding that RIOC support a CAG and release the documents behind this demolition.

When board members choose not to take a side on a matter this central to public health, public process, and Island trust, they are taking a side. Silence does not represent residents. It protects the execution arm.

A CAG would not solve every problem. It would not replace the need to release the structural report. It would not substitute for environmental review. But it would force regular disclosure, recurring public questioning, and a forum where agencies cannot disappear between meetings.

When a Community Has to Hire Its Own Eyes

The most important fact now is not simply that ArchRI is organizing. It is that a private community group, operating with limited funding, has done what the public agencies should have made unnecessary: it organized technical review.

That level of civic engagement has not been seen on Roosevelt Island in many years. Residents did not merely complain online. They signed. They showed up. They documented. They pressed elected officials. They raised money. They brought professionals. And now, according to ArchRI, independent engineers are expected to enter the building.

That changes the balance of the story. The public is no longer only asking whether the city’s claims are true. It is preparing to test them.

“If we throw away the past without thought, we have nothing to remind us of our journey. At the very least, there has to be ample and thoughtful deliberation and documented procedure. Even then we have to fight till the very last minute.”

— Consuelo, petition supporter

The Public Health Story Crosses the River

The Steam Plant is on Roosevelt Island, but this is not only a Roosevelt Island story. Air does not have an address.

If demolition dust, smokestack residue, contaminated runoff, or fine particulate matter are part of the risk, then the geography of concern does not stop at the shoreline. Long Island City is across the water. Astoria is nearby. The Upper East Side is across the channel. The East River corridor is not a sealed room.

That is why the elected officials’ phrase matters: “significant public health and environmental implications.” This is not just about saving an old brick building. It is about whether city and state agencies can move a demolition project forward in a dense urban environment while withholding the very documents that would let the public understand the risk.

“Not only should this be a landmarked building, if it’s going to be demolished in our tight community, the potential hazards should be studied and made public.”

— Clifton, petition supporter

After more than 150 days

The demand is now simple: release the structural report. Conduct and release the environmental review. Release the remediation plan, the community protection plan, and the air monitoring plan. Schedule the promised DOB walkthrough before demolition advances further. Establish the Community Advisory Group before the project reaches the point where oversight becomes decorative. Then explain, in public, why demolition must proceed and why the timeline cannot wait.

If the building is beyond saving, prove it. If the smokestacks are dangerous, prove it. If demolition can be done safely without a fuller environmental review, prove that too, before the air carries whatever comes next beyond the Island.

The obstacle is not the petition. The obstacle is not ArchRI. The obstacle is not residents asking questions. The obstacle is the clock. DOB has not yet scheduled the promised review, but demolition is moving forward. The CAG has not yet been formed, while President Jones says coordination with DOB and state officials is still underway. In practice, that means oversight may arrive only after the work it was meant to oversee has already advanced.

At the Governance Committee pre-meeting, a resident put the question to President Jones plainly: “The question is, do you care?”

His answer was equally plain: “That’s not a question. We absolutely, absolutely care.”

Not whether RIOC can say it cares. Whether RIOC cared enough, over the years this demolition was reportedly being discussed, to tell the public what was coming. Whether it cared enough, once the issue became public, to place a resolution before its own board supporting disclosure, oversight, or delay. Whether it cared enough to do what Community Board 8 has already done, and what four elected officials have now done: put its position in writing.

Instead, President Jones is still pointing to other government agencies while the demolition clock moves forward. That is not care. That is deferral dressed as concern.

That is why this story still needs to move. Residents mobilized by signing the petition, but the issue has now crossed beyond Roosevelt Island. It is a city and state governance story with possible public health consequences across the river and downwind.

Share this article with people who do not live on the Island. Ask them to understand what is being decided, what has not been released, and why the petition matters. Public pressure grows when the story travels faster than official accountability.

Over the past six months, questions that once arrived with emotion have become structured. Zora Boyadzhieva, an architect, spoke in terms of load‑bearing walls and reinforced concrete. Kalin Kresnitchki cataloged environmental concerns and insisted on documentation. A resident in the back said simply, “We need engagement now.”

The tone was new. It suggested a community no longer asking to be heard but expecting to be answered. Anger is easy to absorb. You thank it, you wait it out. But clarity? Clarity sits there. It doesn’t go away. It just keeps asking the same question until someone answers it.

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When the answers changed the words

The first substantive exchange revealed a dissonance. Benjamin Jones explained that any assessment of what might happen to the site after demolition would be pursued later and would be “separate from the demolition activity that’s already occurring.” A planning study and community engagement process would follow. When Kalin asked, “So basically, you are planning to develop the site?” Jones hesitated and replied, “Potentially, but that’s an area for further assessment.” Zora pointed out that engagement after demolition is meaningless. You cannot meaningfully plan a future for a building you have already torn down.

Community engagement after the work has started. Feedback on the consequences.

What had been carried into the room as an “emergency” was not. Yegal Shamash, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Buildings, clarified multiple times that this was not an emergency but a failure to maintain. In other words, neglect. And if so, then by whom. The urgency, as it was eventually described, was limited to securing the perimeter. The demolition itself sat outside of that frame, and yet it moved forward with the same urgency. Community engagement was positioned as something to follow. For anyone who follows the island’s rhythms, the sequence will feel familiar.

The quiet sentence

Not all lines were careless. AnnMarie Santiago, a deputy commissioner from the Department of Buildings, read a prepared statement in response to a question comparing the steam plant to the steam tunnel. Residents noted that the tunnel beneath the island, part of the seawall and the base upon which we live, has three engineering reports documenting deterioration and potential collapse, yet no comparable action. Santiago’s reply was precise.

The steam tunnels fall outside of the scope of this emergency action and may be addressed through future redevelopment. One day the tunnel will be safe… probably right after we build something expensive on top of it.

It was, on its surface, a bureaucratic delineation of authority. To those listening closely, it was something else.If the land is being cleared and the emergency is not an emergency, then what, exactly, is being prepared. And who in that room already knew.

Choreography on the dais

You could watch the meeting without sound and still understand it.

Bryant moved carefully between the rows and the table, holding the microphone like something that needed to be managed rather than passed. He held the microphone like it had legal implications. He was polite, deliberate, almost protective of the flow. Questions were allowed, but answers were moderated.

The panel itself spoke sparingly. Rachel Swack did not try to carry the room, nor could she. The rest of the panel spoke in fragments, carefully measured, as if each word carried a cost, offering only what they intended to make public and nothing beyond it. The facts were thin, but they were consistent. Which is comforting, if what you’re looking for is consistency in not saying much. There was no emergency, at least not in the steam plant. There had been a failure to maintain. It is difficult not to notice what sits just beneath it, a quiet alignment of responsibility, cost, timing, and the question of what land is worth once it is cleared.

Two ways of sitting

At the center left of the room, Benjamin Jones stood with the ease of someone who did not need the room to agree with him. Beside him, Marc Block leaned in close, the two of them speaking quietly to one another while residents spoke into the microphone. Not once, not accidentally, but repeatedly. Their attention turned inward, their conversation carrying on as if the voices in front of them belonged to a different meeting entirely. It takes a certain confidence to have a private conversation in a public meeting. It takes something else to keep it going while people are asking you questions.

When Kalin spoke, when Zora followed, when Tibor’s voice rose just enough to reveal the strain beneath it, the room tightened. You could feel it, the kind of tension that does not come from anger but from being unheard for too long. And just behind it, almost out of sync with the moment, there was laughter. It came from Benjamin and Marc. It is a particular kind of absence to be in a room and to actively choose not to hear it.

Not everyone made that choice. Lydia Tang leaned forward, her attention fixed not on the panel but on the community. She listened the way someone listens when the answer matters. Melissa Wade, seated deeper into the audience, was quieter but no less present. There was something in her expression, a visible disappointment, perhaps even a quiet recognition of what was not being said. There was something shared between them, not authority but alignment, a kind that does not need to be announced. Their presence felt like participation.

The contrast was harder to miss. On the opposite side, Jones and Block remained turned toward one another, occasionally glancing down, looking away, their posture unchanged even as residents spoke about environmental risks and uncertainty. The choreography of the room made the distinction visible. Some listened as if accountable to what was being said. Others did not. It is a dynamic the island has seen before, where remaining present does not always mean being engaged, and where the appearance of participation can quietly replace the act itself.

Where power sits

As the evening wound down, the mood remained eerily calm. Santiago’s line about the steam tunnel did not spark a debate. The connection between redevelopment and what had just been described as a non-emergency remained unspoken. Bryant thanked everyone again. The chairs emptied. People filed into the cold night.

If you read David Stone’s thoughts on local governance, you will know he advocates for elections “as local as it gets.” He argues that power should sit close enough to be felt. That night, it did, and it didn’t. Some appointed board members sat with the community, listening as if the answers mattered. Others remained turned away, comfortable in the distance their position affords, secure in the quiet assumption that attention will pass before accountability arrives.

I do not believe the steam plant demolition was inevitable. It was described, more than once, as the result of a failure to maintain. And yet, that was not the thought that stayed with me.

It was Santiago’s line, read from a prepared statement at the start of the meeting, that the steam tunnels may be addressed through future redevelopment. The words were careful. Placed. Meant to be heard. It is difficult not to understand what that suggests. That what sits beneath us will be addressed when something else rises above it. That safety, perhaps, arrives only when it becomes useful.

When a deputy commissioner chooses words like that and places them into a room, they are not accidental. And when they pass without consequence, they do not disappear. They stay with you, in ways that feel uncomfortably close to home.

Power was in the room that night. It simply chose to sit far enough away not to hear anything. For now, whatever urgency was meant to justify the present remains, as ever, somewhere below the surface.

NYC Department of Buildings Deputy Commissioner Yegal Shamash acknowledged that a full demolition report exists. He described its findings. He spoke about its conclusions. But when asked directly whether that report would be made public, his answer shifted.

He suggested it could be obtained through FOIL. Then, moments later, said he would need to “have a conversation in-house” about what could be published.

The information exists. Its release does not.

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The System That Delays Itself

That answer might have carried more weight if FOIL were functioning in real time.

It is not.

Multiple requests for this very material were submitted in February and early March. The current estimated completion dates now extend into late May and mid-June.

That is not access. That is delay.

At the same time, a narrowly scoped request was submitted to RIOC. No documents. No content. Only email metadata. A defined date range. Two keywords: “Steam Plant” and “Emergency.”

The goal was simple: understand when RIOC became aware and how it was involved.

The response arrived on April 14, one day before the Town Hall:

Even here, where the burden is minimal, the pattern holds.

Information is acknowledged. Requests are accepted. Time is extended.

What Was Said, and What Was Not

One detail did emerge clearly.

There were two separate actions:

• An emergency order to stabilize the site

• A separate order to demolish it

It defines both the urgency and the authority behind what is happening. But the most urgent issue raised by residents was not procedural. It was physical. People reported breathing issues.

The response was direct. Air monitoring will be conducted when legally required. Until then, it will not be expanded.

No timeline. No interim measures. No deviation from minimum obligation.

Why Air Monitoring Is Limited

What officials communicated at the Town Hall follows a familiar pattern. Air monitoring is tied to specific legal triggers, not general concern. In this case, that trigger is asbestos-related work.

When asbestos is actively being disturbed, regulations require monitoring because the risk is clearly defined. Outside of that phase, there is no automatic requirement to measure air quality, even if demolition, debris, or dust may still affect surrounding areas.

That does not necessarily mean the air is safe. It means the law does not currently require it to be measured.

Why Not Do It Anyway?

There are a few practical reasons agencies tend to avoid expanding monitoring beyond what is required:

• Liability exposure
  Once monitoring begins, results create a record. If elevated levels are detected, it can trigger obligations to act, delay work, or take on additional mitigation.

• Cost and operational friction
  Continuous monitoring adds expense and can complicate timelines, especially if results require changes to the plan.

• Regulatory posture
  Agencies often default to compliance with minimum standards rather than proactive measures, particularly when no violation has been formally identified.

What This Means for Residents

Air monitoring is not being withheld because it is impossible. It is not being implemented because it is not legally required. That leaves a gap between what is legally sufficient and what residents may reasonably expect, especially when concerns are already being raised.

That gap was not unnoticed. As reported by Eleanor Rivers in “I Can Ask,” RIOC board member Professor Lydia Tang explicitly directed that air monitoring be installed. The response she received, notably, was not a commitment to act, but a deferral.

