FY 2027 Preliminary Budget Hearing

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Hey, hey, hey.

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The message to workers and families is that standard care is still negotiable. Public safety still leans on temporary funding. Fully funded capital projects are still waiting because the staffing capacity needed for review is not there. We are now just trying to recover from the Adams administration's two-for-one hiring reduction. Too many neighborhoods still go through hotter summers with less shade and less relief because the tree canopy remains uneven. And as we head into summer, beaches and pools will again depend on lifeguards and other seasonal staff to open strong and to stay safe. Routine expiration does not make the impact routine. If these services are essential every year, then the funding should be there every year. Our workers, our parkies need stable jobs, better pay, and real protections. Our communities need a park system that serves every borough with the same standard of care.

The fiscal 2027 preliminary budget includes $50,000 in new needs for fiscal 2027, $127,000 in other adjustments and no savings. There are only two new needs included in the plan with the majority of funding coming from mold and asbestos removal at the Owen Dolan Recreation Center. There is also a state grant of $1.66 million for lifeguard recruitment. The committee is excited to hear testimony related to the FY27 preliminary plan, specifically one-shots, lifeguards and recreation centers. Before we begin with testimony, I would like to thank Council staff for their hard work. Our finance team, Issha Wright, Jack Surrey, Michael Sherman, and our committee staff, Christopher Satori and Patrick Moville, and my own staff, chief of staff Marisel Kenno, Cleave Destiny and Amari Johnson.

I will now ask the committee counsel to go over some procedural items and swear in the representatives from the department. But before they do so, let me acknowledge CM Shekar Krishnan, CM Sandra Ung and CM Frank Morano. I think that is all we have so far. With that, I give it to the committee counsel.

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Good morning, Chair Hankerson, members of the parks committee and members of the Council. My name is Trisha Shimamura, commissioner of New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. I am pleased to be here today to testify regarding the agency's fiscal year 2027 preliminary budget and to be joined by several members of our agency's senior leadership. Since this is my first opportunity to testify at a Council budget hearing as commissioner and some of you may be new to the Council or to the parks committee, before we speak to the proposed budget, I would like to offer a brief overview of our agency, outline some recent successes we have enjoyed and provide a sense of what we want to achieve in the years ahead.

New York City Parks is responsible for over 30,000 acres of land, 14% of New York City's surface area, including more than 5,000 individual properties spanning from Rockaway Beach to Palm Bay Park with an incredible array of uses and functions ranging from tiny community gardens to miles of green streets. In the properties under our jurisdiction, you will find over 800 athletic fields and nearly a thousand playgrounds, 1,800 basketball courts, 700 public restroom buildings, 550 tennis courts, 65 public pools, 51 recreational facilities, 15 nature centers, 14 miles of beaches, 1,200 monuments, 23 historic house museums and over 5 million trees. Two months ago, I was appointed by Mayor Mamdani to lead this incredible agency, tasked with improving the lives of millions of New Yorkers each and every day. The mayor has outlined his vision for a more affordable city. I am very proud to be leading the agency of affordability because parks are for everyone. Our park spaces are free and open to all New Yorkers, regardless of your zip code, your ethnicity or your tax bracket. To go out and enjoy our city parks, you just need a comfortable pair of shoes and the clothing on your back.

In a city where a gym membership can cost you hundreds of dollars every month and a simple family night out at the movies can break the bank, we are providing completely free recreational, educational and cultural programming in parks throughout the year, as well as free and low-cost access to our recreation centers that every New Yorker can enjoy.

