For New Yorkers, shopping online means less travel time and, on occasion, lower costs. It also means more trash to put out at the curbside. Because most online retailers rely on major private carriers such as UPS and FedEx to deliver their goods, this holiday season saw not only a sharp rise in local deliveries but a similar rise in the amount of paper, cardboard and plastic pushed into the city waste stream.
According to the Department of Sanitation, New Yorkers left more than 8,300 tons of cardboard and mixed paper at the curbside in the first full collection week after the Christmas holiday, a 21 percent jump over the same period last year.
This year’s post-holiday numbers were inflated somewhat. Sanitation spokesman Matthew Lipani notes that an awkward alignment of Monday holidays that forced many residents to hold onto their recyclables an extra week. Still, immediate pre-Christmas tonnage -- 7,258 tons this year vs. 6,033 tons last year -- showed a 20 percent increase in paper recyclables and paralleled a national 25 percent surge in holiday online sales according to the Internet research firm comScore.
Such numbers indicate a cultural sea change not only in how New Yorkers are shopping but also in how much trash and recyclables the city will have to process in the years to come. Given the lack of studies on the overall online shopping “life cycle” -- the total net effect on the environment once products have made their way from raw material all the way to consumer’s wastebasket -- environmentalists, for the moment, see only a collection of positives and negatives adding up to a giant question mark.
“There is no guarantee that the Internet’s net environmental impact will be positive,” writes Nevin Cohen, a professor of environmental science at The New School. “For decades, technology watchers predicted that the personal computer would result in the â€paperless office,’ but U.S. shipments of office paper actually jumped 33 percent between 1986 and 1997. E-commerce could have similarly negative effects.”
From a short-term perspective, the cultural shift away from brick and mortar retail seems to offer a net boost to the city’s recycling program. Of the city’s two major recycling contracts, the cardboard and mixed paper contract with Visy Paper is the one that actually pays the city for what it recycles (in pdf format), roughly $7 a ton according to the city’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recyling.
Because the Department of Sanitation also tends to divide per-route costs by the number of tons collected, extra cardboard at the curb in December and January means a better bottom line for the overall recycling program over the long term.
Balancing out such benefits, however, are several concerns. Cohen notes that the biggest benefit associated with online retail is the reduced number of vehicle miles as shoppers take fewer trips to the local mall or department store. As December’s transit strike demonstrated, however, many New Yorkers rely on mass transit (not cars) to do their Christmas shopping. “In New York, there might not be an environmental savings,” says Cohen. “In fact, the net might even be negative once you figure in the additional vehicle miles needed to deliver packages.”
A second concern is the amount of new, non-recyclable or hard-to- recycle materials that come with products ordered online. Many retailers and shippers, in order to protect their goods, load up on plastic cushioning materials such as foam rubber, bubble wrap, and expanded polystyrene -- a material many know by the Dow Chemical trade name Styrofoam. So far, the city does not collect these materials nor does it have many private company suitors begging to take these materials off the city’s hands.
The reason, says Betsy Steiner, executive director for the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers, boils down to the materials’ very nature. Bulky, light and easy to produce in virgin form, foam and bubble wrap are a tough fit for a recycling industry that makes its profit on a per-ton basis.
“Basically, you’re collecting and shipping air,” Steiner says. “So for a program to work, it has to be localized and in very, very large quantities to be economically viable.”
Shipping air is cheap, of course, but not as convenient as simply dropping things off at the curb. Steiner says her organization gladly accepts mailed packages that include the molded foam packaging used to shield iPods and other modern electronic products. Those looking to recycle foam peanuts, a product her organization doesn’t accept, can visit the nearest UPS Store or visit the Plastic Loose Fill Council’s “Find a Collection Center” , enter a zip code and get the address of the closest business that collects loose fill foam.
The day when New Yorkers can simply leave such materials in the blue can at the curbside is still a long way off, however. In the meantime, organizations such as INFORM, a Wall Street-based non- profit firm organization promoting “strategies for a better environment” advocates a European-style system that shifts the responsibility for the waste processing of worn-out products and packaging away from municipalities and consumers and back onto the producers themselves.
“It’s kind of like a welfare system that we’ve generated for manufacturers here in the U.S.,” says Lloyd Hicks, director of INFORM’s solid waste prevention program.
Hicks holds up Germany as the most obvious counterexample. In 1991, the government mandated that manufacturers and distributors take back all transport packaging, including expanded foam and blister wrap. Manufacturers that don’t wish to process such materials can opt out via the Green Dot program, a non-profit program which finances packaging material recycling. To gain membership in the program, companies pay a scaled fee depending on the amount of material recycled. Once in, they earn the right to put the Green Dot logo on their packages, making their products more desirable to distributors who might otherwise bear the recycling responsibility.
“They’ve found a way to deliver the same products with less packaging,” says Hicks. “That’s one reason we believe there should be a way to provide a similar system in the U.S.”
The Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyler’s Steiner says her organization doesn’t endorse producer responsibility legislation. She says the real issue isn’t who pays for recycling so much as who is willing to buy the recycled materials once they’ve been processed.
“I think on the surface it looks like, oh, it’s getting paid for, but the bottom line is they’re still encountering problems on the end use market,” Steiner says. “That’s been the problem with plastics recycling globally. The raw material is so cheap you just get into the chicken or the egg thing.”
Cohen, the environmental science professor, shares Steiner’s sentiment somewhat. Like Steiner, he sees the Green Dot program as a top down solution to a bottom up problem -- i.e. individual consumers shifting their shopping patterns as a way to minimize both stress and seasonal costs. Unlike Steiner, however, he sees a chance to phase out polystyrene and phase in packaging technologies that deliver, at worst, a net neutral effect on the environment.
“The long term goal should be to develop two-way packaging that eliminates the waste,” Cohen says, pointing to NetFlix, a movie rental company which ships its DVDs in reusable envelopes, as a pioneering example. “It would be great if Amazon.com and other companies developed a similar method for shipping their products.”
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If you’re like most New York City homeowners, the recent combination of early winter snow and record high fuel prices already has you griping as you await the first monster Keyspan bill of the season.
If you’re a researcher or entrepreneur specializing in environmentally-friendlier alternative fuels, on the other hand, it has been a time to celebrate.
“People are jazzed,” says John Nettleton, and by people, he means people like his colleagues at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a Cornell University research group. “They see it as a real opportunity.”
Nettleton’s group has two projects under way within the city involving “bio-fuel,” specifically bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is a mixture of refined vegetable oil and ordinary petroleum diesel. By promoting the use of such fuels, environmentalists hope to reduce petroleum emissions while at the same time providing an additional market for local farmers and recyclers.
Earlier this year, Nettleton’s group conducted a survey of New York restaurants and put the total amount of waste vegetable oil available to recyclers more than a million gallons in Brooklyn alone. (Almost 90 percent of that total is currently recycled, Nettleton says, but most of that recycled product goes toward the production of cosmetics, soaps and other organic derivatives. ) Part of the beauty of bio-diesel is that the “bio” part can include a wide range of oils, everything from used sesame oil to animal fat and grease.
“There’s a huge potential supply of restaurants and food service establishments in New York City, I think 26,000 restaurants by the last count,” says James Quigley, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College.
Percentages vary, but the most common bio-diesel blend, 20 percent vegetable oil, 80 percent petroleum -- often referred to as B20 -- is already price-competitive when compared to regular diesel and gasoline. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report on alternative fuel prices, the average Sept. 2005 price of B20 was $2.91 compared to $2.81 for ordinary diesel and $2.74 for regular gasoline.
The cost will become even more competitive because of a recent federal tax credit giving heating oil producers a dollar back for every gallon of virgin soybean oil they use to produce bio-diesel.
Not only is bio-diesel cleaner-burning than heating oil but it also delivers better efficiency, thus reducing stress on aging boilers. Add in the fact that a recent executive mandate from Governor George Pataki earmarks a five percent minimum of the state’s fuel consumption portfolio for bio-diesel and you have all the requirements for a fast-growing marketplace.
How fast is the market growing for bio-diesel? Environmental Fuel Alternatives, a Brooklyn startup with production facilities In Newark, claims to have sold two million gallons of bio-diesel in less than two years’ time.
“If I could get the production up and everything I wanted, it would be double,” says Bob Lindenbaum, the company’s chief operating officer.
Other heating fuel suppliers are following suit. Mark Schildwachter, an executive at the Bronx heating oil wholesaler Fred M. Schildwachter & Sons, Inc., says his company is currently in the process of switching over its equipment to accommodate B20. The company already offers bio-diesel to customers who wish to order it but expects to ramp up production to all its customer within the coming year.
James Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy personally drives a 20 year-old Volkswagen that can switch over to bio-diesel as a fuel source once the engine has been properly warmed up. Quigley permitted bio- diesel vehicles to be shown off alongside hybrid and fuel cell models in the Center’s “Clean Car Fair” held on Earth Day earlier this year.