Bridging that gap does not appear to be happening internally. And when even a direct request from within the board results in hesitation rather than action, it suggests that movement, if it comes, will need to come from outside pressure.

What Comes Next

Information exists. That much is no longer in question. Officials have acknowledged it, referenced it, and in some cases described it. But acknowledgment is not access, and access delayed is access denied in practice.

At the Town Hall, Deputy Commissioner Shamash pointed to FOIL as the path to obtain the report. Those requests have already been filed. No substantive response has been produced. When pressed further, he said he would need to speak with his commissioner about what could be released.

In that same exchange, he stated that a third-party review could be allowed. But no process was outlined. No indication of who would fund it. No explanation of how such a review would begin, or whether it would carry any authority to affect what comes next. At the same time, a critical distinction was introduced: the emergency order to secure the site, and a separate demolition order that did not appear to rely on that same emergency basis.

If the demolition is not tied to an active emergency, then its urgency, and its necessity, become questions that can be examined. Without a report, or an independent review, those questions remain unanswered while the project continues to move forward.

What Advocates Are Saying

Following the Town Hall, we shared our summary with members of the group actively working to halt the demolition, including Zora Boyadzhieva, Kalin Kresnitchki, and Tibor Krisco, to ensure accuracy and invite their perspective.

On the question of the report, advocates cautioned against overstating certainty. As Tibor Krisco noted, DOB “did not overtly confirm a report existed,” though officials did describe structural findings in detail. Kalin Kresnitchki offered a more precise framing:

“DOB described its structural findings orally at the Town Hall but did not provide or confirm the existence of a written report, and no report has been released publicly.”

What was presented at the Town Hall went beyond general statements. Officials described specific structural findings and referenced images associated with those findings. That level of detail strongly suggests that some form of report exists. What remains unclear is its scope, its rigor, and whether it reflects a complete analysis or a partial one. The public, however, has access to none of it.

While no formal commitment to a third-party review appears in the public record, DOB Deputy Commissioner Shamash did offer a more informal next step. As Kresnitchki described:

“He gave us his business card and promised to give us a personal demolition site tour… we have sent him an email… awaiting a response.”

At the same time, advocates raised concerns that extend beyond process and into current conditions on the ground. According to Kresnitchki:

“Demolition is going for weeks… cutting lead paint covered metal pipes… no containment, no negative pressure and HEPA filtration.”

On air monitoring, the understanding remains unchanged. Monitoring will begin when asbestos removal legally requires it. Not before. The result is a widening gap between what is happening on the ground, what is known, and what is formally acknowledged.

Emanuella Grinberg a concerned Roosevelt Island citizen affiliated with ArchRI, the group working to halt the demolition, shared the following message for residents:

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And there are others you learn to avoid, gently, respectfully, with the kind of choreography that only comes from repetition. A turn of the head. A sudden interest in the opposite side of the street. A quiet adjustment of pace that, at my age, is more aspirational than effective.

When I was younger, and my eyesight was more cooperative, I could simply cross to the other side of the street before they ever noticed me. It required timing, but it was reliable.

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Now, I have fewer options. I can try to position myself behind someone taller and hope for the best, or I can avoid eye contact entirely and pretend that my hearing has begun to fade.

Dr. Michal Melamed, on the other hand, does not avoid anyone.

I have watched her stand, patiently, in conversations most of us have already excused ourselves from in our minds. She listens with a softness that feels almost impractical now, like something from another time. The kind of patience you hope your doctor has, but rarely expects anyone else to carry.

I admire it. I do not possess it.

I used to cross the street. Now I pause, calculate, and accept my fate a bit earlier than I once did. She stays.

Why I Take the Tram

I take the tram because I have to.

Not for the view, though I suppose it is still there. Not for the novelty, which seems to renew itself endlessly for those visiting. I take it because it is the most direct way to get to my appointments, and because I would prefer, whenever possible, to buy my own radishes.

There is a pantry in my building, and it is generous. Truly. But pride is a stubborn companion, and it does not always accept generosity as easily as it should. It insists, for reasons I no longer question, on leaving less for my ungrateful children, whom I love very much.

So I take the tram.

What It Costs to Rely on It

There is a difference between riding something and relying on it.

If you are visiting, the tram is a view. A moment suspended over the river, a photograph waiting to happen, a brief inconvenience if the line is long.

If you live here, it’s a calculation. Whether I have the energy to stand today. Whether I can schedule an appointment somewhere between the tourist rush hours, or if I will have to negotiate my way through them. Whether I have the patience to be civil.

Often, I do not.

I find myself wondering how many radishes I can reasonably carry before I start resenting every life choice that brought me to this moment. It sounds small when I say it like that. Radishes. A handful of groceries. But that’s the thing about relying on something. The smaller the task, the more obvious it becomes when the system isn’t built for you.

I adjust. I always adjust, assuming it was decided in a meeting for me.

When Patience Breaks

On April 9, 2026, during the full board meeting of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, the tram came up the way it often does. Mary Cunneen, Chief Operating Officer, announced that there would be necessary work on the tram. September and October. Approximately two months.

Dr. Michal Melamed, not with the patience I have come to associate with her, asked, plainly, why there was no plan for how people were meant to navigate the interruption. Not the mechanics of the repair, but the mechanics of living through it. It was said bluntly.

That was what shifted the room.

Because when someone like her runs out of patience, it is rarely about a single moment. It is about something that has been sitting, unresolved, for longer than anyone is willing to name.

What followed was a brief hesitation, the kind that settles over a room when something has been said more plainly than expected. It did not last long. It rarely does.

The conversation moved on. It always does.

I assume the answer will appear in September.

Projects moved forward even when long-term costs were unclear or likely to exceed what the Island could reasonably sustain. Former insiders describe a pattern where available funds were expected to be spent, driven in part by a persistent belief that any surplus would revert to the State. That assumption, they say, was used to justify a simple approach: spend what you have while you have it.

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The results were visible. Capital projects expanded beyond initial expectations. Operating costs followed. And when the bills came due, the pressure shifted back to residents and users.

The Sportspark stands as a familiar example. Costs ballooned well beyond early projections, followed by attempts to raise rates to close the gap. The logic was not unique to one project. It reflected a broader posture toward spending.

As one longtime observer, David Stone, used to put it, there was always an appetite for ribbon cuttings. The moment of completion mattered. The long-term cost often came later.

That history matters because it defines the baseline. Not a system living within its means, but one that too often treated its means as something to be fully exhausted.

The Shift: Looking Beyond the Island

A day after the vote, the outcome feels almost inevitable. The RIOC Board approved the resolution unanimously, a quiet consensus around something that, on paper, reads like a routine extension.

But unanimity does not make it ordinary.

Beneath the formality sits something more significant: an attempt to change how the Island funds itself.

Not by raising fees or cutting services, but by looking outward. By asking a question that feels obvious in hindsight: why should Roosevelt Island shoulder the full cost of serving a public that extends far beyond its residents?

The idea itself is straightforward. Pursue external funding, state, federal, and agency-based grants, that align with the Island’s infrastructure, environmental, and operational needs. Identify opportunities where Roosevelt Island is not just eligible, but relevant, and then go after them.

This is not a new concept in government. But it is, in many ways, new here. And that distinction matters because it signals a shift in mindset, from managing scarcity to exploring possibility.

The Operator Behind the Idea

At the center of that shift is RIOC’s Chief Operating Officer, Dhruvika Amin. She is not a public speaker. She is not charismatic, and she does not operate as a populist. There is no attempt to win the room. Her approach is different. She is a numbers person.

Her focus is on how a budget holds together, how it breaks, and how to prevent that break from reaching residents in the form of higher costs or reduced services. Where others chase visibility, her instinct is structural: balance the system, protect the baseline, and then find ways to grow it.

Because identifying new revenue streams is not just about opportunity. It is about preventing the cycle that has defined much of RIOC’s past, where spending decisions eventually force difficult corrections on the public.

That instinct has already surfaced. In a prior board discussion, as Eleanor Rivers observed, a request to increase Public Purpose Funds met visible hesitation from some resident board members. The moment did not turn into confrontation, but it revealed a willingness to push when the numbers called for it.

There is no guarantee this strategy will succeed.

The mechanics, including the choice of external partners, remain largely out of public view. What has been presented offers a framework, but not yet a full accounting of outcomes. That will matter.

A Shift Worth Noting

The contrast with the past is what gives this moment its weight.

For years, the Island operated as if whatever it had should be spent. The question was how to allocate, not whether to expand. The result was a pattern of visible projects followed by quieter financial pressure.

This initiative moves in the opposite direction. It starts with the premise that the Island should not carry the full burden of what it supports. That if it serves the city, the state, and a broader public, then its funding should reflect that reality.

It is an attempt to shift the model from consumption to leverage.

That does not make it easy.

Not every grant will be worth pursuing. Some will introduce constraints. Others will require matching funds, reporting, or long timelines that complicate execution. And the choice of partners, along with the discipline to pursue only what makes sense, will ultimately determine whether the idea delivers.

Those details are not yet fully visible.

The Bet

Because RIOC, as it often does, hides in plain sight.

Basic questions about what has been pursued, what has been secured, and what it has cost do not receive direct answers. They require formal requests, filings, and time. Information that should be readily understood instead moves through a process designed to delay it.

We have submitted those FOIL requests. And we will wait.

Not because delay is acceptable, but because it has become the only path to clarity.

The idea itself is worth paying attention to. If it works, it could begin to rebalance how the Island funds itself. If it does not, the costs will surface, as they always do, later.

Either way, the outcome should not remain obscured. The Island has been asked to trust the process. What remains to be seen is whether the process is willing to be seen at all. The idea is clear. What is not clear is everything around it.

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Fay continued, her eyes fixed on the page, reading through the names of staff, some present, others expected to join later, all drawn from the same prepared list. Fay was trying so hard to be fair that she accidentally became inaccurate. It’s like watching someone carefully pour water… next to the glass. I found myself recognizing the improvement from the last meeting, and in that moment, adjusting my own lens in return.

Then CEO Benjamin Jones entered the room and offered a greeting. What stayed with me was that none of the board members or staff turned to meet it. Leadership had entered, and the room did not respond. It suggested a growing distance, not spoken, but felt.

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When the discussion turned to the steam plant demolition, Jones took over as the slide deck came into view and moved through a structured overview of agencies and responsibilities: the Department of Buildings, HPD, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He spoke with confidence, the kind that settles a room, at least at first.

Where the Attention Went

As Jones continued, the room drifted. His remarks moved through process and coordination, outlining a high-level timeline through March. The details were there, but they leaned more toward who he knew and how the work would move than toward what had brought people into the room. The presentation had everything except the one thing people came for, which, in fairness, was only the entire reason they were there. The questions that had drawn island residents there remained untouched.

Most eyes followed politely at first. Then, as it became clear that no substance would arrive, they wandered. Melissa Wade maintained eye contact the way you do during a long story you already regret asking for. It felt less like courtesy, as he seemed to direct much of his attention toward her. On the screen, Tibor Krisko, attending remotely, turned briefly to his dinner.

At some point, Jones handed the meeting back to Fay. By the time Jones finished, the room had learned a great deal about who he knows, and absolutely nothing about what anyone needed or wanted to know.

Lydia Tang stepped in before Fay could fully reclaim the floor, redirecting the meeting away from its prepared rhythm and toward the gallery.

She called on Kalin Kresnitchki, who had been documenting the process in detail.

The moments Before the Cut

Kalin’s images were brought up, not as argument, but as record. Snow marked in ways that did not belong to winter. Black soil exposed beneath it. Nothing clarifies a situation faster than snow that looks like it has secrets. Work advancing without anything that resembled visible protection. He spoke carefully, staying close to observation, letting the details hold their own weight.

Zora Boyadzhieva spoke again, and this time I found myself watching her more than listening. Her words were measured, familiar, grounded in questions the room already knew by heart. But her eyes stayed on Benjamin Jones in a way that felt different from the rest of us. There was no accusation in them, only a quiet expectation, as if she still believed he might step into the role the moment required. While others had already begun to disengage, she remained with him, holding that possibility a little longer. It was not naïve. It was deliberate. But it carried a cost. Hope, in that room, had nowhere to land.

She then asked him directly whether he would introduce her to the head of the agency he had just referenced, someone he had described as accessible, someone he had met with. It was a simple request, grounded in the very relationships he had placed at the center of his remarks. At moments, he attempted to acknowledge her as she spoke, but the shift in his tone was difficult to miss. Her tone never changed. His did. That’s usually where the answer is. Where her voice remained steady, even kind, his carried the edge of someone increasingly aware of the position he was being pulled into, and unwilling, or unable, to fully step into it.

