Old RIOC, New Lawyer

Melissa Wade called the General Counsel process “textbook old school RIOC behavior.” President Jones now has to show whether the Board governed or merely approved.

President Jones has become better at saying RIOC cares.

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.