As commissioner, I will work to ensure that our parks and facilities are not just accessible. They need to be engaging and active spaces that New Yorkers can be proud of. Whether they are looking for a chance to exercise, get closer to nature, gather with family or neighbors, or simply just sit and take in a moment of peace from our crowded and noisy streets, New Yorkers rely on our city parks as essential city infrastructure. Our staff needs to care for these spaces just like their own backyards because for so many New Yorkers, that is exactly what they are. They need to be clean and welcoming public spaces that provide a sense of belonging and joy. In just these few past months, I have already seen countless examples of the hard work and dedication that our incredible employees, who are essential workers, bring to striving for excellence in the public realm and delivering for New Yorkers every single day. When New York experienced record levels of snow and severe weather from the recent winter storms, including a deep freeze that felt like it would never end, parks employees were out on the front lines working 12-hour shifts cleaning our park perimeter sidewalks and intersections, resolving dangerous tree-related conditions and patrolling the lakes and ponds within our parks, keeping New Yorkers safe. This is the level of dedication that our employees bring to this agency every day and I look forward to living up to the example that they set.

Last month, we were thrilled to celebrate the opening of Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center, the first new park recreation center in over a decade, the first ever in central Brooklyn and the largest recreation center in the entire borough. Located right in the heart of Little Haiti, the residents of East Flatbush and Midwood finally have access to a state-of-the-art facility with 74,000 square feet of space offering swimming and a competition-sized six-lane pool, team sports, exercise, educational programming, a teaching kitchen and even an audiovisual production media lab. Like all of our parks, recreation center memberships are entirely free for kids and young adults and incredibly affordable for New Yorkers of all ages. We are grateful to our partner agencies for their collaboration, especially the Department of Design and Construction for delivering the project through a design-build contracting process years faster than would have otherwise been possible. And to our elected officials and local community members for their tireless advocacy and support for the project. Shirley Chisholm is an American icon and a hero to me and millions of others. Opening this facility in her honor is an incredible testament to her legacy and a reminder that our government can and must deliver for everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

This commitment to equity and fairness means that we also believe that all New Yorkers should have access to vibrant, high-quality parks. We were excited to recently announce the newest phase of our community parks initiative, also known as CPI. $50 million in new capital investment will deliver the transformative reconstruction of 10 parks, serving neighborhoods in all five boroughs that have historically been neglected and underserved. Through this initiative, we are using a data-driven methodology and working with local communities to create and revive thriving public spaces. Over the past decade, we have wholly reimagined and reconstructed 70 CPI projects for local neighborhood parks with dozens more actively underway. Over half a billion dollars of capital funding for rebuilding parks and playgrounds that have not seen significant investment in decades. Many of those underserved neighborhoods are also impacted by higher heat vulnerability and some communities are not benefiting equally from the City's urban tree canopy, which is vital living infrastructure. We believe that every New York City neighborhood should get to enjoy the benefits that trees provide. We are working to expand our tree canopy with new plantings all over the city, delivered in a more efficient and equitable fashion thanks to the concentrated planting strategy adopted through our recently relaunched neighborhood tree planting program.

Now, new streets are planted on a data-driven basis of fairness and efficiency, prioritizing the most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods first as a matter of environmental justice. Even in its early stages, this new efficient approach is already delivering results for New Yorkers. In our most recent fall-winter planting season that just concluded, we planted over 9,500 trees along our streets and in our parks, the highest planting levels in over a decade.

With the support of the mayor and many of your offices, we engaged in a massive publicity campaign to get the word out to New Yorkers willing to rise up to the challenge and become part of our lifeguard team for this coming summer. We offered qualifying tests at indoor pools around the city including our recreation centers as well as New York City public school sites. We are working to get these new recruits trained, certified and ready to protect New Yorkers, serving alongside our returning lifeguards so that the upcoming beach and pool season can be even more successful than the one we enjoyed this past summer. In summer 2025, over 9 million people visited our public beaches and pools and we expanded the number of free summertime learn-to-swim classes and were able to bring back senior splash and lap swimming programs to our outdoor pools for the first time since the COVID pandemic. This was all made possible through an incredibly focused campaign to recruit and retrain lifeguards and expand training opportunities, which is an effort that will carry on as we seek to build on that momentum.