As noted in many environmental journals, bio-diesel is, at heart, an imperfect energy solution. Even if you raise the blend ratio to 100 percent refined vegetable oil, you still face the continued problem of turning long-chain carbon molecules into airborne carbon gases such as carbon monoxide, a poison, and carbon dioxide, a heat- trapping chemical considered by many scientists to be a root cause of rising global temperatures.
According to a 1998 U.S. Department of Energy study, mixing vegetable oil with diesel reduces sulfur emissions but actually raises nitrogen oxide emissions, a key contributor to urban smog. Maybe that’s why those looking to clean up local skies and reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuel see bio-diesel and other carbon-based biofuels as the economic equivalent of methadone maintenance -- i.e. a compromise solution for a society too addicted to quit petroleum cold turkey.
“You could say bio-diesel is a transitional fuel like natural gas,” says Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy. “It gives us a sustainable resource, and it allows us to put people to work in sustainable jobs while at the same time reducing the export of dollars in exchange for exhaustible fossil fuels that pollute our atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”
Quigley’s program owes its existence to a $2 million Department of Energy appropriation secured by local Congressman JosĂ© Serrano in 2003 to help combat historic air quality problems in the Bronx. As director of the program, Quigley would love to see a bigger local emphasis on technologies that get rid of the emissions issue altogether, technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaic systems and wind turbines. As a realist, however, Quigley recognizes that bio-fuels are an important first step -- one that could, in time, tilt the free market to these other energy alternatives.
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Tar Beach, those black tarred rooftops where regular New Yorkers got their summer tans, is celebrated in song, in movies like “On The Waterfront” and in a well-known quilt and children’s book by Faith Ringgold. But if they evoke the same kind of nostalgia as stoop ball and stick ball, those roofs turn out to be bad for the environment.
The asphalt and concrete trap sunlight and heat and contribute to what scientists call the “urban heat island” effect that makes the city as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the suburbs. The difference in temperature translates into some $100 million in additional energy costs per year.
That is why a movement is growing to replace New York City’s iconic rooftops with something cooler, literally.
A cool roof, or “white roof” -- as simple as a basic coating of light-colored water sealant – is the roof of the future in New York, says Laurie Kerr, an architect in the Office of Sustainable Design, the eco- conscious division of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “The city controls maybe one in ten buildings in terms of square footage. Over the next 20 years, all of those buildings should have cool roofs.”
But others are pushing an alternative -- a “green roof,” in effect a rooftop garden, with plants (even trees) atop a layer of soil.
Common in Europe, and growing more popular in American cities out West, green roofs remain a challenge in New York.
“Roof tops are an enormous wasted resource,” says Leslie Hoffman, executive director of EarthPledge, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that has helped build green roofs atop eight local buildings, including the Rheingold Gardens building in Bushwick, a 250-unit senior housing facility. Her organization’s efforts are paralleled by Sustainable South Bronx, the Hunts Point non-profit that recently opened a demonstration green roof project atop the American Banknote Building. In an interview with WNYC at the time of the installation, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said the borough was home to at least nine green roof installations. “We can’t force anybody" to install green roofs, Carrion said, "but we are certainly creating incentives by saying we will be very supportive of your project."
Expanding that support to the rest of the city could take some time. Green roofs, while attractive to look at and useful when it comes to minimizing both heat and water runoff, are roughly five times as expensive as the typical roof installation.
Cool roofs demand less of an investment from private property owners and less paperwork for city contractors. With the recent signing of a new law mandating that all major city- funded construction and renovation projects meet energy conservation standards laid out by the U.S. Green Building Council, Kerr from the Office of Sustainable Design expects most projects to go with the easier white roof method.
Green roof advocates, meanwhile, are working hard to boost the economic case for green roofs in the hopes of convincing city leaders to set up incentives for builders and property owners.
“The problem is the reflective roofs don’t deliver one twentieth the benefits of a green roof,” says Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a Canadian advocacy group.
Peck points to green roof’s ability to limit storm water runoff, something the city needs to do in order to bring its sewage system in compliance with the Clean Water Act. The largest green roof on record, a 10.4 acre installation at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge River truck factory, is expected to cut that facility’s storm water runoff -- and the resulting sewer bill -- in half. If New York City were to take a cue from Portland and some European cities and charge building owners for the amount of storm water they send into local sewers, the return on investment issue would quickly balance out.
Peck also points to green roofs’ ability to filter pollutants and to remove carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Like their counterparts in urban forestry, green roof promoters are hoping to come up with models that put a dollar figure on such services.
Should those dollar figures become available, however, they might not be enough to convince individual building owners to make the switch, says Stuart Gaffin, a scientist at the Center for Climate System Research at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences. Earlier this year, Gaffin served as host of a graduate seminar on green roofs. In their attempt to put together a model on the environmental benefits of green roof installation, however, they found most of the benefits appearing at the societal level, as opposed to the individual property owner.
“You try to get the economic benefits to the owner and you run out of things pretty quickly,” says Gaffin. “There aren’t a lot of direct cost-benefit effects.”
Gaffin says he has deals with two local schools -- one public, one private -- to install and monitor green roofs. With these plots, he hopes to build up local data which can then be used to convince the city council to offer additional incentives for green roof owners.
Gaffin and his students are joined in their effort by Diana Balmori, the architectural designer of the city’s largest green roof, atop the Silvercup Studios facility in Long Island City. Built with the help of Earth Pledge and the New York Power Authority, the installation is the first of what Balmori expects to be two major installations in that neighborhood. Balmori plans to use rainwater data from both installations to push city leaders to follow in the footsteps of their Seattle and Chicago counterparts and add green roofs to the evolving “green building” concept.
“It would be really great if New York grew some industries around this, but it hasn’t reached the critical mass to make it affordable enough for the majority of the population,” Balmori says. “With just some minimum incentives, that turnaround could happen. All we need is that relatively small push.”
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Should New Yorkers sacrifice the city’s last remaining wetlands to help the citizens of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast regain theirs?
The bargain isn’t that direct, of course, but as the White House and Congress budgetmakers count up the dollars needed to meet President George W. Bush’s September 15 commitment to rebuild Mississippi River levees, extend Gulf Coast breakwaters, and restore the once massive network of flood-absorbing bayoux around the New Orleans metropolis, those with a stake in local, federally-subsidized marsh restoration are already bracing for impact.
“The [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers has a big plan to do about 70 to 90 acres of restoration next spring,” says Don Riepe, Jamaica Bay guardian for the American Littoral Society. “This project only costs $16 million, but with the Bush Administration promising $200 billion for the Gulf Coast, I’m wondering if we’re going to lose a lot of these projects as Congress or whoever authorizes the money for this takes it away.”
The $16 million project is already underway and already budgeted according to an August 3rd summary put out by the New York District of the Army Corps of Engineers. It involves the relocation of sand and sediment gathered in the dredging of local shipping channels and the spraying of that sand onto targeted islands such as Elders Point and Yellow Bar Hassock.
Based on a successful 2003 pilot study that increased both the acreage and amount of erosion-resistant vegetation of Big Egg marsh, the project is slated to commence this month with the dredging of Ambrose Channel at the entrance of Lower New York Bay and of Rockaway Channel at the entrance of Jamaica Bay. The gathered materials, estimated to be upwards of 200,000 cubic yards, will be stockpiled at the end of Floyd Bennett Field and relocated to local marshes in the spring of 2006.
While Riepe has few doubts that the project will go off as planned, it’s the fate of future projects that causes him concern. The restoration plan for Elders Point and Yellow Bar owes much to a mid-1990s policy shift on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers. After the upper Mississippi River flooded its banks in 1993, the federally-funded civil engineering agency began looking for alternative remedies to levee-raising, a tactic which had merely increased the volume of water penned in during flood conditions. Encouraged by environmental groups eager to regain wetlands lost when the Corps effectively channelized the river in the 1930s, the agency began buying up lowland portions of the river valley in an attempt to regain the river’s natural floodplain and thus create an escape valve for flood waters.
That eco-friendly strategy is sure to be modified in the coming years. Earlier in September, according to the Associated Press, the Justice Department sent an email to regional U.S. attorneys’ offices, seeking information on the role environmental lawsuits played in the delaying of federal funded levee-strengthening projects in and around New Orleans. The inquiry came on the heels of an Internet posting by the conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noting that in 1996 the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club sued to block an Army Corps of Engineers project to raise and fortify levees along the lower Mississippi.
Congressional Democrats, including New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, denounced the Department of Justice inquiry as a Bush Administration attempt to deflect blame at a time when polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving both the president and the entire federal government’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina. Subsequent news stories, meanwhile, have shown that the levees in question were eventually fortified and were not the levees that failed in the wake of Katrina.
