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Parks funding stalled in Mayor Adams' budget update, as fires plague green spaces
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Nov 23, 2024
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Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
By
Michelle Bocanegra
Published Nov 23, 2024
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Park lovers and their allies in the City Council were dismayed to find no additional funding for the most pressing issues at city parks, when Mayor Eric Adams announced this week there was more money in the city’s coffers than originally thought.
Despite more than $200 million in additional revenue for the current fiscal year and deep reductions in migrant-related spending, no new money was directed to alleviate strains on parks department staffing, as brush fires have torn through city green spaces in recent weeks and the Council looks to expand staffing as part of its composting efforts.
The parks department was allocated a $618 million budget when the budget was adopted in June. That represented more than $20 million in cuts from actual spending the previous year. The agency has lost hundreds in headcount, largely driven by a hiring freeze, program eliminations and attrition.
Now, with something of a windfall for other agencies in the annual November budget update, parks advocates and Council members are pushing for more money amid worries that staffing shortages will lead to decline in city green spaces.
“I can tell you I'm furious,” said Adam Ganser, head of the advocacy organization, New Yorkers for Parks. “I can't say that I'm surprised.”
The mayor’s budget update includes just under $2 million in lockable bins for parks as part of the administration’s vision for containerizing trash.
But advocates say that does nothing to materially address their concerns that parks staffers are being left in the lurch by austerity measures, in the face of other budget restorations like police academy classes.
“There's more hiring for police, sanitation is fully funded. The libraries and cultural [institutions] are fully funded and yet parks has been singled out as really the only entity that is not only not getting additional funding, but is getting cut, and there's no rhyme or reason around it,” Ganser said.
City lawmakers and parks experts have said the unprecedented amount of fires in parks as a result of the drought could have been mitigated with better park maintenance: people cleaning up debris, clearing away brush and enforcing rules such as no smoking or campfires.
“This budget modification is completely silent on money for our parks,” Councilmember Justin Brannan said on WNYC, hours after the mayor unveiled the updated plan. “There's tons of money out there for cops, but there seems to be money for little else, and it just doesn't add up.”
Spokespeople for the mayor did not provide comment on Friday.
Parks advocates banded together in the aftermath of the mayor’s announcement to decry what they describe as a lack of attention to the most urgent issues facing the parks department.
“At a time when our city’s parks are literally burning, Mayor Adams’ refusal to restore NYC Parks budget cuts is a slap in the face to the New Yorkers who rely on these vital spaces and the Parks workers struggling to maintain them,” reads a statement from the Play Fair for Parks Coalition, which includes Ganser’s organization and the New York League of Conservation Voters.
As a mayoral candidate, Adams pledged to make sure that the parks budget accounted for at least one percent of the city’s overall budget — it’s currently at about half that amount.
“We went into November thinking we could at least get something, and we got nothing,” Alia Soomro, deputy director for city policy at the New York League of Conservation Voters, said.
Soomro echoed Ganser in saying that libraries, often used as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations, saw their budget restored, allowing for the return of seven-day service to locations that lost it as a result of cuts.
But she worries that parks funding is a different story.
“You could make the argument that parks has really been so disinvested in over the past few decades that it's a special case,” she said. “People don't take it seriously.”
Tagged
Politics
budget
new york city
parks
Mayor Eric Adams
City Council
Michelle Bocanegra
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