As seen in the fiscal year 2026 preliminary mayor's management report released earlier this month, our MMR ratings for overall park condition and park cleanliness in the first four months of this current fiscal year increased by 1 percentage point in each category compared to the same period of FY25, rising to 86% and 93% respectively. Among other factors, we believe this improvement can be credited to the expansion of our second shift maintenance staffing approach, which strategically targets 200 heavily used park locations during peak use evening hours and weekends. To be clear, this metric data, which helps inform our maintenance strategy around the city, is not self-reported by our operational staff. These metrics are derived from thousands of inspections made through the year by our parks inspection program, or PIP. This is a detailed, objective quality assurance program independently administered by our operations and management planning division, conducted completely independently from our maintenance and operations staff, similar to what many in the retail business would call a secret shopper program, so that we hold ourselves accountable and adjust our strategies in real time as problems arise.

The PMMR also reflects the growing interest in the recreational programming that we offer in parks around the city, as over half a million people attended our programs outside of recreation centers in the first four months of FY26, an increase of 77% over the same period in FY25. The increase was largely due to the addition of nine more program sites and an increased number of operating days for our Kids in Motion program, which is our free drop-in program led by New York City Parks staff, offering active outdoor play at playgrounds to keep kids active and engaged on those warm summer days. Because we are committed to accountability and transparency, I will also mention that the new PMMR reflects a significant decrease in the number of street trees pruned in the first four months of FY26 compared to the same period in FY25. Unfortunately, we expected the loss of services of an experienced block pruning contractor due to the tragic passing of the company's owner in late June, forcing the agency to rebid these contracts. The preventative care of our tree canopy is a hugely important priority for us. We are working to advance these new block pruning contracts through the City's procurement process and bringing those vendors on board as quickly as possible so we can resume meeting our block pruning targets as we have typically done over the years.

Even though it has felt at times like this winter would never end, we know that warmer days are approaching and our parks, athletic fields and playgrounds are going to be busier than they have ever been. As many of you know, thanks to once-in-a-lifetime celebrations like the 2026 World Cup and Sail 250, the New York City metro area is expected to receive a truly massive influx of visitors and tourists this summer, with an estimated 2 million people coming into or passing through New York City as they cheer on their favorite teams and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. We are confident that our employees are up to the task as we are poised to begin onboarding our seasonal employees, reactivate our water features and get our sports fields in shape as our busiest season approaches. There is no denying that this summer will present some very unique challenges. But we are extremely excited that so many visitors will be able to come experience our world-class green spaces alongside the millions of New Yorkers that enjoy our parks each and every day.

Turning to the specific topic for this hearing, the fiscal year 2027 preliminary 10-year capital plan for New York City Parks includes a total budget of $12 billion, demonstrating this administration's ongoing commitment to promoting equitable investment in a greener, healthier city. The FY27 preliminary expense operating budget for New York City Parks is $654 million, providing our agency with the resources we need to continue getting the job done, delivering core services and keeping our city's parks clean and welcoming. To be completely clear, this proposed budget figure does represent a $33.7 million decrease from the FY26 adopted budget of $687.6 million, which it is important to note is due to the routine expiration of single-year one-shot funding items that are typically added at each budget adoption subject to negotiations between the Council and the administration. In our current FY26 adopted budget, this yearly funding includes the Council's park equity initiative discretionary expense funding as well as additional staffing, supplies and equipment to support various efforts throughout our agency. Our maintenance teams, green thumb community garden program, urban parks rangers, forest management framework and parks enforcement patrol are all significantly supported through this supplemental funding, which provides tremendous added value. The parkies serving in those staffing lines are a hugely important part of our team.

We very greatly appreciate the Council's long-standing support and advocacy for that dedicated funding.

We do not have enough time today to exhaustively outline every operational aspect of every effort and initiative being undertaken by the agency to ensure the long-term success of our park system. I hope this overview has helped demonstrate our commitment to growing and protecting green and open space around the city and we look forward to working with the Council in close partnership to make sure our park system can be the envy of cities around the world. To be clear, we cannot do this alone. We rely on the support of our elected officials, our partners and friends groups ranging from large conservancies to small neighborhood associations organizing volunteer cleanup events. And most importantly, the individual New Yorkers and park visitors who use our parks every day and who need to do their part by treating these public spaces with the respect and dignity that they deserve, so we all can enjoy this vital resource that we have to share. In closing, I want to thank my entire team for their continued hard work and dedication to our mission. I am honored and grateful to have been granted the privilege of leading this agency and I look forward to working with each of you to continue improving our parks and open spaces for all New Yorkers. We would be happy to answer any questions that you have.

