I do not usually write ahead of the week’s rhythm. Fridays suit an old woman. They allow time for tea, rereading, and the small mercy of correcting one’s own excessive cleverness. But this cannot wait for Friday. The board is scheduled to vote before then, and a warning delivered after the vote is not a warning. It is merely a footnote with better manners.
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.
A brief note:
This newsletter is written once a week and supported almost entirely by readers sharing it quietly with one another. If you were forwarded this, subscribing ensures it arrives without relying on someone else to remember you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If one person came to mind while you were reading this, consider forwarding it to them. That kind of sharing is how this work survives.
Share
Before the board votes, open the door. Show the search. Show the recusals. Show the safeguards. Then ask residents for trust. Not before.