Rick O’Connor chose his moment carefully. Where others had circled the issue, he moved directly into it, raising a doubt that had been sitting in the room without being named. If this was truly an emergency, he asked, how had an order signed two years earlier only now become urgent enough to justify demolition. The question did not carry force, but it carried clarity. He followed it with something more practical, asking whether RIOC’s legal staff would be willing to help reach out, to explore whether the work could be paused or delayed until more information was made public, until an environmental report existed not in theory, but in hand. It was a measured offer as much as it was a question, an indication of how far he himself was willing to go. The room held it for a moment. Then it passed. No response formed. And Benjamin Jones, who had struggled with questions far less direct, did not find one here.

Before the moment could fully settle, another voice entered. An environmental attorney, introduced through his work representing victims of 9/11, spoke with a familiarity that came not from theory, but from consequence. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The room shifted toward him almost instinctively. I noticed Rick first, a small, unguarded “oh” escaping him, not performative, but genuine, as if something had just widened beyond the bounds of the meeting itself. Lydia Tang and Melissa Wade leaned forward at the table, so far it felt as though they might cross it. The air changed. Rick’s question had not been designed to force RIOC into action, but to mark where he stood. Yet this was different. This suggested something forming outside the room, or perhaps already formed. And as I sat there, I found myself wondering, as I still do, who had invited him, and what it meant. Whether this was a signal, or simply a coincidence. Whether RIOC had just been put on notice, or whether this, like so much else, would pass without acknowledgment. The question did not resolve. It stayed.

Whatever had been unfolding inside the meeting, it was suddenly clear it might not stay there.

When Words Stopped Working

Fay Christian tried to bring the meeting back to the agenda. After the long stretch of public testimony, there was a visible shift toward order, toward something resembling the structure the evening had begun with. As the public finished, Lydia Tang asked for one more question, or perhaps framed it as a request, but instead of directing it to Benjamin Jones, she turned to COO Mary C. Cunneen. Lydia did not speak for long. She simply asked whether Mary could coordinate air monitoring across RIOC-controlled land adjacent to the steam plant, so that the community, and she herself, could sleep knowing independent measurements were in place. Before she could fully finish, Benjamin Jones stepped in. He apologized as he did, still searching for footing, but aware that as CEO, the answer had to come from him.

He spoke for a long time, but there was nothing to hold onto. The words came one after another, referencing agencies, processes, possibilities, but they did not connect. They did not build. They never arrived anywhere that could be understood as a complete thought. It is difficult to follow an answer that is trying not to arrive. What did come through, slowly, was something else. He was trying to move the weight elsewhere, toward other agencies, away from RIOC. He needed to avoid saying no, but could not find a way to land without revealing it. And at some point, quietly, the room stopped trying to understand him, because it had already understood what he was trying to do. Everyone understood. That was the problem. Lydia waited through it all, patiently, long enough for the words to begin collapsing under their own weight.

Lydia did not meet his language with more language. She waited until it exhausted itself, then returned with something smaller, clearer, and impossible to misinterpret. She restated the request, shorter this time, without framing, without reference to agencies, just the action itself. Install air monitors around the site. She directed it to Benjamin Jones. It was the same question, stripped of everything that had allowed it to be avoided. What had taken him minutes to circle, she reduced to a sentence that could only move forward or be refused.

He began to answer, and for a brief moment it seemed the pattern would repeat. The same opening words, the same turn toward process. But before the sentence could form, the room broke. The room had decided it was done listening. The laughter came quickly, not with him, but at him. It was not cruel, but it was honest. The kind of laughter that arrives when something has been seen too clearly to continue pretending otherwise.

The Air We Carry Home

As the meeting drew toward its end, I found myself thinking less about what had been said and more about Fay Christian. She let the room breathe. She was not standing with the community, nor fully with her peers, but she was not blocking either. Near the end, she spoke about her granddaughter, about breathing issues that had been getting worse. It was a small admission, almost folded into the larger conversation, but it stayed with me.

The air has changed for me as well. In that moment, I saw Fay again as I had known her before. She has always carried herself with a certain elegance. I remember her from years ago, when she taught my granddaughter. There was care in her then, a real care, but also something else I could never quite name. A restlessness, perhaps. A sense that she was not entirely at ease in the role she held. This newer role seemed to have given her a shape she had been searching for. And yet, for a moment, it was no longer about agencies or reports or timelines. Not for her, and not for me. It was about what enters our granddaughters’ bodies without permission.

And still, she remained where she was, between the room and the institution. At times, a buffer. At times, something closer to a shield. Loyal, it seemed, to the structure that had elevated her. I did not see indifference in her. I saw conflict. The kind that does not resolve in a meeting. The kind that follows you home, in the same air our granddaughters breathe.

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And then, almost inevitably, they leave. No recent CEO has lasted more than two years. Some exits come with press releases; others follow executive sessions. Some trail lawsuits, internal disputes, or investigations that never fully surface. Residents hear about the ending, rarely the process that led to it.

The pattern is not subtle. The job comes with authority, but it also comes with a short clock.

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The Role: Two Titles, One Reality

Ask most residents who runs Roosevelt Island, and the answer comes quickly: the CEO. Others give a different answer: the State, the Governor, what some have long referred to as “the chambers.” That split is not confusion. It is a signal.

The role is not just CEO. It is President and CEO. Two titles, one position, double the expectation. But the reality is tighter.

Some prior CEOs have described, in varying degrees of detail, how control actually flows, often through the State and more specifically through the Chair of the Board. Others have only hinted at it. Those hints tend to travel.

Which raises a quieter question. Is the double title meant to elevate the role, or to soften the reality of it?

Because the title suggests something larger than what the role is allowed to be in practice. The limits of the role are easier to see not in the title, but in how decisions actually move.

The Forces That Shape the Role

Formally, the CEO reports to the Board, but in practice the role is defined by managing expectations between the State, developers, and the public, with occasional input from elected officials. The center of day‑to‑day power tends to run through the Board Chair rather than the full Board. Records and reporting around the interim period suggest regular status check-ins between the Chair, the CEO, and select board members; when asked publicly, that arrangement was denied, and subsequent requests for related calendar records were declined with support from the State. An appeal response indicated involvement from counsel within the Governor’s office. Set against that backdrop, the role sits between three forces:

The State
The Chair of the Board carries real weight. Direction does not come through open debate. It arrives already formed, already aligned.

The Builders
Developers appear when it matters. Large projects. Contracts. Timelines. When they are involved, decisions accelerate and resistance tends to disappear.

The Island
Residents and local advocates are the most visible force. Meetings, complaints, pressure. But attention comes in waves.

When the Island is vocal, elected officials step in, and when they do, the machinery of the State can move quickly. We have seen it before: after tram incidents drew sustained attention, City Council Member Julie Menin pressed for answers and action followed; when bus service faltered, State Senator Liz Krueger reached out to the MTA to coordinate more closely with RIOC and service improved. These moments do not happen in a vacuum. They tend to follow pressure, coverage, and organized advocacy.

The current steam plant effort, led by a growing group of residents pushing for transparency and a pause, has rallied attention, but the odds of a full reset are low given the alignment already in place. That is precisely the point: without sustained pressure that pulls elected officials into the room, outcomes tend to proceed as structured. When that pressure appears, even briefly, it can change the trajectory. When that pressure fades, decisions consolidate among a smaller group with clearer interests and closer proximity to power. Not everyone is operating with the same information at the same time. Some are reacting to outcomes. Others are shaping them. The CEO operates within that reality.

What Actually Happens

The job works. Until it doesn’t.

At first, alignment is easy. The CEO is visible, responsive, engaged. Issues are handled, pressure is absorbed, and nothing rises high enough to disrupt the balance between the State, the builders, and the Island.

In the current moment, that restraint is visible. Faced with growing pressure around the steam plant, the response has been measured, controlled, and largely procedural. Residents are directed to email. Responsibility is framed as external. The issue is acknowledged, but not escalated.

So far, that approach is working. It keeps friction low with the State, avoids direct conflict with developers, and contains the issue within channels that do not force broader action.

Yet pressure is building. More than 1,400 residents have engaged. Community Board 8 has called for a slowdown and greater transparency. Questions are no longer isolated.

Moments like this test the role structurally. As pressure grows, the CEO faces a narrowing set of options: escalate and risk misalignment with the forces above, or contain and risk losing control of the narrative on the Island.

History suggests what comes next is rarely decided in public view unless elected officials step in. When they do not, information tightens, conversations shift, and decisions begin to take shape before they are known.

The Present Moment

The pattern is not only a failure of leadership. It is a function of design.

CEOs arrive with authority on paper and expectations in public. They learn quickly where decisions are actually made, who needs to be kept aligned, and how far they can push before the role begins to push back.

Some try to navigate it. Some try to challenge it. None, so far, have outlasted it. The current moment is not unique. It is simply visible.

The question is not whether this CEO will succeed, but what success actually means in a system like this. And more importantly, what would need to change for the outcome to be different this time. Because without that answer, the next transition is only a matter of time.

There was a time, not long ago, when that pressure had a more constant presence. RIRA, for all its limitations, acted as a steady signal. Not perfect, but persistent. A body that kept attention from fading completely. Today, internal division has reduced that role. What remains is more symbolic than structural, much like the resident board members themselves.

New efforts are beginning to form. ArcRI has emerged around the steam plant, organizing residents and focusing attention. Its success will depend on whether that pressure reaches elected officials.

The longer question is whether it becomes something more. If it grows beyond a single issue, builds continuity, strengthens ties with elected officials, and sustains pressure across decisions, it may begin to fill the space that once existed.

When residents organize, apply pressure, and force visibility, outcomes shift. When that pressure fades, the system returns to its default state.

So the question is no longer about the CEO. It is about whether the Island can build structures that give its residents lasting influence.

Will this moment pass? Or does something more permanent begin here?

On my walks these days I move slowly, not by choice but by necessity. Breathing, for me, has become something that must occasionally be negotiated with my lungs rather than taken for granted. So I pause often. I watch the river. I watch the paths. And as the snow began melting this past week, the Island began revealing what it had quietly stored beneath the white blanket of winter.

But before the ground revealed its secrets, something else caught my attention.

A group of RIOC staff were moving slowly across the lawns and pathways in the north of the Island. Not one or two workers, but several of them, spaced out across the grass as if they were searching for something that had been lost. The whole scene had the seriousness of a forensic investigation. I half expected someone to shout, “Don’t touch anything!”

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They moved carefully, eyes scanning the ground between the patches of melting snow. They moved with the focus of people who already knew what they were going to find and were deeply disappointed about it. One would pause, bend down, collect something in a bag, then move forward again while the others continued their quiet sweep across the landscape.

The way they were searching, I briefly thought perhaps someone had dropped a diamond ring. The methodical search made me wonder if something precious had been lost. Although judging by the expressions on their faces, it was clearly not something anyone was excited to recover. It had all the seriousness of a crime scene investigation.

Only later did I understand what they were looking for.

The Plaza That Quietly Changed

Years ago, residents in the north of the Island had a different complaint.

Motorgate Plaza had become known for its pigeons, and pigeons are not shy about leaving their presence behind. Emails circulated. People grumbled. Visitors would wrinkle their noses as they crossed the plaza.

And then, gradually, the complaints stopped.

Not because the pigeons suddenly developed better manners. Pigeons, like certain public figures, remain stubbornly resistant to self-improvement.

The change came because someone inside RIOC decided the plaza mattered. Dhruvika Amin Patel, RIOC’s Chief Financial Officer, asked that the area be regularly washed and maintained. A small team of staff began cleaning the plaza consistently.

Day after day. Week after week.

The pigeons remained. But the plaza changed.

The interesting thing about work done well is that it disappears. Once the plaza became clean again, the conversation vanished with the problem. No one stops in the middle of a plaza to praise the invisible people who keep it that way. Human nature is wonderfully consistent. We complain loudly about messes and remain mysteriously silent about the people who clean them. People will write three emails about a dirty plaza. They will write exactly zero about a clean one.

The great tragedy of doing a job well is that everyone assumes it was always that way.

The Geese of the Southern Promenade

If one walks toward the southern end of the Island, a different kind of mess greets you.

The geese have claimed that territory with a kind of cheerful determination. The geese approach public space with the quiet confidence of Related scouting the Island for its next tower. Anyone who has walked those paths knows the small green reminders they leave across the grass and pavement.