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Commissioner, thank you. I also want to acknowledge my colleague and neighbor in Queens, CM Lynn Schulman, who has joined us as well. As we dive into the questions, let us just jump right in actually.

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So during his campaign, the mayor supported allocating 1% of the city's budget to parks. Unfortunately this campaign promise is yet to materialize. In fact we are now at an even lower level of parks funding compared to the total budget than before the mayor took office. Has there been any discussion regarding increasing the department's budget to meet this campaign promise with OMB or the mayor?

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Yeah, thank you so much for your question. I want to just also say thank you to the many advocates who I know are in the room and in overflow rooms who have all called out for additional funding to parks to hit that 1%. I just want to say that we are very excited to be in constant communication with this administration about the campaign promise that he has made and also about the real benefits that parks bring to all New Yorkers. So this is an early part of our budget process. We are really encouraged by the conversations that we are having and frankly in regular conversations with this administration around the benefit that we bring and around what additional tasks we can do with more resources.

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From those conversations, has there been any commitment?

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I think that the mayor has said publicly that he is committed to seeing through the 1% for parks. Although I will also point out that, as I am sure you know, we are facing a very serious budget crisis at this moment. The mayor has reiterated that we are interested in creating a more transparent, honest budget that is really reflective of truly anticipated revenue and costs. So we are certainly continuing to be in conversation with this administration around what that means for parks. I am very encouraged to have your support and to have advocate support continuously talking about the real benefit that parks bring to New York.

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If the decision was made to allocate additional funding in the adopted budget, how would you allocate the additional monies?

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Sure, that is a great question. Thank you. So I think that the gap between what we currently have budgeted and what advocates and others have called for as 1% is around $616 million. It is a very significant pot of money. Certainly as the leader of an agency I would welcome additional resources at any time. I think that we know many of the most successful programs that we have are really data-driven and metrics-driven. As I highlighted in my testimony, we really do have some rigorous metrics that we hold ourselves to, be it through our PIP ratings which really look at every single park, or through inspections overall like our MMR report that comes out. We saw an improvement just based on what we believe to be the impact of second shift. So there are a lot of programs that we have out there that are data-driven, that we are always happy to point to as successful initiatives and programs that parks runs, that we know are proven to have a real impact in the parks.

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From those assessments, can you name a few of those programs?

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Yeah. So certainly, just to point to our MMR ratings again, our overall cleanliness and use of our parks is rated through our parks inspection program. But we also provide data in our MMR that comes out.

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We had discussed in just this MMR versus last year's that we saw an uptick in overall cleanliness in our parks. We believe that that has at least in part, if not more, been due to the implementation of second shift at a larger level. We have right now second shift staff that come out on weekends — Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday I believe, although I will look to our acting first deputy commissioner Mark Poke to give us more information on this. With that program, we see our parkies go out and be in our parks when a lot of park patrons are using them in the afternoons. We saw that with that implementation expansion, we went from 100 sites at first to now 200 park sites. We have seen tremendous success with this overall — higher ratings, overall cleaner bathrooms, trash is cleaned out more frequently. So we have these kinds of examples. That is just one, knowing that this is a truly data-driven program that can deliver results.

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Thank you. We are excited to see that there are no savings in the CSO plan, the chief savings officer plan, but there are also no restorations to the agency's budget after the effects of the PEG program. We saw hundreds of positions reduced and many programs delayed or outright eliminated as cost savings measures. This has undoubtedly had an impact on our parks and the city's ability to care for our parks and green spaces. While there is not a PEG program, there is still an instruction from the agency to institute savings across the board with recommendations by the CSO. Can you please explain the savings that you found as well as any impact on services in your report?

