Pratt Center

Joan Byron

Director of Policy, Pratt Center for Community Development; Board Member, Bronx River Alliance

Testimony before the City Council Committee on Parks and Recreation

Oversight Hearing on Equity in Parks: Do Disparities exist in the Care of the City’s Open Space?

My name is Joan Byron, and I am Director of Policy at the Pratt Center for Community Development; we work with communities throughout New York City on issues of social, economic, and environmental justice, especially as these issues manifest themselves in our built environment. I also serve with Kellie Terry on the board of the Bronx River Alliance.

The Bronx River Alliance points the way to a conservancy model that can  give substantial, ongoing voice to low- and moderate-income communities to ensure that the development, maintenance, and programming of parks responds to local needs and priorities.

The experience of the Bronx River Alliance also highlights the differences between conservancies representing more affluent constituencies, and those that don’t. And it clearly shows that funding the capital and maintenance needs of parks in low-income communities must remain a public responsibility.

There are instances in which “people’s conservancies” can garner significant public funding, especially for capital projects, as the Bronx River Alliance has done. They may also become the channels through which resources made available thorough unique circumstances – like the agreement that Councilmember Julissa Ferreras negotiated with private land users in Flushing Meadows Corona Park – can be directed to meet local needs. We applaud the Councilmember’s leadership in bringing some $25 million in new resources to FMCP. But we would remind the Council that the premise that a community must be prepared to give up parkland in order to secure the funding needed to address decades of deferred maintenance is fundamentally unjust.

Our lack of clarity about what conservancies can and can’t do has created an expectation that unless a source of outside funding can be identified, parks serving low-income  neighborhoods will continue to be undermaintained, and capital needs for repairs, much less expansion, will be unmet.  In other words, that investment in our parks will be inversely proportional to the need that they serve.

We urge the Council to consider the recommendations laid out by New Yorkers for Parks in their 2013 Parks Platform, for adequate funding of the entire parks system, for increased clarity and efficiency in how that funding is used, and for transparency about partnerships between the Parks Department and the many private organizations that take responsibility for operating public parks.

Key reforms proposed by new Yorkers for Parks include:

• Providing the Parks Department with a meaningful discretionary capital budget, to enable the Department to plan and prioritize investments citywide. Our current reliance on discretionary allocations from Councilmembers and Borough Presidents is inherently inequitable, and politicizes decisions that should be driven by need.
• Baselining the Parks Department’s budget for maintenance and for core functions including seasonal staffing for playgrounds and pools, tree care, and gardening, at a level that recognizes these activities as essential public services. Even after the welcome increases of last year, 75% of DPR’s maintenance staff are Job Training Participants (JTP) workers. As New Yorkers for Parks has pointed out, increasing Parks’ maintenance budget would enable many of these workers to step up to full-time, permanent living-wage jobs, benefiting the workers themselves, as well as the parks they maintain.
• Tracking and making public the actual costs of maintaining every park in the system, along with the sources of funds for that maintenance, to enable both the Parks Department and community members to understand how money is raised and spent;
• Standardized, easily accessible annual reporting of the revenues, expenses, and other financial information by all public-private partnerships. The terms of agreements between these organizations and the Parks Department should also be publicly available. Where provisions that may once have made sense – such as the requirement that New York City match private contributions made to the Central Park Conservancy – need to be opened to public discussion, and perhaps revisited.

Proposals to “tax” the largest conservancies are founded in the visceral and intuitive response of many New Yorkers to the way that gross disparities in the quality of our parks have amplified inequality among neighborhoods. The amount of money that might be raised by such a measure  – on the order of tens of millions of dollars per year – would obviously not make much of a dent in the real capital and operating needs of our parks.

It is within the Council’s power to budget the capital and expense dollars that we need to emulate Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá. He has often said that while in a market economy, it may not be possible to overcome income inequality, but that it is possible to achieve “quality of life equality,” by providing all city residents with access to high-quality public spaces.

For more on the relationship between parks and other public spaces and inequality:

http://www.gmfus.org/archives/global-cities-inequality-and-the-public-realm/

Paper written by Joan Byron for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, examining policies and investments in transit, parks, and other public spaces in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and potential lessons for New York City.