The geese have never once mistaken the promenade for anything other than their personal living room. The geese, it must be said, behave exactly like longtime residents: territorial, noisy, and deeply convinced the place belongs to them. And yet, oddly, their presence feels different.

Geese possess the rare New York talent of making eye contact while refusing to move. Perhaps it is because the geese belong to the ecosystem here. The wildlife sanctuary has created something rare for a place surrounded by water and skyscrapers: a small living community where animals still behave like animals.

Much of that quiet balance rests on the shoulders of Rosana Ceruzzi, who tends to the animals day after day with a patience that rarely makes headlines.

The geese are messy, yes. But their mess feels natural. It reminds us that this Island, despite its buildings and committees, is still a place where nature occasionally insists on having a say.

What the Snow Revealed

As the thaw continued this week, I noticed something else happening across the Island.

RIOC staff were walking the paths with bags and tools, carefully collecting what the snow had hidden for months. The sort of job that makes archaeology seem glamorous by comparison.

Hundreds of dog droppings.

Not pigeon droppings.

Not goose droppings.

Dog droppings left behind by residents who had walked their pets, watched them finish their business, and then decided someone else would eventually handle the rest.

RIOC has placed bag dispensers throughout the Island. They are there like small reminders of a shared agreement. The dispensers offer bags. They do not, unfortunately, provide motivation.

The tools are available. It turns out the Island has solved the technology problem. The remaining challenge appears to be human nature. The bags are free. The effort, apparently, is negotiable.

Yet this week a group of workers spent their days bending down again and again to collect what their neighbors chose not to.

The Small Decisions That Shape a Place

Communities are rarely defined by their grand debates or their public meetings.

More often, they are shaped by thousands of tiny decisions made when no one else is watching. Neighborhoods are shaped by habits. Good ones build a place. The other kind requires a cleanup crew.

Do we hold the door for someone whose hands are full?

Do we pick up the piece of trash that is not ours?

Do we bend down with a small plastic bag when our dog finishes what dogs inevitably do?

The Island has always prided itself on being a thoughtful place, a place where neighbors know one another and where shared spaces matter.

But walking the paths this week, watching staff quietly clean up after hundreds of small moments of neglect, I found myself wondering a simpler question.

What kind of neighbors are we becoming?

Because a place, I’ve come to believe, becomes what its residents repeatedly decide is not their problem.

A Different Kind of Ownership

Every dog on this Island successfully completes its portion of the task. The failure rate begins immediately afterward.

Perhaps the measure of a community is not how clean the paths look after the maintenance crews have finished their rounds, but how willing its residents are to care for the ground beneath their feet.

The next time we see something left behind, maybe the answer is not to wait for someone else to solve it.

Maybe we simply pick it up.

Not because it is our dog.

But because it is our Island.

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On July 8, 2024, an emergency demolition order was issued for the Roosevelt Island Steam Plant.

That fact alone is not controversial. Buildings age. Infrastructure deteriorates. Safety matters. But emergency authority is reserved for imminent danger. It is meant for collapse risk, structural instability, fire damage, conditions that require immediate stabilization to protect life.

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The Timeline and the Tension

Nearly two years have passed.

In that time, there has been no publicly produced forensic structural report demonstrating imminent collapse. No detailed engineering assessment with measurements, load analysis, mortar testing, or steel evaluation has been shared with the community. What residents have seen instead is oil tank removal, soil disturbance, and an open DEC spill case involving No. 6 fuel oil affecting soil and groundwater.

If a building posed imminent structural danger in July 2024, standard protocol would typically prioritize shoring and stabilization. Perimeters would be secured. Engineers would reinforce compromised elements. Immediate collapse risk would be addressed first.

That sequence matters.

The local Community Board recently voted unanimously to request that demolition be paused until sufficient documentation is reviewed. Community Boards do not have the authority to halt demolition. Their votes are advisory. But unanimity signals concern, especially when the question is not preservation for nostalgia’s sake, but documentation for public safety.

Emergency authority is an extraordinary tool. It bypasses ordinary review precisely because time is presumed to be short.

Which raises a simple question: if time was short, why has stabilization not been the visible priority?

The public record so far does not include a detailed structural report supporting imminent collapse. Focused requests have been filed seeking clarity on when the term “emergency” first appeared in writing and what documentation supported its use. Those answers will matter.

Emergency Power and Long Term Planning

This issue is not about opposing growth. It is not about freezing Roosevelt Island in time. It is about process.

In a recent joint announcement extending the Roosevelt Island master lease, state and city officials described a future of continued investment and planning. The release stated:

In that same announcement, David Kramer, President of Hudson Companies, said:

“We applaud the City and State for working together to ensure a bright future for Roosevelt Island. Since the City and the State first shook hands in 1968, Roosevelt Island has become a very special part of the New York landscape, and this agreement will help safeguard its bright future. Kudos to Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams for making this happen.”

Growth is not inherently controversial. Redevelopment is not inherently suspect. Investment in the island’s future is something many residents support.

But when emergency authority and long term planning occupy the same physical geography, documentation becomes even more important.

Residents deserve to know that the use of emergency power was grounded in detailed engineering evidence. They deserve to know that environmental risks are being addressed with full transparency. They deserve to know that process was followed before demolition became irreversible.

A Call for Clarity

Roosevelt Island was conceived as a planned community. Deliberation was built into its DNA. Emergency power is the exception, not the rule.

If the documentation exists, it should withstand scrutiny.

If it does not, that is not a preservation debate. It is a governance question.

Community Board 8 has asked for a pause. It does not have the authority to impose one.

Residents do have the authority to lend their names to a call for clarity.

If you believe that emergency authority should be supported by transparent documentation before demolition proceeds further, you can add your name to the petition requesting a pause until full structural and environmental documentation is publicly reviewed.

Editorial Note: The petition calling for a temporary pause of demolition pending full public disclosure of structural and environmental documentation can be found here. Residents are encouraged to review the language carefully and decide for themselves whether the request reflects their position.

The word emergency carries weight.

So should the proof behind it.

If one person came to mind while you were reading this, consider forwarding it to them.

The way the wind cuts across the river this time of year. The way older buildings hold heat but never quite hold air. I told myself that was why my chest felt tight again on certain mornings. Age, perhaps. Winter, certainly.

It had been worse once before.

Years ago, when the old Goldwater hospital came down and the land was scraped clean for what would become Cornell Tech, trucks lined up for weeks. The ground shifted. The air felt heavier. People mentioned it in passing. A cough. A residue. A fine gray film that appeared on windowsills by afternoon and returned the next morning as if it had never left.

I remember wiping my own windows and telling myself it was only dust. Progress has its own weather system. We adjust. We move on. Most people did. Construction ended. Buildings rose. The island congratulated itself on the future.

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My breathing eventually steadied.

I learned not to think about it.

Then the façade work began at The Landings. Scaffolding wrapped the building like gauze. Stone scraped. Surfaces sealed. The air shifted again, subtly. The gray returned, not dramatically, but faithfully. I found myself wiping the windows more often. I found myself pausing before a full inhale.

It is strange how rarely we think about breathing until we must.

Thinking about breathing

Lately it has felt less automatic. Something I have to notice. Something I have to manage. I hope it goes away again. I hope I return to the luxury of not noticing my lungs at all. At my age, hope is softer than confidence.

My granddaughter used to distract me from it. The joy of seeing her, the way she runs toward me without calculation, used to dissolve whatever cloud had formed in my chest. Lately even that has not quite done the trick. The cloud lingers.

This morning I was heading to the subway because Dr. Resnick closed his clinic a few years ago, and if you want someone to listen carefully to your breathing now, you must go into the city. I scheduled the appointment reluctantly. Just to check something. Women say that when something feels slightly off but not yet alarming.

I paused catching my breath in a way I did not need to years ago.

There are others on the platform now. Some unhoused. Some struggling. I try, quietly, to see them as people first. To imagine the shape of their days. To remember that no one arrives here without a story. And yet, when my lungs feel tight, I stand a little further away than I once did. I wonder if they notice me the way I notice them. I wonder if, to them, I am just another older woman hovering at the edge, already fading into the background. There is something intimate in that recognition. I do not know whether it comforts me or unsettles me more.

There is an irony in it that I cannot ignore. I have feared becoming fragile. Feared being overlooked. Feared becoming background. And here they are, already living in that space of near-invisibility. I worry about getting too close to the platform edge, about unpredictability, about my breath. But I am aware now that in the quiet arithmetic of progress, they and I may share more than I would have wanted to admit. We are both, in different ways, at risk of being forgotten.

Progress has a way of not caring for the weakest. The elderly. The fragile. The ones who move slower through turnstiles and elevator doors. I sometimes feel I must fight my way to the subway station simply to avoid becoming part of the background, like dust that settles and is later wiped away.

Sitting near the pigeon lady’s old spot on the center bench, it occurred to me that perhaps we are not so different. She was easy to overlook once she became routine. I, too, have become routine. The island changes around us. Buildings rise. Structures fall. Those who cannot keep pace are absorbed into memory.

People as problems to be solved

Later that evening, I watched the recording of the February 2 meeting of the Manhattan Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee, the local advisory body that represents Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side on land use, city services, and development matters. It was held over Zoom and chaired by Paul Krikler.

The discussion turned to unhoused neighbors on the subway platform. Dan Sadlier spoke about affordability and systems straining under rising rents. Sharon Pope-Marshall expressed compassion. Others echoed concern. Rick O’Conor read an email from a parent describing her daughter feeling followed on the platform. The temperature shifted. It always does when someone mentions their child.

Safety and compassion sat side by side, neither dismissing the other.

Dan said something that lingered.

“We get weird when we treat people as problems to be solved.”

He meant it gently. And he was right.

But I could not stop thinking about air.

The Architect and the Excavation

When the agenda moved to the steam plant demolition south of the Tramway, the conversation lifted from the platform below ground to the space above it. Zora Boyadzhieva introduced herself clearly. Licensed architect. Twenty-five years of experience. A practitioner of adaptive reuse. A mother raising her children on this island.

She explained what buildings from the 1930s are made of: heavy concrete foundations, steel structures, masonry load-bearing walls. Strong bones.

Apparently the only fragile thing in the room was the timeline.

The building was decommissioned in 2013. It was maintained for years. The last structural review occurred around 2020. Then, beginning in 2023, violations began to accumulate. It quickly developed a condition called “sudden emergency violations.” Eventually, an emergency demolition order. I love how emergencies here have anniversaries. They wait patiently for the right calendar year.

She never said the emergency was manufactured. She simply laid out the dates like a row of dominoes and let gravity do the rest. It’s amazing how a structure can survive ninety years of weather, but not three years of administrative attention.

Residents asked for the structural report. For documentation of contaminants. For demolition plans. For testing results. Since December, she said, there had been silence.

Judy Berdy followed, urging formal action. Tibor Krisko confirmed that he and Zora had drafted a resolution to move to the full board. Paul guided the discussion deliberately, clarifying process, ensuring voices were heard, and preparing the committee for a vote.

Then Kalin Kresnitchki shared a photograph taken earlier that day from the Queensboro Bridge.

In it, excavation is visible. Oil tanks have been removed. Soil is exposed. Transparency, however, is still underground. The tennis bubble stands nearby. The sports fields are within view.

The emergency, once described in broad language, was no longer abstract.

It had moved from paperwork to earth.

Kalin noted that tanks installed decades ago often sit in contaminated soil. That excavation had already occurred. That whatever testing exists has not been publicly shared with residents. That remediation, if done later, could be costly. That children play tennis and soccer within sight of the site.

“Maybe we should postpone tennis,” he said. Roosevelt Island’s first sport where the opponent might be particulate matter. Then more quietly, Zora added, “But we cannot postpone breathing.” That’s the problem with air. It refuses to follow agenda order. Testing may exist. Sharing it, seemingly, is the real hazardous material.

I do not know what is in that soil.

I only know that my breathing has felt different lately. As it did during the last major excavation. As it did when the island assured itself that dust was temporary and progress permanent.

Zora was not an agitator. She was a professional asking technical questions. Which, on this island, can feel far more disruptive. And Paul was not a bystander. He was the conductor, making sure the questions were heard in full.

The committee advanced a resolution calling for a pause until sufficient transparency and documentation were provided. Paul guided the process calmly. Zora remained composed. The ground, however, had already been opened.

The full board would later vote unanimously to request that the work be frozen pending review. Even so, earth once moved does not return easily to stillness.