Still, with the death toll from Hurricane Katrina still rising, restored habitats and healthy marshland will no doubt take a back seat to the simple protection of life and limb in the coming allocation of Congressional funds. What’s more, as fiscal conservatives float the argument that the $200 billion needed to fix the Gulf Coast should come from pet local projects, even a $16 million effort to fight marshland erosion in the heart of New York City has a target on its back.
Maybe that’s why Jamaica Bay’s primary Congressional benefactor, Democratic U.S. Representative (and former mayoral candidate) Anthony Weiner, when discussing next spring’s sand-spraying and other related projects, framed it as a way to strengthen the city’s own flooding defenses.
"We need to increase coastal protection programs in New York,” Weiner said, and such programs mean “marsh restoration, beach renourishment and the contruction of jetties and groins to protect waterfront communities like Manhattan Beach, Sheeps Head Bay, Rockaway, and Broad Channel."
Such arguments might not win over the newly ascendent deficit hawks in Congress, but they are playing well at City Hall. That’s where Jim Gennaro, Democratic council member for the 24th District in Central Queens and chairman of the council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, has secured the recent passage of two laws designed to push the city to the lead role in both protecting and reversing the loss of Jamaica Bay wetlands. Passed this spring, the first law calls for the development of a watershed protection plan encompassing Jamaica Bay and its surrounding environs. The second law calls for the creation of a task force to examine city-owned properties adjacent to Jamaica Bay and earmark which of those properties can be returned to wetlands status and put under the aegis of the parks department.
“I feel that each level of government has to be responsible and do what’s appropriate,” says Gennaro. “I think we’re still going to have [federal funding]. My focus is more on taking steps to try to stem the loss of the 40 or 50 acres of wetlands we lose every year from the forces that are at work now.”
Gennaro is particularly interested in finding a bigger role for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection in the restoration of Jamaica Bay. Currently, the department’s primary interaction with the bay comes via the 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant, a facility near the end of Flatlands Avenue that has been blamed for boosting the nitrogen content in the bay and possibly contributing to the die-off in local marsh grasses. Currently, the state Department of Environment Conservation, a superseding agency when it comes to waterway discharge, is looking to impose a cap on the maximum amount of nitrogen effluent released. Gennaro says he would rather avoid the inevitable litigation such a process would generate and simply give the Department of Environmental Protection a greater stake in keeping the bay’s waters healthy enough to support marsh ecosystems.
“We’re looking for creative ways to have DEP expand its role and they have been very receptive to that,” says Gennaro.“We want to take it beyond stormwater and sewage treatment and take it to the point that some of the properties that are managed by DEP, such as the old Pennsylvania Avenue landfill, would become prime spots for wetlands restoration.”
Such a strategy would literally work around the edges of the current problem. It would allow a percentage of the dry land along channelized inlets such as Hendrix Creek near Canarsie to revert back to their original wetlands state. It wouldn’t, however, be able to replace the fast-disappearing islands soon to be targetted by the Army Corps of Engineers and its sand-spraying project. That’s why environmental stakeholders such as Don Riepe of the American Littoral Society are keeping an eye on both the weather in the Gulf of Mexico and the political climate in Washington, D.C.
“If we don’t start doing these [sand-spraying] projects, we’ll never get a basis for restoration. We’ll lose the whole system,” he says. “I know in the past [the Army Corps of Engineers] have had a lot of projects on the books for Jamaica Bay, and they haven’t done them because Congress hasn’t authorized the money. I’m hoping it doesn’t happen again.”
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ENVIRONMENT
-Mayor's Waste Plan?
-Bronx Water Filtration
Garbage is a critical issue for New York City. Since the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, the city has paid high prices to ship its waste out of state. And 80 percent of the waste is currently handled by waste transfer stations in four, low-income neighborhoods
In October 2004, the Bloomberg administration issued a new solid waste plan, which would move most of the 50,000 tons of trash the city produces each day by rail or barge, instead of by truck. To do this, the city proposes reopening four marine transfer stations, piers where trucks can dump trash onto barges, to handle the city's residential waste. Critics say the plan does not address many issues like commercial waste or recycling. And it does not solve the problem of where the garbage ends up and how much the city must pay other states to dispose of it.
Safe, clean drinking water is also a critical issue for New York City and a state court ruled that the city must filter water that comes from the Croton Reservior. A water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was first proposed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the late 1990's and generated heated political debate. Some environmentalists argued that the water does not need to be filtered; parks advocates said it should not be built in limited green space; and residents of the north Bronx fear years of construction, noise, and dust. The plan was abandoned in 2001 because it lacked support of elected officials.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg revived the plan by offering two concessions. The city committed $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx and the city's Department of Environmental Protection agreed to do an environmental impact study.
At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.
Michael Bloomberg proposed the solid waste management plan that uses marine transfer stations rather than trucks.
Bloomberg was responsible for reviving the filtration plant project in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. He won the support of many local officials by offering $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx.
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The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation oversees more than 27,000 acres of parks, playgrounds, beaches and other recreational areas, giving New York the largest city park system in the country.
But the figures can be misleading. While the number includes masterpieces such as Central Park and Prospect Park, it also includes areas so decrepit that Park Commissioner Adrian Benepe said they should essentially be abandoned. Even counting those wastelands, New York City has fewer acres of green space per person than any other major American city.
Advocates blame many of the parks' problems on a lack of resources. In response, many want the city to devote one percent of its budget - or about $500 million - to park expenses, almost twice what it spends now. They have asked candidates to pledge that they will work toward this goal.
The parks department licenses about 600 businesses that pay to operate concessions, such as skating rinks, golf courses and restaurants, on park property. In 2003, this generated about $60 million. But instead of being spent on parks, the money goes into the city's general budget. Many parks advocates would like to change this and see the money go for parks – assuming, of course, that the city would not reduce its appropriation to the parks department as a result.
Faced with a federal court order that the city filter some of its drinking water, Mayor Michael Bloomberg authorized construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. To offset the loss of parkland - and to mollify Bronx residents angered by the decision - Bloomberg will spend an extra $240 million on Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks. This has not satisfied many parks advocates, who argue that using parkland for anything other than its intended use sets a dangerous precedent.
For years, the Great Lawn in Central Park was the scene of massive rallies, large concerts and other huge gatherings. But in 1997, the city spent $18.2 million to restore the 13-acre Great Lawn and now the city says it is too delicate to support the trampling of hundreds of thousands of feet. The Bloomberg administration has limited large gatherings on the lawn to six events per year, at no more than 50,000 people at one time. And four of those would be for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, sharply curtailing the opportunities for political expression.
The administration argues that that's not the point – protecting the lawn is. But civil liberties advocates note the issue arose when demonstrators wanted to use the Great Lawn for a massive protest against the Republican convention last summer. The Bloomberg administration denied the request, citing the need to protect the lawn.
<p,>Parks advocates would like the roadways of Central Park and Prospect Park to be closed to automobile traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
While he says he would like to take the one percent pledge, Ferrer says he cannot do so, given the budget deficits the city faces in the next several years.
The former Bronx borough president said that using the money from concessions for parks is one of three things that any mayor serious about parks would have to do. (The other two are providing minimum staffing levels at all parks and offering a completely transparent and ongoing review of parks operations.)
Ferrer said he would use some of the money from the fees to hire staff to supervise play after school and "make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks."
At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.
At the parks forum, Ferrer said he supported steps that would have avoided the need for the plant. He expressed concern about parkland being used for other purposes, such as parking cars and storage. "That's got to come to an end," he said. "Parks are for people."
While saying he treasured the Great Lawn, Ferrer opposes the policy limiting gatherings on it. "Blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not," he has said.
Ferrer said the United for Peace and Justice, which had sought a permit for the convention protest, had offered to put up a bond to protect the city from damage to the lawn.
The former Bronx borough president told the parks forum, "I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks...There are alternate means to getting around the city.
During his four years in office, the mayor has kept funding for parks fairly constant at around $260 million - or, for this year, at only a bit more than one half of one percent of the city budget. The administration says it has tried to use partnerships with private groups and federal and state money to maintain and operate the parks.
Bloomberg says he advocated earmarking concession fees during the 2001 campaign, but that this plan was derailed by the city budget crisis. He says he has instituted a program that allows concession fees above a baseline amount to go to the parks department. This, he said has result in $14 million for the department since 2002.
Bloomberg's department of Environmental Protection chose the Van Cortlandt Park site as the preferred location for the filtration plant and Bloomberg negotiated the deal with Bronx politician to provide the additional funding for Bronx parks in return and so win their support for the project.
The Bloomberg administration has aggressively sought to limit use of the Great Lawn, with the mayor telling protestors they can go elsewhere to express their political views.
The administration has extended the hours that cars cannot use the parks but has not banned auto traffic completely.
