Although RIOC president/CEO Shelton J. Haynes noted the “team’s” contributions, they mostly served as a buffer against community involvement.
They invited not a single resident as a speaker, failing even at drumming up enough word salad from RIOC officials for filling up the sixteen minutes needed to match up with the national moment of silence at 8:46.
Two speakers, Haynes and Public Safety chief Kevin Brown managed ten minutes of talk, including Brown’s reading the names of those who paid with their lives in the World Trade Center attack.
Six minutes short, at 8:40, at a loss for what to do, the organizers collapsed into “two minutes of silence” anyway. While the rest of the nation waited, RIOC rolled over into photo ops and self-congratulations.
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Still Searching: Transparency Delayed at RIOC
New York’s Freedom of Information Law rests on a basic principle: government records belong to the public unless an agency can identify a lawful reason to withhold them. For Roosevelt Island residents, that right matters because RIOC controls public land, infrastructure, transportation, contracts and development without functioning as a locally elected government.
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