I hope I am wrong.

I hope this is winter. Age. Renovation dust that will settle.

But I would like to know.

Because breathing should not require speculation.

And progress, if it is to mean anything at all, should not ask the fragile to keep quiet while the soil is moved beneath them.

Some people move through the day without noticing their lungs at all.

I would like to be one of them again.

Editorial Note: The petition calling for a temporary pause of demolition pending full public disclosure of structural and environmental documentation can be found here. Residents are encouraged to review the language carefully and decide for themselves whether the request reflects their position.

This is the story of how Related and Hudson turned public land into private gold, one signature at a time, and how RIOC, through silence and compliance, became an agent of that transfer.

A Timeline of Concessions

Across more than two decades, RIOC amended the Southtown Development Agreement five times. Each amendment deepened the public’s losses.

The first amendment reaffirmed the original structure but offered early signals of the Board’s deference. The second allowed dormancy to linger without penalty, weakening RIOC’s bargaining position and setting a precedent for compliance rather than renegotiation. The third waived public space obligations and narrowed community leverage, signaling a retreat from earlier commitments to civic benefit.

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The fourth amendment granted Related a full affordable building, Building 8, subsidized through the agreement outlined in the document “Southtown 8 – HDC Regulatory Agreement.pdf.” This deal guaranteed revenue streams and financing through public subsidies while limiting RIOC’s long-term ownership or oversight. While the building was officially designated affordable, its design and isolation from the rest of the Southtown development made it easier for the developer to consolidate all affordability obligations into a single site. This allowed Related to market Building 9 as fully luxury offerings without the perceived “burden” of integrated affordable units. The result was a technically compliant but strategically segregated approach that diluted the original spirit of inclusion and affordability across the full development.

Separately, Building 7 played an even more critical role in undermining the public promise of affordability. Although originally envisioned to help fulfill the 40% affordability goal of the Southtown project, it was instead leased largely to a wealthy private hospital system. This institutional tenancy, secured through a direct deal with the developer, allowed Related to mark affordability quotas as satisfied, without adding a single affordable apartment to the general housing market. As a result, the public received no true benefit. No working family ever applied. No waitlist opened. Just a quiet deal behind closed doors.

Most significantly, the fifth amendment finalized the transfer of value to Building 9.

$3.60 a Foot

Building 9 is the tallest and most profitable building on Roosevelt Island. Yet its tax-equivalency burden is strikingly low. Instead of paying New York City property taxes like most comparable luxury buildings, which typically amount to $10 to $14 per square foot annually, Related pays only $3.60 per square foot in base ground rent, plus a nominal $1 per square foot tax-equivalency fee. That puts its fixed annual burden at just $4.60 per square foot.

But even this number obscures a deeper concession. Rather than collecting tax-equivalency payments annually, RIOC accepted a one-time buyout: $92.33 per square foot, totaling $24.8 million. This payment was positioned as a substitute for 35 years of taxes, yet the decision to lock in that figure, and the assumptions behind it, were never publicly scrutinized. Had Related paid standard tax-equivalency payments over those 35 years, the present-day value would have totaled nearly $83.5 million, meaning the public lost out on approximately $58 million in long-term value.

With more than 350 fully market-rate units, Building 9 is expected to generate close to $20 million in annual rental revenue. Against that backdrop, its combined ground rent and tax-equivalency payments amount to roughly six percent of gross income, a figure that would be unthinkable in a fully taxed building, but entirely permissible under this deal.

Meanwhile, RIOC agreed to lease 7,000 square feet of office space within Building 9 at a market rate. That lease, valued at $180,000 annually, guarantees occupancy and provides a stable income stream the developer can finance against. Combined with the waived obligations, it means the public is now both tenant and underwriter.

The result is that Roosevelt Island pays twice: first, in forgone tax revenue; then, in subsidized tenancy. And while Related locks in profits, the community shoulders the cost, in missed infrastructure, higher maintenance burdens, and eroded trust.

Rubber-Stamped

Every one of these amendments passed through the RIOC Board with minimal resistance. At the center of the oversight process was Howard Polivy, longtime Audit and Budget Chair and key member of REDAC.

REDAC, the Real Estate Development Advisory Committee, was created to provide financial and land-use oversight for RIOC’s largest transactions. Polivy presided over years of approvals with no visible pushback, no call for third-party appraisals, and no public-facing questioning of whether RIOC could secure better terms. REDAC, designed to be a guardrail, became a greenlight.

If there was dissent, it was never strong enough to stop the momentum. The board became a formality. The public was no longer in the room.

The Park That Bought Our Silence

To many, Commons East Park seemed like a gift: a modest patch of green space promised in the final development phases. But it came in place of far more substantial community benefits that were once negotiated, and quietly erased.

The original development plans described Commons East as a vibrant civic space, filled with active and passive features: landscaped lawns, climbing structures, picnic decks, lounge areas, porch swings, hammock spaces, and yes, even ping-pong tables. These were not vague aspirations; they were spelled out in development agreements and presented as public-facing offsets for the density and luxury units coming in Building 9.

But when the time came to build, most of those features vanished. RIOC waived Related’s obligation to fund lighting for Firefighter’s Field and a permanent public comfort station, amenities valued at more than a million dollars, in exchange for a one-time payment. What the public received instead was a trimmed-down Commons East with a few benches and a fenced-in dog run.

A park for people became a relief zone for dogs. And the promise of meaningful infrastructure became a symbol of substitution: smaller, cheaper, quieter.

Eleanor Rivers might call it a “symbolic consolation prize”, a place to sit, so we wouldn’t ask why nothing else came.

What We Could Have Had

At every amendment, RIOC had leverage. Time delays, rising market rates, and inflation meant Related needed action. But instead of renegotiating, RIOC stabilized the deal.

With stronger leadership, the public might have gained a new AVAC facility. It might have secured affordable units in Building 9. A permanent community institution could have been negotiated. And RIOC could have secured office space for public use as a condition of development, rather than becoming a tenant inside a luxury tower it helped underwrite.

Instead, the final Southtown building became something else entirely: a fully open-market asset generating close to $20 million a year in rental revenue, while returning only a small fraction of that value to the public. Against that scale of income, the concessions made by RIOC were not marginal. They were structural.

And now, another chapter appears to be forming.

What began as rumor has hardened into expectation. Planning materials and quiet conversations point toward at least one more building at Southtown. In the Governor’s own press release celebrating recent investments on Roosevelt Island, David Kramer of Related is quoted directly. No RIOC board member is mentioned. No public process is acknowledged.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. The public compromised on affordable housing, on amenities, on tax value. It accepted a dog run in place of infrastructure. And while those concessions accumulated, the developer’s voice rose, now appearing alongside the Governor’s as the future of Southtown is discussed.

So the question is no longer what Roosevelt Island could have had.

It is whether Roosevelt Island still has a say.

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The narrow aisles. The small collisions. The cart that stops too suddenly because someone has remembered they need cilantro. The little cardboard signs that try to sound handwritten and cheerful, even when the price has changed again.

I come here the way many Roosevelt Islanders do, by habit and by gravity. The island narrows your choices in certain practical ways, and the city offers them back to you in fluorescent light.

I was halfway between the bananas and the eggs when I saw her.

Not fully. Not at first. Just the outline.

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A woman in a neat winter coat, hair brushed back with care, hands gloved, posture upright in that particular way some women carry themselves when they have decided, long ago, that dignity is not negotiable.

For a moment, my mind did what it always does when it misses someone. It tried to manufacture a reunion.

My heart said: It’s her.

The pigeon lady.

She used to sit on the Roosevelt Island subway platform as if she had an appointment there. Not sprawled. Not collapsed. Seated. Proper. A woman with class, even in circumstances that were not kind. She fed the pigeons with a kind of ceremony. She never begged. She never performed her suffering. She simply existed, presentable, as though staying put together was the last thing she owned.

I watched her for years without ever learning her name.

That is one of the small embarrassments of city life. You can witness someone daily and still fail to truly meet them.

Then, one day, she was gone.

No announcement. No explanation. Just absence.

It is strange what you miss when it disappears. Not because it was pleasant, necessarily. But because it was part of the place, like a familiar crack in a sidewalk.

So when I saw this woman near the eggs, my mind filled in the missing years. I imagined a shelter that worked. A social worker who followed up. A case file that did not fall to the bottom of a pile. A bed that was safe enough to accept. A door that opened and did not slam shut.

I nudged my cart forward, quietly, like someone approaching a skittish animal.

And then she turned. It was not her. I reached for the eggs anyway.

The temperature

On February 2 at 6:30 pm, the Manhattan Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee, the local advisory body that represents Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side on land use, city services, and development matters, met over Zoom, chaired by Paul Krikler.

The recording opens with Paul in full focus, background blurred. The blur perfectly illustrated how much of public life remains just out of focus. Paul offered a quiet thumbs up to someone off screen before welcoming the community. It is a small, almost private gesture. Everything is working. The meeting can begin. RIOC updates. Library news. Community updates.

Then the discussion turned to unhoused neighbors on the subway platform.

Dan Sadlier of City Relief spoke first, laying out statistics about affordability and systems that cannot keep pace with rising rents. Sharon Pope-Marshall expressed compassion. Mia Haj asked what practical steps residents could take. Others nodded along, each careful to signal empathy, each careful to avoid sounding punitive. There was, at moments, an almost unspoken competition in grace.

And then Rick O’Conor said what many residents have said privately for months.

He read from an email describing drug activity on the platform. A daughter feeling followed. Safety concerns not theoretical but lived. It’s fascinating how quickly grace can curdle when someone mentions their child. Statistics are abstract. Daughters are not.

The temperature shifted.

A women’s shelter.

Not on Roosevelt Island. Not on our platform. But close enough to matter, close enough that the conversation came up at our Community Board 8 Roosevelt Island Committee meeting in February. Close enough that people on the island were already talking about it the way New Yorkers talk about things before they happen. With fragments. With rumors. With the anxious tone of people who do not trust official timelines.

The proposed site is 1114 First Avenue, near East 61st Street. A 200-bed facility, originally discussed one way, then revised, then discussed again. The kind of plan that can feel like it arrived already fully decided, even as officials insist public feedback is welcome.

No one dismissed compassion. No one dismissed safety. The tension remained intact, because it is intact in life. You can want help for someone and still not want your child cornered on a platform.

Dan said something that has stayed with me.

He meant it gently, like a hand on the shoulder. He was right. But I have also learned that the city gets weird when it treats residents as problems to be managed. The weirdness is different, but the result is the same.

Not near my groceries.

I thought about the neighborhood around 61st Street, where people have been shouting at meetings. Booing. Demanding not only safety, but control. I understand the impulse to protect your block. I also recognize the old, familiar reflex that appears the moment the city proposes something uncomfortable.

Not here.

Not near my children.

Not near my eggs.

If this women’s shelter at 1114 First Avenue is going to be built, I want it built with clarity. With honest communication. With a plan that is visible, not rumored. With a structure that does not rely on the public to guess.

Not because the neighborhood deserves special handling.

Because the women inside it will.

And because maybe, somewhere in this city, the pigeon lady is no longer feeding birds underground.

Maybe she is simply buying eggs, like everyone else.

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Roosevelt Island had always been governed from elsewhere. Decisions arrived finished, explained after the fact, wrapped in language about inevitability. For years, residents pushed back not because they believed they could control the Island’s future, but because they believed they should be part of it. RIRA was born from the dangerous idea that people who live somewhere might notice things. Not as a protest group alone, but as a corrective force. A way of saying that lived experience mattered.

The fight was not abstract. It was about density, services, affordability, and the sense that the Island was an experiment meant to serve people. It was supposed to be an experiment in living, not a spreadsheet with water views. Representation was the demand because representation promised friction. Someone in the room who might slow things down. Someone who might ask why.

The Moment It Felt Like We Won

When resident board seats became real, it felt like a turning point. Not symbolic, not advisory, but structural. It felt like we won because for once the chairs had familiar names on them. People who lived here. People who had fought battles of their own.

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Howard Polivy. Margie Smith. Fay Christian. David Kraut.

For many of us, this felt like a win. Rivercross forced the state to negotiate, which is impressive right up until the negotiation ends. Its leaders understood power. Elevating them felt like elevating the Island itself. We assumed the hardest fighters would protect the whole because that is how stories usually go.

The room did not change as much as the acoustics did. The assumption held exactly as long as it took to become comfortable.