City and state politicians have done a lot to try to make New York's air healthier. But should they do more -- and can any local action make a real difference?Â
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Four candidates for mayor discussed issues facing city parks, including staffing, maintenance and safety, at a forum on July 26 sponsored by Parks1, a campaign to have the city spend at least 1 percent of its budget on park maintenance. The discussion included Democratic candidates Fernando Ferrer, C. Virginia Fields and Gifford Miller and Conservative Party candidate Thomas Ognibene. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was invited, but did not attend. Representative Anthony Weiner could not attend because of a vote in Washington. Dave Evans of WABC TV, Erik Engquist from Crain's and Daily News columnist Errol Louis questioned the candidates. The following is an edited transcript.
MAJOR ISSUE?
PROTESTS ON THE GREAT LAWN
ABANDONED PARKS
1 PERCENT PLEDGE
PAYING FOR PARKS WITH CONDOS
FIRE THE COMMISSIONER?
CAR-FREE PARKS
SUPERVISED PLAY
LITTERING AND VANDALISM
OPEN AIR WI-FI
GIVING UP PARKLAND
AFTER THE OLYMPICS BID
COMMUNITY GARDENS
IF I WERE MAYOR...
Dave Evans: What do you see as the single greatest challenge facing our parks today?
Thomas Ognibene: As a City Councilman, one of the things I committed myself to was rehabilitating the parks in our community. I worked with the community leaders of the civic associations and the community board and I think the total we spent, my district alone, was about $25 million. On every park I found a civic association in the community that was wiling to police that park, go in there and clean it up and make sure in the morning that all the debris was removed. The people who drove in the community, one of the first things they saw when they came in was a real beautiful park.
Gifford Miller: The biggest challenge we face for our parks is in fighting the notion that parks are an amenity -- that parks are a luxury. Parks are something much, much more. Parks are important. Parks are a necessity. Parks are at the heart of what makes our city strong, our city safe, our city prosperous and our city livable.
We see this struggle right now with the parks department and with this administration. This administration looks at the parks and says, "It's not bad," and not bad is fine for something that isn't truly important. But if you look at parks as being every bit as much a part of the fabric of life in our city as education, as transportation and safety and security and in fact as inseparable from those things, because when you have strong parks you're going to have a stronger and safer and more prosperous city, you look at where we are today and recognize that it is not acceptable.
In too many communities in this city, particularly low-income communities, our parks are neglected or abandoned. There was a piece in the New York Times the other day in which the parks commissioner said that he thought it was OK to allow parks to be abandoned and to go "back to nature" as it were. This was a park that was overrun with drug use and prostitutes, which don't seem like "nature" in its basic form.
There is a problem of vision, a problem of commitment and I have a plan to change it. It starts by reclaiming the bottom 50 percent of our neighborhood parks. I have made a commitment to add $10 million to our operating budget and $25 million dollars to our capital budget to reclaim those parks.
We have to enforce park cleaning in every park. You know, they're supposed to clean every park everyday. They don't. We have to actually enforce that.
We should improve the under-funded facilities in every borough. We should ensure that the crime statistics are available, regarding every park, so parents can know whether the parks that they're sending their kids to are safe, and we should encourage more public and private investment in every borough and not just Manhattan. We have to change our vision of what's acceptable in our city for our parks and we have to raise our standards.
C. Virginia Fields: Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing our parks is that of funding because that funding has been systematically reduced and cut over year. Being able to bring the funding level up to the point where it is going to allow us to provide for safe, accessible and well maintained parks is going to require political will, commitment and a desire to do all that we can to ensure that our parks are safe, accessible and well maintained.
As borough president, I have heavily invested in the parks throughout Manhattan. I have invested in the parks because I know the value of parks. I see parks as perhaps the great equalizer -- equalizer in the sense that every community, every neighborhood should have safe, respectable and well maintained parks, because in this city we have people who cannot afford to leave and go away to summer homes. They too have a right to be able to go to a park and enjoy it. In order to do that, we have to invest in every neighborhood and in every community.
I know how to get things done with respect to making parks safe, accessible and well maintained, and as mayor, as far as our economic development overall initiatives, I see parks as a part of that
Fernando Ferrer: I believe the largest problem with our parks today is the unevenness of investment in parks and the maintenance of our parks across this city. That's the problem I saw as the borough president of the Bronx for nearly 15 years and a member of the council for about five.
The efforts to reclaim Orchard Beach, Joyce Kilmer Park, reinvest in Crotona Park, St. Mary's Park and everything in between with a multi-million dollar effort. The effort to acquire new parkland, the effort to get the New York Botanical Garden to create an unprecedented number of community gardens throughout the borough. It was also important to create livable open spaces, but that requires that anyone serious about parks do three things: One, support Intro 327 that will re-circulate approximately $50 million of concession funding back into the maintenance of parks. Second, to have minimum staffing levels and maintenance levels for every park in every community district in every borough or city. And third, to have a completely transparent and ongoing review of our parks, so that everyone in every neighborhood can not only see the condition of their parks, but be part of the constituency for better parks in every community.
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Errol Louis: This question is about the free speech issues that were raised about the use of the Great Lawn in Central Park and in particular, the city policy that limits large events to six in the course of the summer, four of which are by the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera. Do you agree with the current limitation on the use of the Great Lawn or do you think it runs contrary to sentiments expressed by the Supreme Court when it said, in a case in the 1930s, "Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and … have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions"?
Gifford Miller: I'm with the Supreme Court on this one. This is clearly a wrong policy. We've introduced legislation in the City Council to repeal it. As important as the Dave Matthews Band is to a lot of people, I don't see how it's more important than the right of the people who wanted to protest the views that were being espoused in Madison Square Garden during the Republican convention. The grass is important as well and there could be I think reasonable accommodations made for bonding for damage that is done as associated with rallies and free speech at the Great Lawn, but to reserve it for just a couple of Philharmonic events and maybe one or two others is wrong and if I were mayor, I would revoke it.
Fernando Ferrer: Like any New Yorker, I treasure the Great Lawn in Central Park. But blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not. It seems to me that that's what bonds are put up for. In fact, the group that wanted to use the Great Lawn offered not only to do that but presented a sensible plan for their assembly and their demonstration that in fact would've been better for this city than the plan that the police commissioner and the mayor ended up approving. I agree also with the Supreme Court on this issue.
Erik Engquist: The parks department admits that it no longer maintains a certain number of parks, because "investing in them would be throwing good money after bad." Do you reject that out of hand, or is there some logic to ignoring parks that the surrounding community does not seem to take care of?
Virginia Fields: I do reject that out of hand. It is absolutely irresponsible for the city to assume that it does not have the responsibility to keep parks well maintained and to provide the resources to make it happen, because this is public land and if the city does not invest, then no one will assume that responsibility. That is why I propose that, as a part of development plans for parks, we also factor in how [the park] will be maintained. Part of my commitment to parks is to invest in maintenance workers.
Thomas Ognibene: There's no such thing as a community that doesn't care about the parks that are in it. Just think what would happen if we adopted the same attitude toward policing or to our schools. If you work with the police, the Department of Environmental Protection and other agencies and you renew the park and you make that investment, the people of that community will cooperate with you to keep their park beautiful for their senior citizens, for the people and their children. That attitude by the city of New York is unfortunately reflective of the attitude of many people in that administration about many of the aspects of life in the city of New York, and it's totally wrong.
Errol Louis: Mr. Miller and Mr. Ferrer, you know many of the people here favor setting aside 1 percent of the overall city budget for parks. I'm wondering, why haven't you done that in the past and if you might take a pledge to handle it differently?
Gifford Miller: I think that the 1 percent pledge, what it actually says, is to work toward 1 percent. I take that pledge. We should work toward 1 percent. But it is an enormous increase in our city's maintenance and operating budget, and I don't think we'll be able to get all the way there. I do think we need to work toward it.
If you look at my record as speaker of the City Council over the last four years, I have fought against the cuts that the mayor has proposed every single year to our parks, restoring millions and millions of dollars of cuts even during the toughest budget that the city ever saw. This mayor proposed drastic cuts, I stopped them. In this past year's budget, just for example, I restored more than $9 million in cuts that the mayor proposed and then actually added $2.4 million for additional parks personnel, for parks enforcement to make sure that we are doing more to make our city's parks safer.
Do I think we're going to get all the way to 1 percent? That would be an enormous increase, up to $500 million from around, a little less than $200 million. It would be great, but I don't think we're going to get there in four or eight years.
Fernando Ferrer: Bringing the budget up by more than $270 million is a promise that is difficult to make given the current budget and the budget deficits that we all predict.
There are things, however, that we can and must do to work toward that. I would like to see the parks budget in my lifetime go back to about half a billion dollars in pre-1990 budget terms, about 1 percent of the budget. I think we have to work toward that. A good first step is allowing parks to keep the $50 million of concession funds and to spread them across the parks that have been neglected the most.
