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Report Card On Neighborhood Parks


New York City's neighborhood parks showed a small improvement overall this year, according to the second annual Report Card on Parks released by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, although a quarter of the city's parks still have failing grades. Like last year, the city's worst performing parks are largely in the outer boroughs, while four of the ten top-scoring parks are in Manhattan.

To compile the report card, the group sent inspectors last summer to the each of the city's 195 neighborhood parks (whose size measures one to 20 acres) to rate parks in eight different categories, including playgrounds, passive recreational areas, athletic fields and courts, bathrooms, and drinking fountains. These features were graded for cleanliness, maintenance, safety and structural integrity. Attention was paid to whether repairs, lawn-mowing, painting, and other maintenance jobs were neatly and properly done.

The good news is that slightly more than half the parks received an "A" or a "B" up from 43 percent in 2003. In addition, areas where the parks department has focused capital investment in recent years - the playgrounds, pathways, and sitting areas - scored as well as they had the previous year.

But the other side of the coin is that nearly half of the city's parks were rated "C" or lower, and 25 percent received a "D" or an "F." Sixty-five percent of the parks that received an "F" in 2003 got the lowest grade again this year. The most problematic areas continue to be the bathrooms, drinking fountains, and athletic fields. Citywide, the average score for these features ranged from 52 to 66 percent.

New Yorkers for Parks found that the grades received by many parks depended on how recently maintenance crews had been there and how carefully they had done their jobs. The parks department uses roving crews that move from park to park because it lacks the resources to staff every park. In addition, most of the workers are participants in state and federally funded job-training programs, not parks staff skilled in plumbing, horticulture, or lawn care. "The maintenance is inconsistent," said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. "If you have a person for each park, a fixed position instead of roaming crews, you would see a marked improvement."

Sternberg Park in East Williamsburg, one of the ten lowest scorers for the second year in a row, illustrates the type of problems that led to poor report card scores. On a sunny day last spring, locals filled the benches to eat lunch, relax or watch their children play. But the garbage cans overflowed and trash lined the fences. The drinking fountain was choked with dirt, and the bathroom was locked. A bumpy ball field with large bare patches looked as if it had been neglected for years. A large capital investment is now slated for Sternberg Park, an expensive way for the city to compensate for the shortfall of funding for ongoing maintenance.

"While two years doesn't make a trend, if you look at the last two years of our report card, about 50 percent of the parks have received a 'C' or lower," said DiPalermo. "New York is not a 'C' city in the arts, in finance, in law. But in parks, we seem to be accepting that we are a 'C' city. And I think we fail our communities when we say a 'C' is acceptable."

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

City Parks And The Proposed Budget


In the discussion about whether the city should allow protesters to rally on Central Park's Great Lawn before the Republican Convention, one issue has been left out: Where would the money come from to fix the trampled grass and plants? The New York Post was wrong when it editorialized, "Plant a new lawn. Grass seed is cheap." It requires money and skilled staff to keep a lawn green and lush. Even with ordinary use, the city's collective backyard needs frequent soil repair and reseeding. Yet New York City spends less than most major cities in the country on maintaining its parks. City funding for operating the parks has dwindled over the past two decades to less than half a percent of the city budget. That's why the lawns in many parks — those without the substantial private funding of Central Park — are little more than weeds and dirt.

This situation is unlikely to change in next year's budget, which will be finalized in negotiations between Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council this spring. With tax revenues up and increases projected for the next fiscal year, Mayor Bloomberg is proposing to increase spending in a number of areas. But just a small amount of extra money would trickle down to the parks department..

Although the numbers in the executive budget look good - $187 million in city funds to parks maintenance and operations, up from $164 million last year - the mayor is allocating about the same amount of money to parks as last year. Most of this increase reflects a shift in funding sources for the parks job training program, which is covered by state and federal funding through the Human Resources Administration. Next year, however, the city will be paying the program's supervisors through the parks department budget.

There is some real new funding, however. The mayor's budget provides money for 34 new employees to run the recently opened Chelsea Recreation Center. It is the first recreation center opened in the city in more than 30 years, offering state-of-the-art facilities and numerous activities for children and adults in an area with few parks or other places for recreation.

The budget also provides for hiring 40 new architects to work in the capital division on renovation and new construction projects.

Aside from those new items, the executive budget sticks mostly to the usual game where the mayor eliminates previously funded services only to restore them in negotiations with the City Council, although there are slightly fewer cuts from the current budget than in recent years. This tactic diverts attention from the larger issue of the need for significant increases for a department that has lost more than half of its fulltime staff over the past 15 years.

Unlike last year, when funding cuts originally proposed by the mayor would have closed the Queens and Prospect Park zoos, Mayor Bloomberg allocated $9.2 million to the Wildlife Conservation Society for the city's three zoos. He also put $6.3 million in the budget for seasonal park employees, about half the money needed to keep staffing at the current level during the months when the parks are most heavily used. However, he eliminated all funding for street tree pruning, while adding $6 million for fighting the Asian long-horned beetle to make up for cuts in federal funding.