Rivercross and the Narrowing of Care

Rivercross was meant to be the bridge. The place where resident leadership would prove that self‑governance could extend beyond a single building and begin to shape the Island as a whole. For many of us, elevating Rivercross voices to the board felt strategic. What followed revealed a different outcome.

Once seated, Rivercross leadership focused narrowly on securing privatization for their own building. The work was intense, technical, and inward‑looking. The broader interests of other wire buildings, of shared spaces, of the Island’s long‑term balance, quietly receded. Self governance expanded confidently right up to the edge of the Rivercross property line. Privatization is very demanding work. It leaves little time to notice your neighbors. Support aligned consistently with the state, with major contractors, and with investors whose priorities were no longer ambiguous.

For years, Margie Smith, Fay Christian, and Howard Polivy advocated primarily for Rivercross itself. The fight was framed as communal, but the focus remained fixed on a single building. Other wire buildings, other residents, and the broader Island were rarely centered. That imbalance became harder to ignore when RIRA members, including Frank Farance, began pressing publicly on what Rivercross privatization would mean for everyone else, how it would draw on shared Island resources while leaving the costs behind.

It was around this moment that something shifted. The final Rivercross deal that reached the board appeared markedly watered down from what had been envisioned by Margie Smith and her peers. And just before that vote, Fay Christian stepped down. Margie Smith followed within days. They stepped down right when their presence would have been inconvenient, which is a very efficient schedule.

No explanation fit the timing, but the timing explained plenty. No public accounting that made sense of the sudden absence of two resident voices at the precise moment they were most needed. David Kraut never said outright why they left. He hinted only that the decision was not theirs alone. The fact that their departures came days apart, just before the final vote, was enough to register as something other than coincidence, though few noticed it at the time.

What the experiment ultimately enabled was not broader self‑governance, but confidence. Private capital learned that the Island could be reshaped with resident participation that did not meaningfully resist it. Affordability could be acknowledged, reconfigured, and minimized. Quality‑of‑life arguments could be absorbed without altering outcomes.

When the Room Went Quiet

After that, the room changed.

The coordinated departures at Rivercross did more than thin the table. They marked the only moment when the board briefly hesitated. In that same period, Howard Polivy abstained from a vote aligned with the state’s will, an anomaly in a record otherwise defined by assent. It was the lone pause before a long stretch of unanimity.

David Kraut withdrew from public engagement long before he withdrew from concern. He still walked the Island. He still listened. But he stopped speaking in the way he once had. Some people step back because they are finished. Others because they are not.

Howard Polivy did not step back. His presence grew. Committees accumulated the way furniture does when no one throws anything out. Responsibilities expanded. His votes returned to consistency. Over time, that consistency came to define his role. Power accrued, but only so long as it was exercised in alignment. Every nod reinforced the arrangement.

As that ecosystem solidified, even voices we once believed would challenge it were absorbed into its gravity. Representation remained visible, but its edges dulled. No one announced new rules. None were needed. Certain names stopped being spoken critically. Certain questions stopped being asked. The limits became understood without being stated.

Winning Representation, Losing the Island

RIRA, meanwhile, turned inward.

The organization that had once focused outward, pressing against authority, became a place where residents argued among themselves. We fought over process. Over tone. Over whose version of the Island mattered most. Pressing against authority is exhausting. Pressing against each other is much more sustainable. We had won representation, and in doing so, lost the urgency that had unified us.

Without term limits, representation does not evolve. It calcifies. Without independence from state renewal, representation hardened. The state chose who stayed. The state chose who did not. What had once felt like access revealed itself as permission.

Some people stayed and tried to adapt. Others walked away quietly. A new wave of residents arrived without this history, without the memory of what the Island was supposed to be. They arrived to a finished story and were told it had always been this way. The experiment faded, not in collapse, but in indifference.

Roosevelt Island was once described as a utopia. Experiments require uncertainty. What we have now feels settled.

What followed Rivercross did not require scandals to proceed, even though there were many. Agreements were enough. Southtown came next.

And by the time the public realized what was being negotiated away, representation was still present, but no longer capable of interrupting outcomes.

At the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, committees have increasingly served a different function. Over time, they have become the place where minimum legal requirements are satisfied, language is refined, and decisions already made elsewhere are given a procedural home. Outcomes are not debated into existence. They arrive fully formed.

This distinction matters. When committees stop shaping outcomes and begin ratifying them, oversight becomes performance. Accountability becomes layered. Responsibility moves outward, into consultants, vendors, and third-party partners, each adding distance between decision and consequence.

Howard Polivy’s long tenure on the RIOC board did not create this system. It illustrates it, and shows how long a system can operate without interruption when no one is required to meaningfully dissent.

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A System That Rewards Alignment

Howard Polivy has served on the RIOC board for years beyond the expiration of his original term. He has done so without elections, without a constituency to answer to, and without any meaningful mechanism for public accountability. In that structure, survival is not determined by effectiveness or independence. It is determined by reliability.

Polivy’s record is simple. On every final resolution, he voted yes. Even when votes were not unanimous, his was. Even when concerns were raised, his position did not change. The language accompanying those votes rarely varied either. Year after year, the same assurances appeared: appropriate process, sound judgment, institutional stability.

This consistency was not incidental. It was rewarded.

In systems where outcomes are decided before meetings begin, unpredictability is the only real threat. Polivy did not introduce it. He reinforced the existing logic of the institution. He echoed the priorities of state operators and senior executives while diluting the influence of local concerns that lacked structural leverage.

You do not need a villain for mismanagement to persist. You need alignment.

Audit, Finance, and the Disappearance of Scrutiny

At RIOC, audit and finance have long operated as a unified committee. The structure itself is questionable. The consequences are visible.

Budgets passed year after year without meaningful resistance. Investigations multiplied, often bleeding into operating costs rather than preventing them. Executive turnover accelerated, yet institutional responsibility never settled. Each failure was treated as discrete. Each remedy was temporary.

Major breakdowns did not arrive unannounced. In 2013, the vehicle procurement scandal later known as Motorgate unfolded after years of routine budget approvals and weak internal controls; precisely the domain of audit and finance. In 2019, the Sportspark renovation was approved as a contained capital project, only to balloon into a multi‑year closure with escalating costs and lost public access, again passing through audit and finance without a meaningful challenge to scope, timeline, or pricing assumptions. More recently, tax and lease arrangements benefiting large residential buildings were approved as fiscally prudent, even as they quietly eroded long‑term revenue and shifted the burden elsewhere. Each of these decisions fell squarely within the responsibility of audit and finance to question risk, test assumptions, and interrupt momentum. Each instead was waved through, framed as manageable, appropriate, and unlikely to disrupt operations.

Polivy was present throughout. Not as a dissenter. Not as a brake. As a constant, lending continuity to decisions that repeatedly failed to slow themselves down.

Oversight did not fail loudly. It failed to interrupt.

Real Estate and Exported Accountability

RIOC has spent years exporting responsibility outward. Consultants were hired to advise. Developers were empowered to manage. Legal layers accumulated between the board and the ground.

The deal with Hudson Related is not an exception to this pattern. It is its clearest expression.

Main Street retail was handed over under a long-term master lease. The promise was professional management and revitalization. The result has been vacancy, churn, and a lack of coherent community strategy. Public land became private leverage.

The structure matters. RIOC pays rent to Hudson Related for land it controls. Public purpose funds flow from RIOC to nonprofits, which then use those funds to pay rent back to the same landlord, effectively subsidizing private leases with public money. Public money circulates through layers that obscure accountability while strengthening private control.

This is not conspiracy. It is design.

Polivy voted yes to the structure. Yes to the extensions. Yes to a model that protects the institution legally while weakening its connection to the community it serves.

Operations and Lived Consequences

Operations is where abstraction becomes experience.

Red bus failures. Railings that deteriorate and fail. Infrastructure allowed to slip from routine maintenance into emergency response. Each incident is framed as sudden. None of them are.

They are the predictable outcome of years of approvals that treated degradation as acceptable risk and delay as a neutral choice. Budgets passed. Warnings softened. Responsibility diffused.

When committees function as confirmation rather than challenge, rather than places to help shape outcomes, operations absorb the cost.

Oversight as Illusion

There is a rational logic to institutions insulating themselves from legal scrutiny. Board indemnification exists for a reason. Board members are expected to make difficult decisions, and the risk of being sued is part of that design. Protection is meant to enable action, not replace it. At RIOC, protection increasingly became the action.

But when the state inserts three or four layers of consultants, legal structures, and third-party operators between itself and the public, something else happens. Responsibility is not just protected. It is displaced. Governance shifts from decision-making to risk management. Oversight becomes procedural rather than substantive.

In that environment, the board does not increase accountability. It can reduce it.

Board members who do not face elections do not face consequence. Over time, many retreat from visibility altogether. Remote participation becomes normalized. Presence becomes symbolic.

Some board members remain visible in the community. They attend events. They are seen. They answer questions. That visibility creates friction. It also creates accountability.

Others disappear into the institution, where absence is not punished and questions are no longer expected.

Howard Polivy did not need to hide. The system hid for him.

The Inspector General report made clear that legal insulation has limits. Process does not absolve responsibility when outcomes consistently fail the public.

If a board exists primarily to absorb scrutiny rather than exercise oversight, the question is no longer about individual members. It is about purpose.

What Can Be Fixed

Reform is possible. But only if governance is treated as more than continuity.

Committees must shape outcomes, not receive them. Board service must have limits. Visibility must be expected, not optional. Community structures that once influenced agendas must be restored, not sidelined.

Without elections, residents’ power is limited. Knowledge is the one tool that remains.

That is why attention matters. That is why records matter. That is why questions matter.

A survey opened last week asking a simple question. It will remain open until Howard Polivy decides whether to resign. This is not about punishment. It is about accountability. Continuity without consequence is not stability.

Howard Polivy did not break the system. He enabled it by remaining reliable inside it, year after year, as oversight narrowed and accountability thinned.

When governance becomes indistinguishable from continuity, the question is no longer who stayed. It is what was allowed to happen because they did.

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If you were to close your eyes and open them again, you might not know whether it was 2011 or 2019 or 2024. The numbers change. The faces change. The chairs around the table change. But for a very long time, one presence did not.

Howard Polivy. Board meetings are like reruns of a show you never liked. New cast, same script, and somehow Howard Polivy was always renewed for another season.

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He was there when the meetings ran smoothly and when they did not. He was there when CEOs came and went, when governors changed, when priorities shifted quietly behind closed doors. He was there when the tone of the room softened and when it tightened. He was there when others raised their voices, and he was there when they left.

And through it all, the meetings continued to end the same way. With a yes.

Howard Polivy wasn’t just renewed for another season. He was syndicated.

How He Entered the Room

Howard Polivy joined the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation board in 2009, recommended by Mayor Bloomberg and appointed by Governor David Paterson. His term, like many others, was finite on paper. It expired, unlike many others, his presence did not.

Years passed. Governors changed. Board members rotated in and out. Polivy remained seated long after the technical end of his term, a constant through successive administrations. He was not the loudest voice in the room, but he was a familiar one. And familiarity, in institutions like RIOC, carries weight.

He did not build influence by challenging authority. He built it by never forcing authority to react.

From early on, Polivy aligned himself with the structure of the board rather than its personalities. Others raised their hands. Howard raised no objections. He simply positioned himself where the vote would end up, which is a far more efficient use of energy. Over time, that instinct made him useful. And usefulness, more than independence, is what ensures his survival.

The Illusion of Oversight

At a recent committee meeting, the room lingered on a small procedural question. An agenda item concerning needed work on the AVAC pipe had already been added. The substance was not in doubt. The work was necessary. The outcome was clear.

The debate was not about whether the pipe needed fixing. It was about how politely the board wished to take credit for agreeing with an agenda that had already been distributed based on the meeting now underway. Oversight, in that moment, became a matter of presentation. Which was, by then, the usual form of supervision.

Over the years, Polivy occasionally postured to remind the room that he held power. He asserted control when someone suggested he did not. He even made a brief attempt to elevate himself to CEO during one of the leadership transitions that followed the termination of an executive he had helped scrutinize. The attempt went nowhere, which was exactly where it needed to go. The state did not elevate him. It did not need to. It let him stay, accumulating committee chairs and internal influence instead. Time did not move him upward. It let him spread sideways.