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Sure. I think the EO12 had instructed our agency to designate a chief savings officer and then to look through and see opportunities for inefficiencies and savings. That report was to be submitted by March 20th, which I think was just this past Friday. The agency has complied. I want to reiterate, though, something that the mayor has said and that is certainly true within our agency: none of these efficiencies and savings were to have any sort of impact on the actual services to New Yorkers, and we know that parks provides many services. So while this is still very early in the conversation and we have not had any sort of formal circle back with OMB, it is a little early to talk about the details. I will just tell you that any sort of savings that we were able to identify will have no impact on overall services to our parks or recreation centers or any other impact to New Yorkers.

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Just to be clear, so there have not been any conversations with OMB yet.

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We just submitted on Friday. So not yet.

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You mentioned bathrooms. I just want to jump there really quickly if that is okay.

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What is the current cost to construct a bathroom or renovation in the park? Yeah, thank you so much for the question. So if you do not mind, I would just like to set the stage a little bit here and just say, for a moment of pride, I am very proud as leader of this agency — and I know that parkies share this pride — to be playing a role in providing New Yorkers a very critical public amenity. Of the public restrooms in our city, parks provides 70% of them, over 700 of them. You do not have to be a mother of two small children like I am to know that this is absolutely critical if you want to be in our parks, enjoy our parks or playgrounds, take on a basketball game, or just sit down on a park bench or enjoy one of our playgrounds. All of these desires to use our parks and recreational programs rely on the idea that you need to have a public restroom nearby. So we are very proud to be continuously providing that service.

But that also means that building and reconstructing public restrooms has oftentimes come up in conversations with communities, because costs really do range. Typically when you are reconstructing a restroom, it can be as low as $2.5 million or so and go up from there. When you are doing a completely new restroom building, it can start around three million and then go up from there. Typically three to five million is what we see for new construction. Now I am sure that you are not new to this idea that we oftentimes have been saying that more often than not, we are probably recommending fully new construction of restrooms in your districts and in your parks when possible. We also know that it is not just about restrooms. You oftentimes hear us talk about restrooms plus an additional staff space that we can then have a fixed post staff in. It does cost more, but it typically has a lot of benefits to have the option of fixed post staff in your parks. Maybe we are talking about reconstructing, but reconstructing will only barely give us the accessibility that we know that this park or neighborhood needs. So it would just make more sense for us to construct a new facility that will give us more accessibility and more stalls. So it is a little bit of a complicated answer and I am happy to talk to you more about it. But typically, depending on whether you are reconstructing or doing something new, your costs can range.

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I mean, just as a follow-up to that, has the agency explored any ways to decrease the cost of construction and design of bathrooms in parks?

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Absolutely, and thank you for the question. So there are two components that oftentimes we hear about when it comes to any sort of capital project. I will also look to our deputy commissioner of capital, Eric Borston, to come join me if you have any other questions on that, if there is anything that I am misstating or any additional details you would like to add. Just a couple of years ago, the agency, in recognition that it was taking too long and was too expensive to build these restrooms, undertook a pilot to see if there were ways to speed this up and reduce some of those costs. That is when you started to hear about the Portland Loo, which was a pilot in order to put a single-stall, open-air, year-round bathroom in every single borough to see if that would bring down the cost and if it would be successful. We also tried pre-fabricated modular bathrooms, some of which have been very successful — we received design awards and completed them very quickly — but some of which brought up other problems that were not as quickly anticipated. The Portland Loo just went through its first winter season. We have learned a lot of lessons, some good, some bad. But certainly we are continuously looking at ways to deliver this incredibly important public amenity at a faster pace and for a cheaper price. I will look to our deputy commissioner to see if there is anything you would like to add.

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Thank you, Commissioner, and thank you for your question, Council Member. I must say to begin that the commissioner got it all right and gave a very complete answer to...

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I am sorry, Deputy Commissioner, we have to swear you in.

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Yeah, Deputy Commissioner. My apologies.