And let me react to something that was said before. When it was pointed out that an official of this city said that "in some parks to improve those parks would be throwing good money after bad," that individual, as a spokesman for this city, should have been summarily fired. If that's the attitude, if that's the belief of this city, Mike Bloomberg should've acted on it quickly and made a real affirmative statement about fairness and equity in parks and excellence in every one of our parks, no matter where they are.
Dave Evan: Do you feel it's impossible to take this 1 percent pledge because of current and future budget issues?
Fernando Ferrer: I think knowing that this pledge in four years would bring us to nearly half a billion dollars, as much as I would like to do it, there's no way I can tell you forthrightly that I have the means to do that if I were mayor. And by the way, the proof of that is this mayor, who says he loves parks, hasn't even begun to do it and won't even commit himself to keeping $50 million of concession funds in our parks
Erik Engquist: Brooklyn Bridge Park addresses the oversight that, for many years, Brooklyn Heights and the surrounding communities did not have a real park. The government stepped in and said, "We'll build you a spectacular park. We'll allocate the money, but we will not allocate one penny to pay for the maintenance of this park. Therefore, we need to build commercial, revenue generating facilities in this park, which has turned out to be condominium towers." Is this a good model?
Thomas Ognibene: No I don't think extortion is ever a good model. To say that you're willing to commit to build a park, automatically when you utter those words, there is a commitment to maintain it. If you're trying to put pressure on people to build a development that has nothing to do with parks, and using that as leverage, then in a sense, you're breaching your pecuniary duty to the people. So, I would never allow it. The people deserve the park, and I think they should get the park.
Virginia Fields: Clearly that should not be a part of the decision in terms of building a park in any neighborhood. So, I certainly do not accept that.
One of the things that I would advocate to make sure that parks are part of the planning process is to establish a unit within the department of parks that works directly with the planning agencies so that, as projects are being built in neighborhoods, we are also planning for open space. Part of that planning is to identify how it would be maintained. And that would help us in moving forwards to make sure that we have adequate open space and parks in areas as we developed new communities.
Errol Louis: Mr. Ferrer said that he might have fired the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, for the statement he made about parks that are deteriorating. I was wondering if the other candidates agree.
Virginia Fields: No, not on the basis of what I heard about the statement, but there will certainly be an expectation that all the parks would be well maintained in this city and that budgets will be reflected so that we can do the necessary maintenance.
Gifford Miller: Occasionally, I've had my remarks taken out of context, and I wouldn't want to get fired on the basis of one comment I made to a paper. I certainly don't think that any parks commissioner in my administration would make such a comment under any context. But the commissioner is a well-meaning person who's worked hard on behalf of the city of New York, and I wouldn't fire him for one comment.
Thomas Ognibene: I would have had him clarify that type of an answer because it's the kind of insensitive remark that hurts a lot of people and a lot of communities. I don't know if it justifies firing him, but I certainly would have brought him to the office immediately and asked him what he meant by it and, if he had a good explanation, I'd make sure to get a hold of the press and explain what he meant by it.
Dave Evans: Mr. Ferrer, is there any way you would want to respond or clarify.
Fernando Ferrer: There is no way I would want to clarify what I said. If you are committing to equity and performance in all our parks, not just some of them, all of them, then you have to hold the highest-ranking members of your administration to those standards.
Erik Engquist: Some advocates say that cars should never be allowed in the parks. I hear from motorists that driving through parks is a way to enjoy them. Some also say it reduces crime if they can drive through parks. Would you be in favor of a flat prohibition on cars and vans in the parks?
Virginia Fields: What I have supported and continue to support is a balance between transportation and use of parks. And I think it can be done, as we look at what we've been able to do in Central Park. I would prefer looking to see how we can do that as opposed to outright prohibition.
Gifford Miller: We need to strike a balance, but I would come down further on the side of car-free parks. As somebody who drives around the city sometimes, it feels great when you get that shortcut through one of the parks and get there quicker than anticipated. But I would like to see us do serious traffic studies and I like to see us do experiments eliminating traffic completely from the parks because my gut is that we would be a better city if we really made our parks car-free places.
Thomas Ognibene: In my community, in the 30th council district, we don't even allow parking near the parks after nine o'clock at night. Parks are for people. There are children in parks, there are elderly in parks and they're doing things there without the expectation that they're going to get struck by a motor vehicle. So it doesn't make any sense to me, under any circumstances, to permit cars in parks. Most New Yorkers who drive cars, should be very well acquainted with taking a little more time when they're driving. It's a very little inconvenience to protect those who are our most vulnerable and use the park.
Fernando Ferrer: I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks.
Dave Evans: In Central Park, there all those cars during rush hour and I see numerous accidents involving cars hitting bicyclists. Where do you propose putting those cars?
Gifford Miller: I would put them everywhere else but in the parks. I'm not suggesting, of course the cross-town transverses in Central Park -- those should be retained for the cars. But in the part that's actually in Central Park, Prospect Park, and other parks, we should be trying to eliminate cars. And they're going to have to find other ways to get around. I don't know exactly what's going to happen in terms of traffic studies, but my guess is that New Yorkers will find another way and that life will go on and our parks will be safer and people will be able to better enjoy our parks.
Fernando Ferrer: There's really one choice that becomes evident in this entire conversation. Who do you remove? Cyclists and runners and pedestrians, or vehicles? It seems to me that removing vehicles is the most sensible thing to do, and there are alternate means to getting around the city, as we all know. The sky won't fall if you say you can't use Park Drive.
Errol Louis: The highest rate of juvenile crime occurs between 3 and 6 p.m. and the shift for parks department staff ends at 2 p.m., which leaves parks as possibly the largest unsupervised after-school program in New York. As mayor, how would you ensure that kids play and learn in supervised parks?
Fernando Ferrer: One of the reasons I've talked a lot about after school programs is because of the Police Athletic League on Kelly Street, P.S. 52 playground, with a real human being in the park that was called a Parkie. [These] were the things that kept me off the tough streets. We've got to move back to utilizing our parks, especially in the warm months, as havens for kids in places like where I grew up, who really want that alternative, whose parents want that alternative. That's what I want to begin to use that $50 million concession investment for: a real human being that will be able to supervise play and make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks.
Thomas Ognibene: With all the stakes in this problem, it isn't necessarily just the parks department's problem. Obviously, the highest instance of juvenile crime in the city of New York is that period after school and before six o'clock. There has to be a police presence because there are many people that enjoy the park and it's unfair that their enjoyment be disrupted.
No matter what the statistics say, generally most of the kids that are in the parks are having a good time, playing sports, interacting, not disturbing anybody, but there will always be a few kids who feel that they have some God-given right to vandalize the park and disturb everybody's peace and enjoyment of it. We thought it was a general policing problem and our precincts always cooperated and I would look to have the precincts cooperate in that aspect of it too.
Erik Engquist: How do you get people to stop destroying and littering in our parks?
Gifford Miller: One of the important lessons that we've learned in this city is the broken window lesson. If you allow the window to be broken and you allow it to remain broken, someone is going to break the next window. But if you try to stop it and you replace that window quickly, then you don't have greater crimes down the road. The same thing is true with graffiti. If people put graffiti up, and you show up the next day and paint over it, eventually people will give up.
If somebody vandalized a park bench, of course that person is responsible for vandalism. But the parks department's job is to fix the broken bench. In the end, the problem is not just that bench, the problem is that way too many parks across this city get that kind of treatment, they deteriorate. After 10 years, the borough president's office comes in and puts a bunch of capital money into renovating the park. Then there's no maintenance, there's no commitment to keeping that park in nice condition. Then you come back in [after 10 years] and put the capital budget in to completely overhaul the park again. So at the end of the day, we're wasting a lot of money by spending a huge amount of money on the capital infrastructure of our parks instead of spending our money wisely on maintaining the parks.
If we treat our parks with respect and we put a quality park in play, the community will keep it that way. But if you allow a park to deteriorate and you treat it like it's not worth anything, the community will start to treat it that way. We have to respect all of our parks. We have to provide a decent quality park everywhere and then people will respect what's being done in our parks.
Virginia Fields: That goes to the heart of what we've been talking about all evening. When we invest, we're able to have staff in the park that is able to monitor the different areas. I have to believe that with the appropriate staff, seeing broken benches, cracked sidewalks and other repairs that must be done, we will take care of it. But we lack those resources, so as a result, we see much neglect. That's why I, too, support using the $50 million generated from concessions to reinvest in the upkeep of those parks and giving the mayor the flexibility to be able to use those dollars in areas of greatest need.
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Erik Engquist: Cities across the country are starting to provide free wireless service in parks and other gathering places. Should the city provide wireless Internet access so people can surf the Internet while sitting in our parks?