As chair of the Audit Committee and the Real Estate Advisory Committee, Polivy wielded influence indirectly, initiating internal investigations that shaped careers and constrained executives. Those actions rarely surfaced in public minutes. His power rarely appeared in the minutes. It preferred the hallways, where decisions are harder to quote. Yet even here, his role was not that of an architect. It was that of an enabler. He rarely hesitated with the room, and when he did, the hesitation never crossed into opposition with the state or with large real estate deals. On every final vote, he aligned with the will of the chair and, by extension, the will of those who held power. Performing authority while obeying it turned out to be a marketable skill that repeated quietly over years. It is also what made him indispensable. Indispensability, in this case, meant never being the problem.

When Staying Becomes the Decision

Of course, everything was not always fine.

Infrastructure aged. Retail thinned out. Trust eroded in small, accumulative ways. The consequences of earlier votes surfaced slowly, often years after the meetings that authorized them. By then, the language that had justified them was long forgotten.

This is how institutional harm often appears. Not as a single failure, but as a widening gap between procedure and experience. Between what is approved and what is lived. Nothing failed spectacularly, which made everything harder to question.

Howard Polivy did not create that gap. But he helped normalize it. His votes did not introduce risk. They removed interruption. Stability proved useful until it outlasted its purpose. He certified continuity at moments when continuity itself had become the problem.

Over time, the meetings grew quieter not because there were no problems, but because the process had learned how to absorb them. Votes passed. Language softened. Responsibility diffused. The board continued to function.

In that system, staying was not neutral. It was the decision.

What the Yeses Leave Behind

Howard Polivy’s legacy is not abstract. It is visible in the decisions that were approved, quietly and consistently, and in what those decisions produced over time.

He voted yes when the board extended the Rivercross ground lease in 2011, a deal introduced mid-meeting without public notice. That vote helped unlock privatization, delivering windfall gains to shareholders while permanently weakening the state’s leverage over one of the island’s largest housing complexes. The affordability protections cited at the time dissolved years later, exactly as critics warned. The vote passed. The consequences arrived on schedule.

He voted yes when the board handed Main Street retail to Hudson–Related under a 30-year master lease, promising revival through scale and professional management. A decade later, storefronts still cycle through vacancy, small businesses struggle to survive, and RIOC quietly subsidizes the deal to keep it afloat. Main Street became leverage for Southtown development, not a strategic asset for the community it was meant to serve.

He voted yes on years of capital plans that emphasized presentation over prevention. The tram elevator took seven years to complete. Blackwell House reopened years late. Eleanor’s Pier closed for safety and remains closed. The Helix deteriorated to the point of emergency repair. Each project had its own explanation. Together, they told a simpler story: maintenance deferred long enough becomes crisis.

He voted yes when Sportspark closed for renovation in 2019, a project pitched as a brief disruption. It remained shuttered for nearly four years. When it reopened, residents were met with fees so high they had to be rolled back after public backlash. The facility exists now, improved and functional, but the cost was years without access and a pricing model misaligned with the community it serves.

He voted yes as Audit Chair while contracts slipped just under board-approval thresholds, including the now-infamous PR contract designed to polish executive reputations with public money. Oversight did not fail loudly. It simply failed to intervene.

Each “yes” was defensible in isolation. Together, they formed inertia. Every decision arrived with an explanation. The outcomes arrived later, without one.

The cost of that inertia is visible now. Not in one broken system, but in many weakened ones. In infrastructure that aged faster than expected. In public spaces managed rather than cared for. In a board that learned how to proceed without fully accounting for where it was going.

Nothing here requires scandal to explain it. It requires only years of assent. Though, over the years, several scandals seemed to wander in anyway.

If the Chair Were Empty

It is difficult to imagine the board without Howard Polivy because for so long, it did not have to. But imagine it anyway.

Imagine meetings where experience is paired with interruption. Where memory produces questions instead of reassurance. Where a vote does not arrive already decided. Where “yes” is something earned, not supplied.

The room might be louder. It might hesitate. And when it finally moved on, it would do so with less certainty than before.

Howard did not need to lead or obstruct. Remaining in place turned out to be enough. And for a very long time, that was exactly what the state needed. Continuity served the state faithfully. Whether it served the island is a newer question.

The island is now left to decide whether that is still enough.

If one person came to mind while you were reading this, consider forwarding it to them.

Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system is often discussed as if it were either a miracle or a menace. In truth, it is neither. It is functioning infrastructure that has reached a point in its lifecycle where how it is maintained matters as much as whether it exists at all.

The recent shift by RIOC toward planned outages, advance notice, and scheduled repairs is not cosmetic. It is structural. Planned maintenance is the difference between stewardship and improvisation. For years, residents experienced AVAC failures as surprises. Increasingly, they are being treated as projects. That change deserves acknowledgment.

In 2019, RIOC completed a major modernization of the AVAC system, replacing its aging control systems, upgrading turbines and monitoring equipment, and extending the system’s projected operational life by roughly 30 years. That upgrade did not freeze time. It bought it.

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Even with that work completed, pipes will continue to wear. Steel fatigues. Curves take impact. A system designed for the garbage habits of fifty years ago now operates in a world of different materials, volumes, and expectations. The question is no longer whether AVAC can keep running, but how it should evolve as conditions change.

That evolution does not stop at pipes. As Melissa Wade recently suggested during the Operations Advisory Committee meeting, it may also require reexamining the size and design of building chutes themselves. If access points invite misuse, maintenance alone cannot compensate for design decisions that no longer fit how the system is used today.

What maintenance contracts usually do
(and what they don’t)

A standard AVAC maintenance contract is designed to keep a system operational, not adaptive.

Typically, these contracts focus on routine inspections, valve servicing, emergency response, and patching or localized repairs when something goes wrong. They are written to keep systems operational day to day, not to rethink their structure.

What they rarely include is systematic replacement of aging pipe segments, redesigns to accommodate new waste streams, or long-term lifecycle modeling that looks beyond immediate failure prevention. This is not a criticism of RIOC. It is how infrastructure contracts are written almost everywhere. Maintenance contracts preserve function. They do not future-proof systems.

If AVAC is now expected to operate reliably for decades longer, the maintenance philosophy must evolve from repairing what breaks to replacing what will break.

Preventive replacement is not extravagance

Replacing pipe segments before they fail feels expensive because the alternative, waiting, feels cheaper. It is not.

Emergency repairs cost more. They disrupt service. They force decisions under pressure. Preventive replacement spreads cost over time and reduces risk. This is not unique to AVAC. It is how bridges, tunnels, and power systems are managed once they mature.

A larger annual maintenance allocation, used predictively rather than reactively, is not indulgent spending. It is fiscally conservative infrastructure management.

The question for RIOC is not whether to spend more, but whether to spend earlier.

AVAC was designed for “the rest”

When AVAC was designed, waste streams were simpler. The system was built to handle what remains after separation: trash.

Today, Roosevelt Island separates paper, plastics, organics, and what remains. Only that final category enters the AVAC system. Everything else relies on truck-based collection, even though the island itself was designed to minimize exactly that kind of street-level disruption.

This is not a Roosevelt Island failure. It is a legacy design meeting modern policy. Many newer systems were built with multiple waste fractions in mind. AVAC was not. That does not make it obsolete. It makes it constrained.

Could AVAC handle more than one stream by time or schedule?

In theory, some pneumatic systems handle multiple waste streams using time-based controls, tagging, or parallel routing. In practice, retrofitting a legacy system raises real constraints. Contamination between streams becomes a serious risk. Residue left in pipes complicates separation. Cleaning and purge cycles would need to be far more frequent. Sensors and valves may not be designed for that level of precision. Operational complexity increases quickly.

The question is not “why hasn’t RIOC done this.” The question is what would it take, what would it cost, and what would it displace.

That is a planning question, not a blame question.

What airports and newer systems do differently

Airports and newer planned developments often use pneumatic collection systems that were designed from the start to handle multiple waste fractions. They build in frequent access points for cleaning and modular pipe replacement, and they budget for lifecycle replacement from day one rather than treating it as an emergency expense.

Roosevelt Island did not have that advantage. Its system predates modern waste policy. The challenge now is not to replicate newer systems, but to adapt responsibly within existing constraints.

The mattress question, calmly answered

A persistent narrative suggests residents routinely push mattresses into the AVAC system.

Technically, this is highly unlikely.

Residential access points are not sized for full mattresses. Main pipes are accessible only from secured areas typically restricted to building staff or contractors. For a mattress to enter the system intact would require deliberate action, staff-level access, or extreme compression.

If large objects have ever entered the system, the issue is not resident behavior. It is access control.

That distinction matters.

What getting better actually looks like

RIOC is doing something important right now: it is planning.

Planned outages. Public notice. Preventive repairs. These are signs of institutional learning, not failure.

The next step is explicit lifecycle planning. That means defining how the maintenance contract should evolve, budgeting for predictive replacement rather than emergency fixes, and clearly stating what AVAC can and cannot reasonably be expected to do.

AVAC does not need defending anymore. It needs a roadmap.

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The room was small, almost apologetic in its proportions. A square of tables pressed together, a screen pressed forward, everyone pressed inward. When Mary C. Cunneen, Acting Chief Operating Officer of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, began speaking about the AVAC system, there was very little physical space left for the thing she was trying to explain.

She raised her hands anyway. And I found myself unexpectedly excited, unaccustomed to seeing Mary so vivid, so physical, so entirely at ease inhabiting the explanation rather than guarding it.

Mary reminded the committee that the year before, RIOC had paid to replace a section of pipe at the entrance to the AVAC plant itself. This proposal, she said, concerned a different section. The West Main line, under Main Street, just outside the plant. She explained that certain parts of the system are more vulnerable than others, especially curves, where garbage repeatedly slams into the pipe over decades.

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She demonstrated this by slapping her hands together in quick, rhythmic motions. It was the most animated garbage disposal explanation I have ever witnessed, and unfortunately, almost no one could see it. The slide deck filled most of the visual field, and the gesture existed largely in sound.

The logic itself was straightforward. Curves take more impact. Impact causes wear. Wear eventually becomes failure. The work, she said, needed to happen now. Garbage slamming into pipes for decades is the most accurate metaphor for governance I’ve heard this year.

Mary explained that Envac, the original installer of the AVAC system, would perform the work. She emphasized, carefully and more than once, that this was a single-source vendor. Envac installed the system in the 1970s. Envac maintains it. Envac is the only entity qualified to do this work.

“Given the single source nature of this project,” she said, setting up the number.

Three hundred sixty thousand dollars.

She said it again, this time rounding up just shy of three hundred sixty-one thousand. Even she seemed to feel the weight of it as it landed in the room. It is a lot of money for a pipe. Even if you know nothing about pipes, as I do. Infrastructure often costs more than intuition would allow. Three hundred sixty thousand dollars for a pipe sounds outrageous until you remember it’s underground and therefore immune to common sense.

I found myself suspended between two familiar instincts. One is to trust expertise. The other is to recognize how monopoly language works when it appears fully formed, already justified, already complete. I thought of stories I have read over the years about public agencies that tried to save money by cutting corners, only to discover later that when trains run over tracks, or when systems carry weight at speed, the material matters. The structure matters. Everything matters.

And still, the idea that only one company can replace a piece of a decades old design gives me pause. It sounds odd. It may also be true.

Mary moved on.

In the Middle of It

I have not always been kind to Mary Cunneen in my notes over the years. In earlier meetings, she often sounded guarded, brittle, sometimes condescending. This time, she did not. Her voice was calmer. Softer. There was confidence there, but not the defensive kind. She seemed steadier in herself.

Confidence without defensiveness is terrifying. It means the armor came off because it’s no longer needed.

I have learned, late in life, to pay attention when someone changes how they occupy a room. Mary appears to be doing that. I admire any woman who makes her way into the upper ranks of a system like this one. Men love to call women tyrants. It saves them the trouble of learning how to follow instructions. Men like to confuse structure with cruelty when they are asked to follow it. Funny how structure always feels cruel to people who benefit from chaos.

She is growing in the role. I can see it. And I respect it. You can tell she’s growing into the role because she’s stopped apologizing for occupying space that was never meant to be comfortable.

A Shift in the Conversation

Then Melissa Wade, a member of the committee, asked a question that had almost nothing to do with the pipe being replaced. She didn’t ask about cost, vendors, or timelines. That’s how you know the question was dangerous.

She asked about origin.

We often hear, she said, that residents put the wrong materials into the chutes, contributing to the deterioration of the AVAC system. Would it make sense, she wondered, to look at the size of the chutes themselves. What she implied was that everyone blames residents for misuse, which is amazing considering the system was designed assuming perfect behavior. If buildings have large openings, does that make it easier for large items to be discarded improperly. Would it be worth considering requiring smaller chutes, so misuse is less possible in the first place. Smaller chutes to prevent misuse? That’s called design. It’s very controversial.

