Finally unshackled from board chair RuthAnne Visnauskas’s smothering oversight, the Lydia Tang led Governance Committee moved incrementally ahead, last week.
by David Stone
The Roosevelt Island Daily News
Five Takeaways from the governance committee session
Reforming RIOC’s oversight and governance is a monumental task. Board member Lydia Tang took it on with determination to slice through a decade of negligence. The majority of that negligence can be attributed to RuthAnne Visnauskas, a Hochul flunky committed to hard right intransigence.
Visnauskas was apparently assigned a task of blocking changes at RIOC. This left the Hochul/Haynes alliance in control. Visnauskas slowly ceded ground as the state agency began falling apart.
Credit goes to Tang for hanging in with unfaltering support from fellow board member Ben Fhala. Last week, we saw some of the ongoing results.
One: Tang Can Manage A Mob
With a diverse committee of bright people, all often talking at the same time, Tang was a steadying anchor. RIOC’s only surviving attorney, Lada Stasko, injected legal sensibility into blue sky proposals. Fhala, board member Conway Ekpo as well as community committee members Margie Smith and Audrey Tannen batted ideas around and back.
Tang didn’t flinch. While wryly noting that her agenda would never get finished before shutting down at 5:00, she kept a balance on chaos. Few harsh words were spoken and none without a smile and even a little laughter.
Two: This Governance Committee Works
As reported earlier, the agenda was ambitious. That was necessary because, after a ten year absence, the committee has a lot to do. But while allowing for a broad range of discussion, Tang was willing to leave some work for the future.
Fhala and Ekpo were often at odds, but that didn’t bog things down. There was a kind of mutual respect, if not agreement. Fhala’s ideals clashed with Ekpo’s pragmatism but compromises were found.
A sound idea inaugurated by Fhala and Tang yields positive results at every meeting. A pair of community members, Margie Smith and Audrey Tannen, took seats because of their expertise and experiences.
Both added significantly to every discussion. Smith’s insights as a former board member kept focus on the reality of RIOC’s way of doing business – for good or ill. Tannen, for her part, knows her way around organizations and what works or doesn’t.
Three: we found out who conway ekpo is
During his first two years on the board, Ekpo – at least publicly – did little or nothing except complete the quorum for meetings and always vote “Yes.” Whatever the story was there, he’s brought his considerable skillset to the governance committee process.
Including witty asides, Ekpo persistently drew discussions back into the real world of possibilities while backing Fhala’s best ideas. His was a sort of balancing act between what can be and can’t or shouldn’t. It’s a role no one has played in the past and can be critical as RIOC struggles to right itself.
Four: Purchasing is a disaster
Focusing on how RIOC spends public money, Fhala brought in Kirti Gandhi. He is an experienced engineer whose firm has worked with RIOC for over a decade. Or at least, they have tried to.
Gandhi, with copious documents, showed how winning a bid and doing things the right way led to not being paid money due his firm. His work started with winning an award for inspecting and designing helix repairs in 2013. The award included an unknown amount for overseeing the resulting project, but that did not happen…
…until five years later when he suddenly got a message that RIOC was finally ready to go ahead with construction. This was off because conditions changed over five years. It was also complicated by RIOC’s hiring a contractor that cut corners everywhere and was not meeting specifications.
Although Gandhi openly suspected corruption within RIOC allowing noncompliance, The Daily’s follow up investigation suggests otherwise. That notwithstanding, Gandhi Engineering did as best it knew how and billed RIOC monthly as the work continue.
But the story doesn’t end there because, despite numerous efforts, the company was never paid for its work.
The presentation revealed a RIOC in waves of disarray and lacking basic accountability. No surprise there, but this revelation underscored Fhala’s insistence that RIOC’s purchasing practices need a total overhaul.
Five: Finally
The biggest but least visible takeaway from the Governance Committee meetings so far is that there is a long way to go. By-laws must be rewritten and policies from personnel oversight to purchasing need overhauling.
Although Tang and Fhala have devoted many hours and fought through mountains of resistance, their work has only begun. Ahead lies a battle with a hard right board majority that lives in a fantasy world where everything is hunky-dory despite the train wreck-like reality in front of this state agency.
Yet, Tang is leading the committee in the right direction with the right style. She’s invited diversity as well as transparency. She’s earned the respect of public officials exhausted from endless volleys of complaints about RIOC.
The big unknown, of course, is the extended indefinite state of leadership with both CEO Shelton Haynes and Chief Counsel Gretchen Robinson on paid leave since January. The charges against them are clear, but instead of taking action, the board’s in a holding pattern… while money leaks out of the coffers every day.
Nothing is going far forward until that mess gets settled.
The Five Amendments That Sold Out Roosevelt Island
Roosevelt Island did not lose control of its southern waterfront in a single deal. It happened in five quiet steps. Five amendments. Five missed chances to renegotiate.