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I do. Thank you. So again, the commissioner told a very complete story and really did get everything right. I would just add to that that, first of all, we all know that construction in the city is expensive no matter what you are building. Construction in parks more so, because you are far from utilities, sometimes far from the street, and the delivery of materials and workers adds to the complexity. We are also building the smallest public building imaginable. Larger buildings have greater efficiencies. Our buildings are built by union labor, so you are talking about full union wages and operating governance. To build a 720 square foot building has a lot of inefficiencies that you do not encounter when you are building a more normal size building.

But to that end, we have a number of different design options that we are utilizing. The commissioner mentioned our standard prototypical public restroom building, the PRB. It has six fixtures. It is hand-built on site once the foundations are in. These are masonry buildings, hand-laid masonry. These are intended to last decades. These are not buildings that we expect to suffer from weather or abuse. They are designed to be where they are. The existing buildings that we are all familiar with, the 20 by 20s, are much smaller. They currently have four fixtures in them, but again, as the commissioner said, to make them fully handicap accessible, we lose two of the four fixtures. So in that case, you are getting a public restroom with two fixtures, one men's and one women's. Typically with the alternative, you have three of each. So the capacity and the service is far greater, and the cost is really not that different on the scale of things.

We also have a pre-fabricated option that we have rolled out twice. As the commissioner mentioned, one of them won an AIA New York design award, where most of the work is done offsite — that is the superstructure. Below grade, the same challenges apply: foundations, infrastructure, all the typical costs and potential risks that one encounters there. But above grade, the building is predominantly fabricated offsite in three large modules, delivered to the site and craned in. Again, access is an issue there. That option does not so much reduce cost, but it reduces the amount of construction activity on site that disrupts the use of the park for other uses. Thank you.

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I am going to circle back to the bathroom piece or conversations. I want to acknowledge some of my other colleagues that have joined us: CM Gale Brewer, CM Sandy Nurse, CM Virginia Maloney and CM Kayla Santosuosso who has joined us virtually as well. Just to switch gears really quickly, every year as part of the budget negotiations, the Council pushes for the same few budget items to be funded. However, the administration has only set them for one year at a time. This leaves the jobs of working-class New Yorkers up in the air every year. They do not know if they will have a job to come to next fiscal year. This is no way to live and it puts intense stress on these dedicated employees who work to make our parks clean and enjoyable as much as possible. Is it the commitment of this administration to baseline these one-shots once and for all, particularly the one-shots associated with headcount?

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Thank you so much for the question. I welcome the opportunity to talk more about these one-shot positions, which account to around 277 staff members overall. I am happy to talk a little bit more in detail around these positions, but just at a very high level, I would just like to say that from what I understand, these one-shot funding opportunities have really come out of and are part of the essentially routine conversation and dialogue between the administration and our Council. I am incredibly grateful for these opportunities and can really speak to operationally how these positions have worked to complement and supplement the work that we do. They span from Green Thumb to our forestry management to our maintenance and operations, and of course PEP rangers and stump removal. All of these components are incredibly important to the bread-and-butter work that we do and the services that we provide to New Yorkers. As I understand it, we are very grateful for the continued support that both the Council and the administration have looked at.

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I know you listed some. Can you list all of them with the headcount?

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Yeah, let me slow it down for you and go through. So there are six one-shot initiatives that have previously come through in our FY26 budget. The first one I will talk about is forestry management. This is not our street trees but really our natural areas management. That is 37 positions. We have a year-round headcount of 63, so this is a sizable supplement to that work. We are very proud of the fact that we maintain over 800,000 trees in our natural areas. There are actually six million trees in our natural areas, which is amazing. But 800,000 of those we maintain at a higher degree of touch and a higher degree of maintenance, and this has continuously helped us do that. We are very excited about these natural areas, as we have spoken about at previous hearings, because we understand that the maintenance of our existing canopy and our urban forest really contributes to our overall health.

Commissioner, I am sorry — as much as I appreciate that information, if you can just list them, that would be great. Thank you. Yep. Rangers is 50 positions. Stump removal is $2 million, just OTPS. Green Thumb is 11 positions plus a little OTPS funding. We have maintenance park workers, 73 positions — this is mostly CPWs and APSWs and some gardeners. And then 100 PEP officers.

