A Treasurer Without Teeth: Why RIOC’s Board Can’t Fix What Albany Controls
Albany holds the purse. Volunteers hold the blame. The Treasurer proposal won’t fix RIOC’s broken power structure—unless we admit who’s really in charge.
The Governance Committee is trying to fix a machine they don’t control. Here’s why assigning oversight to an unpaid volunteer is a dangerous distraction—and why the State’s own budget office should own what it already runs.
This article follows a months-long thread of reporting on the structural failures of governance at the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation. It is a companion piece to Eleanor Rivers’ feature, "Checks, Unbalanced", which chronicles the Governance Committee’s effort to create a new Treasurer role on the board—an unpaid position intended to shore up oversight in an increasingly unaccountable system. That effort itself builds on Eleanor’s earlier piece, "Pier Pressure: When Leadership Sinks", which exposed the vacuum at the top of RIOC and the disarray among those charged with guiding it. Together, these articles paint a picture of a board trying to navigate powerlessness, while the real levers of control remain elsewhere.
Let’s get this straight: the Governance Committee is discussing adding a Treasurer role to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation board—a position that would be filled by one of its unpaid volunteer members, with no staff, no authority, and no meaningful access to the financial levers that actually govern this $40 million-a-year entity.
It’s a classic RIOC maneuver: give a powerless board just enough structure to imply oversight, without ever yielding the control Albany keeps tightly locked.
The suggestion came from CLM, RIOC’s outside counsel, during a recent Governance Committee meeting. The idea? Insert language into the bylaws to formalize a Treasurer and assign the role to a current board member. On paper, it reads like progress. In practice, it’s a setup. A volunteer without a salary, budget access, or real authority can’t be expected to provide meaningful financial oversight. They can, however, be blamed when things go wrong.
And make no mistake—things are already going wrong.
The Illusion of Oversight
Since 1984, when RIOC was created by state law as a public benefit corporation, it has maintained the appearance of community governance. Residents sit on the board, attend committee meetings, and vote on resolutions. But those same board members are explicitly prohibited from receiving compensation. And they are routinely denied access to key documents and decision-making processes.
The real power sits elsewhere: with the Chair of the Board (appointed by the Governor), the President/CEO (appointed by the Chair), and the representative from the Division of the Budget (DOB).
So while the Governance Committee—a committee comprised of volunteers—meets to discuss oversight reforms, the people who control the checkbook are watching from Albany.
This is not a theoretical problem. It’s a design feature of the law. It preserves the state’s grip on Roosevelt Island while allowing a facade of local governance. What CLM’s proposed Treasurer role does is simple: it creates a target. Someone to absorb responsibility without being granted authority.
Who Controls the Purse?
The real financial oversight on Roosevelt Island already exists. It lives in the Division of the Budget. Every major financial decision, capital project, or budget line item passes through Albany’s filter. The Board’s role is advisory at best. More often, it’s ceremonial.
So if RIOC is serious about having a Treasurer, the position shouldn’t be assigned to a powerless board member. It should be formalized and acknowledged for what it already is: the Budget Director’s office is the de facto Treasurer.
Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
Accountability Requires Authority
You cannot task someone with fiscal oversight without giving them tools, resources, and authority. That’s governance theater. The volunteer board has no audit team, no finance office, and no independent counsel. They can’t even call a meeting without internal resistance.
The Treasurer proposal, in this context, becomes not a reform—but a liability trap. One more way the state can insulate itself from the consequences of its own decisions.
If the Governor and their appointees want the board to function, they need to empower it. That means pay, access, and authority. Until then, giving a volunteer a title doesn’t fix a thing.
A Final Note on the Governance Committee
Despite the constraints, the Governance Committee matters. It matters because it is the only forum where residents are still trying to shape something better. The proposals may be limited, the outcomes often ignored, but the effort reveals the cracks in the system.
What makes the Governance Committee uniquely important is its power—if used with clarity and purpose—to rewrite the rules of engagement. With strategic adjustments to the bylaws, the committee could shift the tides:
Granting the board sole authority over hiring and firing RIOC’s key executives.
Creating a paid employee role—such as a Treasurer—who serves as a board liaison with mandated authority, directly accountable to the board or its committee chairs, not to the Chair or CEO.
Defining the Treasurer’s responsibilities in statute or bylaws to ensure transparency, independence, and responsiveness to board inquiries.
Requiring that each board committee meet a minimum number of times per year, so that legally mandated bodies like Audit or Governance can’t go dormant for years at a time, as they have before.
Reasserting compliance with state law, which currently does not permit the merger of the Audit and Budget committees—a consolidation that weakens oversight and violates the intended structure of fiscal governance.
These are not technical tweaks. They are structural reforms that could return accountability to the board and transparency to Roosevelt Island. The Governance Committee has the map. The question now is whether they will use it.
The answer isn’t a hollow Treasurer role. It’s to demand that the people who already hold the money also hold the accountability.
Since January 14th, RIOC has had nothing to say. We’re still listening.