It was the most intelligent question I have heard in a committee meeting in years because it suggested fixing the cause instead of funding the consequence.

Mary immediately complimented her. A genuine one.

Alvaro Santamaria, Assistant Vice President of Engineering and Capital Projects, responded next, clearly eager to speak, as men often are when a technical word opens the door. He spoke about pipe diameters and transitions, about how internal piping must match the diameter of the main lines, how funneling can cause problems. None of it was wrong. None of it was unkind. It simply was not what Melissa had asked. Everything he said was correct, detailed, and completely unrelated. He had seized on a word she used and let it pull him away from the essence of her question, not out of malice, but out of habit.

She clarified gently, which women learn to do early. She wasn’t asking about the pipes. She was asking about the hole. The opening where she, personally, drops her bag of garbage. The size of that opening determines the size of what can go into the system.

Alvaro acknowledged the point and added that buildings are often reluctant to invest in modifying their chutes. That is amazing, considering how expensive it gets when they don’t.

Yet, there it was, again.

RIOC blames residents.
Residents can only use what buildings give them.
Buildings do not want to spend the money.

For years, I have found myself caught between two explanations that never quite added up. On one side, David Stone’s writing, which at times made RIOC sound omnipotent, controlling every failure by design. On the other, RIOC’s refrain about mattresses and misuse, which sounded increasingly implausible as a comprehensive explanation. Mattresses became the villain because blaming objects is easier than blaming decisions.

And here, for the first time, someone was pointing to the architecture of responsibility itself. Once you see the architecture of responsibility, the excuses stop fitting through the opening.

Before the Meeting Moved On

Melissa continued, gently, suggesting that if buildings are unable or unwilling to properly educate tenants on AVAC use, perhaps reducing chute size should be part of the conversation. Not to punish residents, but to protect the system.

Mary said perhaps it was something that could be discussed.

Then Howard Polivy jumped in, referencing a discussion with Brian Weisberg from Manhattan Park. Howard jumped in to reference a conversation, because nothing settles a question like mentioning you once talked to someone. Before he could finish the sentence, Fay Christian spoke over him, eager to add that Manhattan Park had already had a large discussion about this issue and that Brian was looking into it.

As best I could tell, the idea that emerged from this overlapping exchange was to lock the chutes during move-outs. At least, that seemed to be the point, though no one quite said it cleanly. It was presented as something already discussed, already considered, already underway.

Neither completed a full thought. They stepped on each other, politely but unmistakably. The eagerness to demonstrate involvement was palpable. It mattered less what the solution was than that it had already been talked about. And as I listened, I found myself wondering what meeting this had been, and who had been in the room for it. Howard and Fay were clearly eager to establish that they had been there.

Nothing stalls progress faster than two people racing to prove they were already thinking about it. I found myself wondering when that discussion took place. And why some committee members were in the room for it, while others were not. These are the kinds of questions you do not ask out loud, but you should.

Melissa, instinctively fair, responded that she was not a fan of penalizing neighbors who are not moving out. Punishing people for staying is a fascinating housing policy, even by Island standards.

The committee then struggled briefly with language around recommending a course of action that had, functionally, already been included in the agenda. They found the words eventually. Or something close enough.

The meeting moved on.

The remainder focused on winter preparedness. Lydia Tang raised concerns about flooding near Westview following the removal of the glass atrium. She and Melissa helped clarify that certain promenade maintenance on the Queens side falls squarely under RIOC’s responsibility. Alvaro outlined recent renovations and plans with a level of detail that felt real. Competent. Grounded.

For a moment, it felt like actual work. No theater, no props, no applause. Very unsettling.

As the meeting wound down, I found myself returning to the suggestion that had slipped out almost accidentally: locking the chutes during move-outs. That, at least, seemed to be the idea. Not debated. Not voted on. Simply referenced as something already discussed somewhere else.

It lingered with me because it explained more than it solved. The solution itself was less interesting than the way it arrived, carried in sideways through overlapping sentences and unfinished thoughts. It mattered that Howard and Fay were eager to signal they had been part of that earlier conversation. Presence was being established, which is the polite way of saying territory was being marked.

And so the question that stayed with me was not whether locking chutes during move-outs is a good idea. It was where that decision-making had taken place, and who had been invited into it. Because maintenance does not fail all at once. It fails when decisions migrate quietly away from the rooms meant to hold them. When decisions migrate quietly, accountability never follows.

As attention shifted elsewhere, I found myself thinking about maintenance again. About how it only becomes visible when something breaks. About how unglamorous it is. About how essential.

We build. We celebrate. We cut ribbons.
And then, quietly, year after year, someone has to show up and make sure the systems still hold. That work does not photograph well. It does not trend. But it is the only thing that keeps a place livable.

When the meeting ended, the room did not change. It simply emptied. The questions lingered longer than the answers. And for once, that felt appropriate.

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What happened at Rivercross shows how early, on-the-record decisions can predetermine outcomes years before the public believes a choice is being made. It shows how conflicts do not need to be hidden to be consequential, only unaddressed. And it shows how accountability can quietly dissolve when the people who shaped a deal are no longer present when its consequences are finalized.

This article corrects the record, documents what the public minutes actually show, and explains why the unanswered questions around process and governance still matter today.

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The Long Run-Up to Privatization

Rivercross, a limited-equity Mitchell-Lama cooperative, entered the late 2000s facing a familiar problem: an aging building, a maturing mortgage, and growing pressure to refinance. Across Roosevelt Island, other Mitchell-Lama buildings were already exiting the program. Privatization was not a sudden idea. It was openly discussed years before it became a vote.

In February 2010, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation board formally discussed ground lease extensions for Rivercross. The minutes show active debate, not procedural housekeeping. The board acknowledged Mitchell-Lama withdrawal and the role lease extensions would play in making that possible.

Most notably, Director Margaret Smith stated on the record that she hoped the Rivercross resolution would be more binding. This was not a neutral comment. It reflected intent.

No recusal was raised. No disclosure was recorded.

The 2011 Vote That Changed Everything

On January 19, 2011, the RIOC board approved a forty-year extension of the Rivercross ground lease. This vote was not originally on the agenda. It was added mid-meeting after management reported that negotiations were complete and materials had already been distributed.

The board framed the decision as necessary to allow refinancing and repairs while maintaining affordability. Embedded in the deal, however, was an arbitration clause that anticipated a future Mitchell-Lama withdrawal and removed leverage from the state if terms later became disputed.

Eight board members constituted the board at the time. Four of them were Rivercross residents, meaning half of the governing body voting on the lease extension lived in the building whose future they were deciding.

Those voting in favor included Fay Fryer Christian, Dr. Katherine Teets Grimm, Howard Polivy, and Margaret Smith. All were Rivercross residents at the time. None recused. None abstained. No ethics guidance is referenced anywhere in the minutes.

Michael Shinozaki cast the sole dissenting vote. His opposition is critical. According to the meeting record, he raised concerns about the financial terms and the process itself, questioning whether the extension adequately protected the public interest and whether the ground rent and related conditions reflected fair value. He was the only director to vote no on the lease extension that embedded the mechanism later used to enable privatization.

It is also important to note how the record was later ratified. When the January 19, 2011 minutes were approved at a subsequent meeting, both Michael Shinozaki and Margaret Smith were absent. The approval was carried by a different subset of directors, meaning the formal ratification of the record occurred without either the sole dissenting vote or one of the vocal Rivercross-affiliated directors present.

What Happened Next Was Predictable

Once the ground lease was extended, the path forward was no longer speculative. The legal and financial framework necessary for privatization was in place.

Publicly, the 2011 vote was framed as a narrow response to mortgage maturity, capital needs, and the goal of maintaining affordability. That framing appeared repeatedly in board discussions and official summaries. But by that stage, affordability itself was no longer the open question being debated. The February 2010 discussions had already acknowledged Mitchell-Lama withdrawal as a real and contemplated outcome, and the lease terms approved in 2011 were structured to survive that withdrawal.

Behind closed doors, the implications were understood. The extended lease provided the long-term security lenders require. It anticipated a full exit from Mitchell-Lama. It set the conditions under which ground rent and fees would be renegotiated once the building converted. The vote did not declare an intent to privatize, but it made that outcome legally and financially possible.

In that sense, what followed was not a surprise. With refinancing secured and the structural barriers removed, Rivercross voted to leave Mitchell-Lama. By 2014, the building had gone private. The arbitration clause approved in 2011 was triggered exactly as designed.

It is also worth noting that Rivercross’s privatization did not proceed without resistance. As early as 2013, residents were publicly raising concerns about governance, arbitration leverage, and the long-term consequences of the deal structure, particularly the imbalance between early gains of Rivercross shareholders and long-term costs to the island as a whole. Those objections did not stop privatization, but they did change the context in which it unfolded. By the time the final settlement arrived, the process was no longer quiet.

Years later, in April 2018, RIOC was asked to approve a settlement resolving that arbitration and finalizing the financial terms of Rivercross’s exit.

The 2018 Meeting and the Sudden Absences

At the April 18, 2018 RIOC board meeting, Director Howard Polivy asked whether he should recuse himself from the Rivercross vote. He did. It was the first documented recusal in the entire Rivercross saga.

Who was not in the room matters just as much.

The published agenda for that meeting listed both Fay Fryer Christian and Margaret Smith as sitting board members. The minutes later revealed, in a single line in the President’s Report, that both had “recently resigned.” No dates were provided. No explanation followed.

RIOC agendas are typically finalized just three to four days before a meeting. In this case, Christian and Smith appeared on the agenda but were gone by the time the board convened, indicating their departures occurred abruptly, in a matter of days.

Board resignations do not require a vote, but context is usually known. Here, none was. Two Rivercross-connected directors were present for the votes that enabled privatization and absent in the final days when the settlement was finalized.

To complete the public record, we submitted a Freedom of Information Law request seeking the exact dates and circumstances of those resignations.

That absence mattered. The 2018 settlement did not simply formalize Rivercross’s future. It resolved arbitration on terms that shifted long-term financial burden onto the building, leaving Rivercross among the most heavily taxed residential properties on Roosevelt Island. While shareholders realized extraordinary value, the building now carries the cost. Yet, that settlement passed.

Correcting the Record about Fay

We need to be clear about what we got wrong, and what the record now shows.

In an earlier reporting, we stated that Fay Fryer Christian and Margaret Smith voted on the Rivercross settlement in 2018. That was incorrect. By the time the April 18, 2018 vote occurred, both women were no longer members of the RIOC board.

The confusion stemmed from the published agenda for the April 2018 meeting, which still listed both Christian and Smith as sitting board members. Their departures were noted only briefly in the President’s Report within the minutes themselves. That distinction was easy to miss, and it led to an error that we are correcting here.

Where the record diverges sharply from Fay Christian’s later statements is on the earlier, decisive votes.

Christian contacted David Stone on September 22, 2017, months before the 2018 settlement vote. Her response reads:

“Nor did I live in Rivercross during the time the vote about Rivercross’ lease extension; I lived in Westview. A reporter checks his data; do not rely on memory. The minutes are public record. Check, and make sure you are correct. If you want residents to think you are reporting truthfully, you should take my advise, check- reread minutes if reporting on a meeting.
Fay”

The minutes resolve that question. There were two Rivercross lease votes that mattered: one in 2010 and one in 2011. In both instances, Christian was a voting board member. When those votes were taken, she had a stake in Rivercross. She voted in favor of the lease extension and did not recuse.

Margaret Smith did the same and was vocal in pushing the process forward.

The documentary record is unambiguous.

The Questions That Remain

Rivercross is not an isolated case. It unfolded under governance structures that remain unchanged, and under a public authority that is once again negotiating land lease extensions that will shape Roosevelt Island’s future for decades. As a new ten-year lease extension moves forward, the lesson from Rivercross is not about the outcome, but about the process that made that outcome inevitable.

The record now shows that privatization was enabled early, without recusal, by directors who lived in the building and stood to benefit. It also shows that when the consequences of those decisions were finally resolved, those same directors were no longer in the room.

What remains unanswered is narrower, and more troubling.

Why were conflicts acknowledged only at the end, after the outcome was locked in?
And why did two Rivercross-connected board members step down simultaneously, in a matter of days, without public explanation?

Those questions remain open. We are still looking.

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