Summer weather is here and parks are filled with people — and garbage.
Maria Venezia said she walks through Ewen Park almost every day and lately the trash has been out of control.
“During about three days in a row, I noticed trash cans completely full and the playground was smelly,” Venezia said.
Earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams announced he would cut the parks department budget significantly, by about $55 million, which would leave the city’s green spaces understaffed for a number of tasks, including trash pick-up.
When budget cuts were first discussed, Christina Taylor, deputy director of the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, said the park could suffer dire consequences without proper funding.
This is not the first round of budget cuts the park has seen, with last year’s budget reduced by $25 million, the money the parks department has to use across the boroughs continues to be spread thinner and thinner.
In April, Taylor predicted budget cuts would require eliminating Van Cortlandt Park’s second shift, which is responsible for cleaning and maintaining the park in the evenings. This, Taylor said, would lead to parkgoers entering an unclean space.
Seems that’s what’s happened.
Taylor said budget cuts have significantly impacted Van Cortlandt Park, and it has become much harder to keep up the maintenance with a dwindling population of workers. Last summer, Taylor said, the park was able to employ 12 full-time workers and 30 POP, or Parks Opportuity Program, workers, but this year there is only funding for nine full-time city park workers and nine POP workers.
The Parks Opportunity Program works with the city’s human resources administration and the social services department to provide parks with workers who are paid hourly to help clean and maintain parks throughout the city.
“Their morale is low, it’s tough,” Taylor said. There are days when they might only have four people to clean the entire park.”
She said reaching 1,146 acres on a day with only four people makes each person responsible for maintaining nearly 300 acres of land. And cleaning up the park is not just litter, Taylor said, parks workers also maintain green spaces, bathrooms and playgrounds.
Taylor said, on top of the reduction to workers, the park is also lacking a number of essential supplies like garbage bags and soap. Small expenditures such as these can be paid for out of the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance’s budget when the parks department cannot afford them, but the park is also in need of new vehicles because, Taylor said, the current ones are falling apart and the alliance could never afford to replace them.
Among the troubled equipment is the parks department’s garbage truck compactor that gets driven around to collect the trash but, because the machine is older, it breaks down on occasion. But every district is provided with only one compactor, meaning if Van Cortlandt’s breaks down, Taylor said, staff has to beg another district to borrow their one compactor.
The 18 workers in the park are specifically dedicated to cleaning. Taylor said there is another crew of people who are in charge of mowing the lawns and maintaining the forests, but their numbers have also dwindled and by the time the group finishes mowing the last lawn it’s time to circle back to the first lawn they mowed.
In addition, Taylor said, the team has been unable to get into the forest to perform routine maintenance.
On June 30, the City Council finalized the budget, adding back $15 million to the parks department budget to be allocated for second-shift workers but Taylor said she has no idea when that money will come and summer season has already begun.
“Having the budget determined for the busiest time of the year, a week before the busiest time of the year starts is not ideal,” she said. “The timing is horrible.”
She said the alliance has been in discussion about advocating for a summer budget to be pre-determined so last-minute hires and decisions don’t need to be made when the budget is finalized at the end of June.
The final budget for the entire parks department came in at $618 million, $20 million lower than last year’s, which was $25 million lower than the year before. Taylor said the alliance is part of a large group calling for the city to spend 1 percent of its total budget on parks but, with the consistent cuts, parks now stand to receive .55 percent of the annual budget.
Even with the $15 million the City Council put back in, Taylor said she is unsure if it will be enough to maintain the park at the level it needs to be.
Meanwhile, Venezia said she frequents the park playground with her young son, and things havent been pretty.
“People are definitely going to the park more often because of the nice weather,” she said. “That alone can increase the amount of trash.”
Over the Independence Day weekend, Taylor said, the park was trashed, plus the pool machinery broke down, which meant no pool openings.
But, Taylor said, the silver lining there was the people who normally work at the pool were available to help clean the rest of the park as hundreds of people came and went.
“There’s no way if park usage continues at the rate it’s at these 18 people can maintain the park,” Taylor said.
Until manpower catches up with the rate of disposal, Taylor said she encourages parkgoers to bring their own garbage bags to clean up after themselves when they enter any of the neighborhood parks, which are always looking for more volunteers.