Thomas Ognibene: It sounds like a wonderful idea if we could do it, but there are a lot more problems in our parks that deserve the money. I don't know if we're ready yet to commit to putting wireless Internet in parks. I think the people go there, hopefully, to get away from wireless Internet.
Gifford Miller: Well I think that expanding access to wi-fi is a good idea. I certainly would be happy to look at whatever proposal there is, but I think the focus on our park system ought to be the parks and not as a means to expand the Internet.
Erik Engquist: I think the idea is, if you have more people in the parks, sitting on those benches, it's less likely that a vandal would come and destroy the bench.
Gifford Miller: Vandalism is not the biggest problems in parks. The biggest problem in parks maintenance is that people use the grass, and it gets beat up, and nobody fixes it, ever. The biggest problem in the parks is that after years and years and years, the water fountain breaks and there's like three plumbers in the entire City of New York. The biggest problem in parks is that the bathrooms are not open. The problem is not vandalism; the problem is the lack of adequate maintenance in our parks.
Dave Evans: As you know, they're building a water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. The mayor promises that, in return, $200 million will go to the Bronx parks over the next decade. People are concerned that parkland can be bartered or traded in the future and that this sets a dangerous precedent. Do you agree?
Virginia Fields: There are some issues that all of us must be concerned about as we look to how we have lost park land and how park land has been used for purposes other than recreation and parks. I would advocate a much more public process before any parkland is taken over for use other than its intended use. This is public land and the public should have an opportunity to discuss it, to review it, and the relevant elected body should have an opportunity to vote upon it. That would alleviate the fear that many people have about the possibility of more parkland being taken.
Fernando Ferrer: I was for filtration avoidance. I thought that the city and the state should've taken aggressive steps for land acquisition and dealing with the Westchester town's raw sewage issue and sewage disposal issues. My position was not to be.
There are a lot of other egregious uses of our parks: city employee parking in Borough Hall Park in the Bronx, use of parks for non-park issues like storage and vehicles, storage of equipment. That's got to come to an end. Parks are for people. Parks are for families and their children. Parks are for the enjoyment of this city.
Errol Louis: Although New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics failed, it focused attention on the role of parks as sports facilities. Excluding the West Side, what specific parks and sports facilities would you continue to pursue as the mayor?
Gifford Miller: The Olympics bid was a great and important thing for our city. It's a shame that the mayor crippled the bid by tying it all to the West Side Stadium.
There's a variety of overhauls of public facilities in our parks that would've been a positive aspect of getting the Olympics. We have to continue to try to find the funding to do those.
In the end, the Olympics never were going to be the silver bullet to create a brand new future for our city. The Olympics were going to come and were going to leave. It was never a real economic development plan. It was never a substitute for a real plan for our parks. We now have to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out how we are going to afford to do what's necessary with our park's facilities without the Olympics.
Fernando Ferrer: Apparently this mayor confused the Olympics with a real economic development plan and physical development plan for the city. He similarly confused park creation with landscaping for multi-million dollar condos.
We know the parks that need, desperately need, infrastructure renewal that only the city, the state, and the federal government can come together to accomplish.
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Erik Engquist: Community gardens were placed in dilapidated, forgotten empty lots. Then, when property values went up, developers came back and said, "OK, your job is done here, now I'm going to build". Is that fair?
Thomas Ognibene: I like community gardens. I think you can have a balance with community gardens, but you can't give up valuable real estate. There is a place for some community gardens but obviously there comes a time when we have to develop a certain amount of housing.
Gifford Miller: Community gardens play an incredibly important role in communities. Community gardens can provide for better housing, stronger housing, stronger communities and we have to have a realistic plan that says, OK, these are the gardens that we're going to keep and we've made that commitment, but we also have to have enough support for insurance and all that for the long run.
Virginia Fields: I'm a strong supporter of community gardens, and I'm very pleased at how many of them have served to beautify areas and to create open space in areas which otherwise would just simply be concrete. I believe that the city should pay the premiums for the insurance for community gardens.
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Fernando Ferrer: You're looking at the guy who created the most of them in one place in this city with the help of the New York botanical garden and substantial capital funding from my office [as Bronx borough president]. Most still exist, and they are extraordinary places. We brought communities out to participate in them, to play in them, to enjoy them and to knit them into the fabric of their neighborhood.
Dave Evans: Now, for the closing question. In the first 100 days of your term as mayor, what specific steps would you take to further parks in general
Fernando Ferrer: Let me go back to the three specific points that I made in my opening statement. First, ensure that every dime from concession funds we make in our parks gets re-circulated into park maintenance and good repair. Second, minimum staffing and maintenance standards for every one of our parks. They have to be clean and in good repair. Third, a completely clear, transparent and publicly accessible way for the people in every community to judge the effectiveness of this city's administration with respect to the good repair and maintenance and safety of their parks. That means crime statistics, that means repair statistics and that also means pictures of their parks.
For too many years, too many families have had to deal with dust bowls in the middle of what should be parks. It would be lovely to have wi-fi access. That means to be able to sit down on a bench. The benches and the slabs would have been replaced and painted from time to time. Working water fountains, working comfort stations, pavement that isn't cracked and destroyed beyond repair, swings, tennis courts, basketball courts, those are the things that people want in their parks and those are the things that this city has to provide. It doesn't take much more than a commitment to understand that parks really are an integral part of living in this city.
Virginia Fields: First, it is absolutely essential for us to be able to do the things that we have talked about -- make sure that our parks are safe, make sure they are accessible, make sure that they are well maintained. In order to do that, we need the adequate resources. So funding would be a priority. I would make sure that dollars are there in order to ensure that we increase our money for expenses, as well as capital.
I am proud to have signed the 1 percent pledge. Why did I sign that? I think it establishes something to work toward -- a goal, a commitment and with that in mind, I would work immediately on the funding.
Secondly, I would work on promoting the parks. I think that the parks should be very much involved with overall planning and toward that end, I would establish a special unit, directing our parks to work directly with our planning agencies -- the City Planning Commission, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Economic Development -- so that as decisions are made for development, Parks is at the table That will allow us to better address a lot of the issues that we have talked about here today.
Again, parks should be the great equalizer in every community and every neighborhood, so no matter what your social or economic level is, you too can enjoy our parks.
Gifford Miller: I've laid out a very specific plan for what I would do with parks. First of all, we need to reclaim the bottom 50 percent of our neighborhood parks and in my first 100 days, I would make a commitment to expanding the maintenance budget by $10 million and $25 million dollars capital commitment to reclaim those parks which are falling apart.
Second, I would enforce that current rule to clean the parks every day.
Third, I would make sure that we make parks safer by enacting Parkstat legislation, which would, like Compstat with the police department, make available statistics about how many crimes are occurring in every park in the city, so that we make sure we are putting our resources to the parks that are having spikes in violent incidents and crimes. The only park that they do that right now in is Central Park.
I would expand public/private partnerships beyond just Manhattan and into the outer boroughs.
I think that you can have some insurance that I would do those important things, not just because I say that I'm going to do them, but if you look at my record as speaker of the City Council, I've already provided leadership in all of those areas.
Thomas Ognibene: I enjoyed going to the parks for recreation and just to relax. And when I did become councilman, I went around to all the various community organizations. I didn't listen to what the parks department told me as a councilman, because it wasn't what the people wanted.
The most important thing you can do is to meet with the people -- those people who are near the park, those people who have organized to protect the parks -- and find out what they want, what they think is necessary so that the park can come to be a real amenity, a real service to the people that live in that community. If you sit down with them, and give them the opportunity to interact with your parks commissioner, and let them plan and then you go out and fund it, and build it according to their desires and their hopes and their wishes, then you're really performing service to the community. I did that in my park in the 30th council district and there's no reason that it can't be done on a scale as big as the City of New York.
Parks bring us close to our community, make us comfortable in our community and give us the quality of life that we deserve.
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The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation oversees more than 27,000 acres of parks, playgrounds, beaches and other recreational areas, giving New York the largest city park system in the country.
But the figures can be misleading. While the number includes masterpieces such as Central Park and Prospect Park, it also includes areas so decrepit that Park Commissioner Adrian Benepe said they should essentially be abandoned. Even counting those wastelands, New York City has fewer acres of green space per person than any other major American city.
Advocates blame many of the parks' problems on a lack of resources. In response, many want the city to devote one percent of its budget - or about $500 million - to park expenses, almost twice what it spends now. They have asked candidates to pledge that they will work toward this goal.
The parks department licenses about 600 businesses that pay to operate concessions, such as skating rinks, golf courses and restaurants, on park property. In 2003, this generated about $60 million. But instead of being spent on parks, the money goes into the city's general budget. Many parks advocates would like to change this and see the money go for parks – assuming, of course, that the city would not reduce its appropriation to the parks department as a result.