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By chance, did you list the urban park rangers? Did I miss that?

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The park rangers is 50. 50.

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What is the breakdown of the park rangers by borough? >> That is a great question. Let me just say that overall our park rangers are budgeted for 94, inclusive of our 50 additional one-shot positions. I will look to our deputy commissioner Margaret Nelson to give us a little bit more of a breakdown of how we deploy them. But at a very high level, just because members may not be aware, our park rangers essentially have the same civil service title as our PEP officers, but really focus on educational programming. They are the ones you see typically running out of our nature centers, doing nature walks, doing educational programming in our public schools, providing that essential programming throughout our parks. They do not typically stay out of one center, but are really spread throughout. You will see rangers throughout our park system at different times of the year doing really incredible educational programming. I will look to our deputy commissioner to talk a little bit more about the deployment of those rangers. I just want to mention, for the record as well, that a third of our PEP officers are funded by the City and if the Council did not fight for them, >> that funding would not be there. So I just want to >> say that for the record as well. >> And thank you for that. So I am happy to talk to you about PEP. Our rangers we do look at a little differently than our PEP officers.

They have the same civil service title, but whereas our PEP officers you will see typically enforcing our park rules and educating the public in terms of those park rules, they try to hit as many parks and like spaces as possible. Our rangers are doing a little bit more deeper programming. For Black History Month we are doing a lot of history programming around the City's Black leaders and their impacts on parks. Rangers will do nature walks. They will do a little bit more of that deeper programming. They will do shoreline educational programming. So a little different in terms of their overall scope. I will look to our deputy commissioner Margaret Nelson to talk a little bit more about how we deploy those rangers. And I am also happy to talk about PEP. >> Thank you. Before you answer, I believe you have to be sworn in. Is that right?

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I do. >> As the commissioner said, first of all, we are incredibly grateful for the one-shot funding for the rangers. Our baseline ranger number is only in the 40s. So when you think about adding 50 more rangers, we really have been able to expand the breadth of our programming throughout the City. We did take a special look at making sure that we are providing programming in every single Council district, which is something we were not able to do with our baseline staffing. So I just want to point that out. As the commissioner said, we have 11 nature centers which are open on the weekends and we provide programming and open hours there. We also provide programming in schools through our natural classroom program. So we are going out into schools doing programming there and also bringing those school children into our parks. We do popup programming and we do scheduled programming. So it is really throughout the City and it is not necessarily based on specific parks at a specific time. So happy to provide you more detail. I would say that those rangers are really spread equitably across the five boroughs.

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What does a typical day for a park ranger look like?

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So a typical day for a park ranger — they are going to spend some of their time planning upcoming programming. They do some reaching out to schools to see if schools are interested in programming, or following up on inquiries that they have gotten. They do do some patrol in parks, and they use that as an opportunity — if they see wildlife in a park, they might gather people around and do some education. That is called our popup programming. So if they see a seal in the river or they see a hawk in a tree, they will be doing popup programming with the people that are in the park. They will also do some patrol around canine conditions, so dogs off leash. They will try to educate folks around that. Again, as the commissioner said, both our rangers and our PEP officers have the same underlying urban park ranger civil service title. They are both trained as peace officers. They both have the ability to make arrests if needed. Again, both our rangers and our PEP officers really look for education first to educate parkgoers on our rules before having to move to enforcement. >> In the instance that they have to make an arrest, the person that they have detained — would they be brought to a local precinct? >> Exactly.

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Is that correct?

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Yes.