More than 200 people, organized by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, descended on the City Council offices in April to lobby for the restoration of tree-pruning and seasonal worker funding, and also to ask their council members to allocate an extra $20 million to the parks department for gardeners, tree pruners, enforcement officers, and other fulltime professional staff. "The city is in a better economic position," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks. He noted that when the economy improved in the early 1990s, the parks operating budget was never restored. Sacrifices were necessary after 9/ll, he said, but "we don't want to be the forgotten child again."

"We've shown from our Ernst & Young study how parks investment pays its way," said DiPalermo. The study found rising real estate values and higher tax revenues in neighborhoods where parks were restored and continued to be maintained. "That's the economic side," he said. "One just needs to look at Central Park to understand what investing in parks means to the quality of our city life."

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parks Opportunity Program


For six months in 2003, Florence Lugo cleaned parks in Lower Manhattan while participating in the Parks Opportunity Program, a paid welfare-to-work program that has trained thousands of welfare recipients, mostly women, over the past three years. "The program helped motivate me to get off welfare and look forward to the future of having a permanent job," she said. But even though she received excellent evaluations, she said, so far she has been unable to find long-term work.

Lugo's experience was typical of the participants surveyed in a study of the program conducted by Community Voices Heard, an organization of low-income people. The group campaigned to change the city's Work Experience Program, which required welfare recipients to do unpaid work in exchange for welfare benefits, into the paid Parks Opportunity Program, which is the largest public transitional employment program in the country.

Most of the program participants maintain and clean the parks, although a small percentage work at playgrounds and recreation centers, in security, or doing clerical tasks. The program pays participants for four days of work and one day of job search assistance and training provided by the parks department. Workers in the first two phases of the program earned from $9.38 to $12.50 an hour for jobs that lasted up to 11-1/2 months, and were members of District Council 37, which represents park workers. In the current phase of the program, positions last six months, pay $7.50 an hour and no longer have union status.

The study, Wages Work!, questioned 101 out of a random sample of 200 people who participated in the first phase of the program in 2001. It found that receiving a paycheck changed their feelings about work. Most survey respondents said they enjoyed their work, developed confidence, and were motivated to find a full-time job. Almost 93 percent said they would have liked to continue in a permanent job in the parks. But the program was less successful in helping participants make the leap to the workforce. Only 15.5 percent had gotten permanent jobs, and only 22 percent had held at least one job since working in the parks.

The study found that the training and education offered to participants in addition to the experience gained on the job was limited -- mostly focused on job readiness and search skills like good work habits, interviewing, and appropriate dress. Many participants were not offered the opportunity for more specific training, like civil service exam preparation and commercial driver's license training. More than 90 percent of survey respondents said that job search assistance could have been improved.

Because the fulltime staff of the parks department has continued to decrease, there are few jobs available using the skills participants are learning on the job. The report recommended that the transitional program offer a variety of positions in different city agencies and non-profits, and that it provide more education, including toward a high school equivalency diploma, as well as more specialized skills training. It also concluded that the program needed to offer more outside supports, like childcare, transportation money, and helping participants keep benefits like food stamps and health insurance to bridge the gap between the program's wages and what it really costs to make ends meet.

Bob Garafola, Deputy Commissioner for Management and Budget at the Department of Parks and Recreation, said that the department now offers many more training opportunities and internships including in building maintenance, computers, and even phlebotomy -- than it did when the program first started. The department is also looking to develop new courses, like a certified nursing assistance program in connection with Lehman College. He said that job placements have tripled since last year, with 1000 participants getting jobs since July 2003.

Aside from its goal of helping people off welfare and into long-term jobs, the Parks Opportunity Program has been essential for maintaining the city's 28,000 acres of parkland. As the parks fulltime staff has declined -- from 5,400 in 1980 to around 1,900 in the next year's proposed budget -- workers in the job training program are doing the bulk of the maintenance in the parks. According to figures from the Independent Budget Office cited in the study, in fiscal year 2004 there were 2,496 participants in the current transitional program, as well as 446 Work Experience Program workers, but just 850 fulltime parks employees assigned to park maintenance. The transitional workers are paid through the Human Resources Administration, using federal and state funding.

"If the program is ended, the parks department could not function," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, the parks advocacy group. But his group sees the reliance on temporary workers paid by funding outside the parks department budget as "a way that the city has been able to not invest in parks." He said, "It's a Band-Aid for the parks department, because what's underneath the Band-Aid is the lack of full-time employees."

DiPalermo also said, "It's very difficult to manage people who come in every two weeks and stay at most six months," although he thinks the department does an admirable job. "Does that model work well in the private sector? I would tend to think not."

However, Deputy Commissioner Garafola noted that the parks department has a tradition of seasonal jobs and has a lot of experience managing short-term workers. "Everyone always wants more fulltime staff," he said. "You take the resources you get and try to make the most of it, and I think we've been pretty successful in doing that."

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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