The Committee Man
How outcomes stopped being shaped and started being approved
Committees are supposed to be where outcomes are shaped. They are meant to be the place where questions slow decisions down, where competing interests surface, and where public responsibility is exercised before anything reaches a formal vote.
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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