Faced with a federal court order that the city filter some of its drinking water, Mayor Michael Bloomberg authorized construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. To offset the loss of parkland - and to mollify Bronx residents angered by the decision - Bloomberg will spend an extra $240 million on Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks. This has not satisfied many parks advocates, who argue that using parkland for anything other than its intended use sets a dangerous precedent.
For years, the Great Lawn in Central Park was the scene of massive rallies, large concerts and other huge gatherings. But in 1997, the city spent $18.2 million to restore the 13-acre Great Lawn and now the city says it is too delicate to support the trampling of hundreds of thousands of feet. The Bloomberg administration has limited large gatherings on the lawn to six events per year, at no more than 50,000 people at one time. And four of those would be for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, sharply curtailing the opportunities for political expression.
The administration argues that that's not the point – protecting the lawn is. But civil liberties advocates note the issue arose when demonstrators wanted to use the Great Lawn for a massive protest against the Republican convention last summer. The Bloomberg administration denied the request, citing the need to protect the lawn.
<p,>Parks advocates would like the roadways of Central Park and Prospect Park to be closed to automobile traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
While he says he would like to take the one percent pledge, Ferrer says he cannot do so, given the budget deficits the city faces in the next several years.
The former Bronx borough president said that using the money from concessions for parks is one of three things that any mayor serious about parks would have to do. (The other two are providing minimum staffing levels at all parks and offering a completely transparent and ongoing review of parks operations.)
Ferrer said he would use some of the money from the fees to hire staff to supervise play after school and "make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks."
At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.
At the parks forum, Ferrer said he supported steps that would have avoided the need for the plant. He expressed concern about parkland being used for other purposes, such as parking cars and storage. "That's got to come to an end," he said. "Parks are for people."
While saying he treasured the Great Lawn, Ferrer opposes the policy limiting gatherings on it. "Blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not," he has said.
Ferrer said the United for Peace and Justice, which had sought a permit for the convention protest, had offered to put up a bond to protect the city from damage to the lawn.
The former Bronx borough president told the parks forum, "I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks...There are alternate means to getting around the city.
The Manhattan borough president says that providing funding to ensure safe, accessible and well-maintained parks would be a top priority for her. As part of that, she says she has signed the one percent pledge because "it establishes something to work toward."
As borough president, Fields says, she allocated significant parts of her capital budgets for the rehabilitation, planning and construction of parks.
Fields says she sees parks not as a luxury but as essential "equalizers" in a city where many people cannot afford to leave town on weekends. As a result, she says, she supports using money from concessions for parks. "Until recognition of the importance of parks is embodied in policy, it is important that they have the benefit of their efforts toward self support," she said in a response to a League of Conservation Voters questionnaire. She says she would use the money partly "to reinvest in the upkeep of the parks."
The Manhattan borough president opposed putting the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in 1999 and, at a Bronx forum this year, said she is still opposed – but, she says, the facility is probably a done deal. "In all fairness and candor," Fields told the audience, "unless you have a different way of approaching [the plant], I don't think as mayor I could stop it, as it has been started."
At the parks meeting, she called for more public discussion anytime parkland is to be used for something else. "This is public land and the public should have an opportunity to discuss it, to review it, and the relevant elected body should have an opportunity to vote upon it," she said.
At a hearing in May, Fields spoke out strongly against the administration plan to limit large gatherings in Central Park. "This proposal is an erosion of a free society," she said. "Has our city gone so far as to say: 'Grass -- Yes. Free Speech -- No.'?"
The Manhattan borough president has said she would continue to try to balance transportation and the use of parks. She said this has been successful in Central Park and that she would prefer that to an outright ban on cars.
The City Council speaker says having $500 million to spend on parks "would be great" but he says he does not think the city will be able to afford to this in four or even eight years.
"We can't afford 1 percent because that's more than doubling our Parks Department's budget," Miller said in a recent debate.
Miller says that, as council speaker, he has fought for more funding for parks and worked to restore programs the mayor wanted to cut.
While he support exploring "such innovative options" as earmarking concession fees, Miller has said that dedicating the funds could require state authorization or an amendment to the City Charter.
While he says that perhaps more could have been done to protect the upstate watershed and so avoid the need for the filtration plant, Miller said at a meeting in the Bronx in May that he had voted to use the park for the plant.
The speaker said City Council has introduced legislation to try to overturn the policy limiting gatherings on the Great Lawn and said that he would revoke the policy if elected mayor. While saying the grass is important, he said groups holding protests could post bond to insure the city would be reimbursed for any damage to the lawn.
"As important as the Dave Matthews Band [which appeared in a city sponsored concert on the lawn} is to a lot of people," Miller told the parks forum, "I don't see how it's more important than the right of the people who wanted to protest the views that were being espoused in Madison Square Garden during the Republic convention."
Miller says he would be more inclined to not allow cars in parks than to allow them. He has called for more studies of traffic patterns and says he expects that those studies would indicate that closing the parks to auto traffic would not have the dire effects on traffic that some anticipate, although he would keep roadways like the Central Parks transverse open to cars. "My guess is that New Yorkers will find another way and that life will go on and our parks will be safer and people will be able to better enjoy our parks," he said.
According to the Parks1 campaign, Weiner has said he would work toward committing one percent of the budget to parks expenses. "While the country's 50 largest cities dedicate $88 per resident toward their parks, New York City provides only $45," Weiner said in response to a questionnaire from the League of Conservation Voters. "Park funding has declined for decades, and the parks and greenery of the city have suffered because of it.
To address this, Weiner has said he would focus on reducing waste and inefficiencies to increase parks funding.
However, in a recent debate, Weiner would NOT commit to 1 percent of the budget for parks. "You don't draw line items in the budget here in the context of the campaign," he said.
In response to a questionnaire from the Parks1 campaign, Weiner said he would work toward earmarking fees from concessions. He did not directly answer the question when it was presented in a League of Conservation Voters survey.
As a member of Congress, Weiner says he secured more than $34 million in federal funding for the revitalization of Gateway National Recreation Area in the city.
At the Ben Franklin Democratic Reform Democratic Club's town hall forum in the Bronx in May, Weiner was the only Democratic challenger who unequivocally opposed the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. Decrying the mayor's top-down management style, Weiner said, "There's no better example of that than the ...water treatment plant in a park that has now led to the destruction of hundreds of trees and a horrible, horrible precedent."
During his four years in office, the mayor has kept funding for parks fairly constant at around $260 million - or, for this year, at only a bit more than one half of one percent of the city budget. The administration says it has tried to use partnerships with private groups and federal and state money to maintain and operate the parks.
Bloomberg says he advocated earmarking concession fees during the 2001 campaign, but that this plan was derailed by the city budget crisis. He says he has instituted a program that allows concession fees above a baseline amount to go to the parks department. This, he said has result in $14 million for the department since 2002.
Bloomberg's department of Environmental Protection chose the Van Cortlandt Park site as the preferred location for the filtration plant and Bloomberg negotiated the deal with Bronx politician to provide the additional funding for Bronx parks in return and so win their support for the project.
The Bloomberg administration has aggressively sought to limit use of the Great Lawn, with the mayor telling protestors they can go elsewhere to express their political views.
The administration has extended the hours that cars cannot use the parks but has not banned auto traffic completely.
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From an environmental perspective, 2005 is shaping up to be a good year here in New York City. Nearly a half-dozen laws designed to curb vehicle emissions and improve local air quality have sailed through the New York City Council and earned the mayor's signature. A similar accord on energy-efficient "green buildings" is in the works. And despite a much publicized battle over waste reduction and marine transfer station siting, the city's solid waste management plan appears to be on its most solid footing in years.
It seems strange, then, that environmental issues have yet to find their way into the ongoing mayoral debate, apart from discussions of congestion-pricing and the proposed Brooklyn-to-New Jersey railroad tunnel. It doesn't help that the New York League of Conservation Voters, an organization that normally conducts an exhaustive endorsement process (and that endorsed Michael Bloomberg's opponent Mark Green in the 2001 campaign), has decided to issue no endorsement at all for the Democratic mayoral primary race, and instead come out early in support of Michael Bloomberg's re-election. ("Four years ago, Michael Bloomberg had a lot of interesting ideas but he had no track record," says Marcia Bystryn, the league's executive director. "We feel the mayor has taken a strong leadership role on a range of issues...")
Voters thus have been cheated out of a chance to review and compare some impressive resumes. More importantly, they've missed a frank discussion of priorities when it comes to city-level environmental policy. After all, in a city of 8 million people, only a few issues can command top billing and as the last few years have shown, such issues have a way of pitting one environmental concern against another -- clean drinking water vs. parkland preservation, just to cite one notable example.
With this in mind, a review of the top candidates' environmental agendas show four main areas where differences in opinion or variations in enthusiasm stand to shape mayoral priorities over the next four years.
Since 1998, New York City has been obligated by a federal court order to filter at least 10 percent of the drinking water coming out of the Croton Valley watershed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to end more than a decade's worth of city footdragging and authorize the construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant was one of the decisions that earned him the eventual endorsement of the New York League of Conservation Voters.
In pushing through a plan to site the plant within the boundaries of Van Cortlandt Park, however, the mayor has quite possibly earned the ever-lasting enmity of park advocates. The mayor has since balanced the loss of green space with $240 million in new funds for Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks, but from the park advocates' perspective, the exploitation of city owned green space sets a dangerous precedent which other mayors will be tempted to exploit.
When the Ben Franklin Democratic Reform Democratic Club played host to a town hall forum in the Bronx in May, Democratic challengers were hard pressed to deliver an outright condemnation of the mayor's decision-making. Only Anthony Weiner, a Queens congressman with a solid record for channeling federal money to city parks, seemed unequivocal on the matter. Weiner blasted the "closed loop" nature of the negotiation process and the precedent-setting use of park land for industrial purposes. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, an opponent of the Van Cortlandt siting in the late 1990s said she remained opposed but doubted such opposition could have an effect if elected. " In all fairness and candor," Fields told the audience., "Unless you have a different way of approaching [the plant], I don't think as mayor I could stop it, as it has been started."
City Council Speaker Gifford Miller admitted that he had voted for the use of the park while adding that more could have been done to acquire watershed land upstate to head off development and protect water quality. Former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's comments were conspicuously absent in a summary of the forum filed by the RiverdaleReview.com, although the candidate is on the record opposing the Van Cortlandt filtration plant as far back as 1999.
”As far as I know, Mr. Weiner is the only candidate solidly opposed to the plant," says Marian Rose, president of the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition, a group which does not endorse candidates.
In their answers to the League of Conservation Voters questionnaire (which they have not posted on their Web site, and may never), every Democratic candidate said yes to the question of whether they would direct city agencies to establish a goal of shielding 50 percent of the land surrounding the city's other main water source, the Catskill/Delaware watershed land, by 2015. In his own answer to the question, the mayor did not offer a yes or no response but noted that, under his administration, the city increased its share of watershed control and would continue pursuing acquisitions via the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
"Because the city cannot force or require landowners to sell their land, and because the city is not permitted to purchase land for a price above fair market value, the administration has decided against setting a ten-year goal for watershed protection," the mayor's response reads.
In the case of local waterways, the mayor and the Democratic challengers have expressed a uniform commitment to the reduction of pollutants and nitrogen in the East River and Long Island Sound. In the questionnaire, however, most, including the mayor, felt that current programs, most notably the Department of Environmental Protection's EPA-mandated elimination of combined rainwater and sewage systems, would elicit the desired improvements over time. In terms of creative remedies, Ferrer proposed artificial wetlands, seaweed farms, and other "low cost, simple solutions" above and beyond the existing work by the city department.
New York City's mammoth solid waste output is a case study in conflicting environmental agendas. In seeking to move the city away from its current truck-dependent waste export model back to a barge-based plan involving reactivated marine transfer stations, the mayor has chosen to stress two environmental benefits -- reduced diesel exhaust and fuel consumption -- above all others.
In City Council Speaker Gifford Miller's spring challenge to the mayor's sanitation plan, he spoke up for those long troubled by the lack of waste reduction incentives in the city's current waste management strategy. The new solid waste management plan, passed this summer, makes room for more ambitious recycling than in the past, but advocates say the program's goal of 25 percent of garbage being recycled is too low.
The mayor headed off an 11th hour challenge by Gifford and his council allies. Still, the Democratic candidates say that waste reduction and waste transport efficiency remain signature challenges for the city.
"There is no lack of ideas in the environmental community for materials recovery," argues Fields, who says the city can use its power as a large contract consumer to pressure manufacturers to reduce packaging and offer more support in the repair or reclamation of aging products. Together with Weiner, Fields is a hearty endorser of "pay as you throw" incentive programs which would give homeowners and building-owners who put less garbage on the curb a rebate on their property taxes.
"Conscientious New Yorkers should get a signal of support from the city, rather than having to pay for the waste of their neighbors," says Weiner.
Bottle Bill
Both Weiner and Fields have joined Ferrer as backers of the Better Bottle Bill, a recently-passed state bill which would expand bottle deposits to non-carbonated beverages and which would return unclaimed deposits to local governments to use in their own internal waste management and recycling programs. According to Laura Haight, an Albany lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a signature by Governor George Pataki or his successor could mean up to $100 million in annual proceeds for New York City alone.
"We need the next mayor to step up to the plate and fight in Albany with us to get our nickels back," says Haight, whose non-partisan group does not endorse any candidates.
The mayor, who has come out in favor of a straight five cent-per-bottle tax over an expansion of the existing deposit law, emphasizes private sector efficiency over government incentives. The reactivation of marine transfer stations authorized by the solid waste management plan will make it easier to ship recyclables in bulk to the coming Hugo Neu facility on Brooklyn's Sunset Park waterfront. This should free up the company to invest in technologies which speed sorting, improve recovery, and possibly encourage expansion into other portions of the city waste stream. For similar reasons, the Bloomberg administration has focused its transportation efforts on reviving the rail link between Visy Paper's Staten Island paper recycling facility and the Howland Hook Marine Terminal.
In its 2005 Mayoral Scorecard grading the Bloomberg administration's first term performance, the New York League of Conservation Voters reserved its lowest score ("average") for the mayor's efforts in the realm of sustainability and sustainable development. Although Bloomberg established his Task Force on Sustainability to examine the city's own internal policies, concerns about clean water, clean air and Sanitation have taken precedence over the last four years.
Expect that to change. The city council is considering Intro 324, a bill which, if enacted, would require building projects greater than $2 million in scope to meet national energy efficiency and other "green" standards set out by the U.S. Green Building Council. Similar bills to encourage the use of heat-reducing "green roof" materials and to press the city to incorporate green building standards into its own buildings and facilities are also in the works. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg administration is backing the potential offering of water and energy rebates to private sector companies via a separate bill, Intro 478.
This is the one issue where City Council Speaker Miller stands out, as a sponsor or supporter of these green bills. "We need to support more innovative legislation," says Miller in response to the League of Conservation Voters questionnaire. "As mayor, I plan to focus on the same issues I have as speaker -- reducing the city's use of materials and emissions, encouraging green building practices by developers, and protecting quality of life by working for parks and expanding and improving mass transit."
Some candidates, however, would like to see even more creativity when it comes to giving residents and workers a stake in city resource conservation. According to Weiner, the city shouldn't just aim for monitoring the energy demand within its own departments -- already a Bloomberg administration aim -- it should give departments that demonstrate improving efficiency a cut of the cost savings. Meanwhile, Fields sees the everyday consumer as a true swing vote in the attempt to force industry-wide change. She holds up the city's large scale buying power as an effective stick but also sees incentives such as the low-flow toilet rebate as a model for how the city should reward consumers who install heat deflecting roofs or reduce their energy demand
"My preference is reward positive behavior rather than punish negative behavior," says Fields.
Although the city earned a failing grade for air quality in four of its five boroughs in April, the resulting media coverage has facilitated the passage of recent laws seeking to increase the number of hybrid taxicabs and low sulfur diesel buses on city streets.
Where things go from here, however, is up in the air. Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city joined Attorney General Eliott Spitzer and other regional attorneys general in their successful effort to force out-of-state energy companies to clean up their coal-burning power plants, a major source of air pollution here in the northeast. Some of the Democratic mayoral candidates, however, think the city could be even more audacious in this strategy. Former Bronx Borough President Ferrer has suggesed emulating the attorney general's equally successful campaign against truck and bus idling and "create a city-wide zero idling rule on school buses with increased fines and eventual suspensions of any driver who continually puts our children's health at risk." Manhattan Borough President Fields, again, feels that incentives for "good corporate citizens" are the better route.
Congressman Weiner, meanwhile, is the one candidate who sees ferry service as the missing piece in the city's current air quality puzzle. "An expanded network of ferries would shorten commute times and develop a healthier means of transit," Weiner told the New York League of Conservation Voters.
Cross-Harbor Rail Link
Where the mayor and the Democrats most notably part ways, however, is on the proposed Cross-Harbor rail link, a $700 million project which would link New Jersey to Brooklyn, reducing the number of current trans-Hudson truck trips by 11 percent according to project supporters. Then again, the same project would dramatically increase the number of short haul truck trips ending in Maspeth, Queens, the link's easternmost terminus. Citing the increased air pollution burden on Queens residents, Mayor Bloomberg has opposed the plan. Every Democratic challenger, meanwhile, supports the cross harbor link.
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