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Would the agency be supportive of the Council's push for the administration to baseline? >> I think that as the leader of this agency, we would always be happy to see more certainty and more funding in our budget, certainly for our rangers and for our PEP officers in particular. These positions require a lot of training and require a specific type of recruitment. The training alone takes around 16 weeks to do and recruitment can take any number of weeks. So I think operationally it is nice for our baseline funded positions to have that certainty, so that we can get them trained and get them out in the field for as long as they will stay with us. >> I thank you for your support. >> So before I turn it over to my colleagues, I want to acknowledge CM Mercedes Narcisse has joined us as well, and Finance Chair CM Linda Lee. I have one last — maybe three — questions, and then I am done. In the fiscal 2025 adopted budget, there was a mixup between the administration and the Council on funding for forestry and natural areas. This resulted in a reduction of headcount and forced several people to find new employment either within or...

(00:50:28)

outside of the agency. The natural resources group is responsible for almost 1,000 acres of natural areas and performs tasks related to mulching, watering, and managing invasive species. This loss of funding will certainly lead to reductions in services that are provided by the agency and may even result in damage to our natural areas due to neglect. Can you please give a full timeline from the perspective of DPR on how this funding was lost, and then I will have a follow-up to that.

Sure. I think, again, just to give a high-level overview and then I will look to my team to speak to it with a little bit more detail. These one-shot funding opportunities, as I understand it, really come out of negotiations directly between the Council and the administration. We are incredibly grateful for these opportunities and frankly, after a couple of years of seeing these one-shots coming in, it gives me a lot of direction and data so that I may be able to demonstrate that maybe something should not be one-shotted and should be baselined. A good example of this is that we had gardeners that were one-shot funded for several years and then, from what I understand, the Council and administration saw that this was something that was constantly discussed and ultimately became baselined. So I will say that it is pretty routine and pretty typical to see these one-shots come up, but they are in direct communication between the Council and the administration on how and what finally comes up. I will look to you, Matt, to give us a little bit more detail.

Sure. Thank you, Commissioner. My name is Matt. I am the chief of citywide legislative affairs. I can talk a little bit about the sort of tick-tock that led to the situation you described. I will take a step back and note that the forest management framework is a partnership between our agency and the Natural Areas Conservancy, and that was released in 2018. What that sketched out is a forward-looking 25-year plan, specifically looking at our forested natural areas. So this is different and separate from all of our efforts related to street trees or trees within landscape parks. It is very much focusing on those natural forests, and because natural forest health is where the vast majority of the raw value of individual trees that make up our canopy lies, our natural forests are a huge part of that.

So starting in FY20 the agency received one-shot expense funding. I believe that was four and a half million. I believe there was then a pause during the COVID-related FY21 discussions. That funding was resumed in FY22. In FY23 and FY24 we saw one-shot funding of $2.5 million. Through these years you can think of the forest management framework staff and that planning and other analysis and other work kind of getting underway. Then in FY25, and again we were not directly involved in these discussions so it is a little hard to speak to, it does appear that both the Council and the administration did not fund it in FY25.

I guess, not to cut you off, what was the result of the loss of funding? What was the impact of it?

For sure. There were 27 FMF-focused staff that were employed at the time of FY25 adoption. 20 of those were able to stay on and shifted to other grant-funded parks opportunities and positions. So 20 out of the 27 stayed on board. Three were able to fill full-time vacancies that already existed and then four resigned and went on to others. So 23 out of the 27 stayed on with the agency and I believe to a large degree still do today.

What is the current budgeted and actual headcount in the forestry division?

In the forestry division — sorry, not to split hairs, but do you mean the natural resource group? Or do you mean forestry in...

We have 200 active staff who are dedicated to caring for our street and landscape park trees, and that includes 58 foresters and 90 climbers and pruners.

Is that enough to manage the City's natural areas? So our forestry staff actually take care of our street trees and park trees — that is just a terminology thing. That is the team taking care of our street trees and park trees in any given park. In terms of our natural areas staff, there are 73 who are taking care of our natural areas space — that is the more wild, more... forgive me, I keep saying the word natural, but more like the typical forest of what you think of.

Is it enough?

I mean, I think you can look at our MMR data for how we are doing with the resources that we have. More is always more in the sense that we are always happy to receive more resources, but at the same time I would also say that parks understands to a very intimate level that we have mandates to uphold and essential services to provide New Yorkers, be it in our landscape parks or in our natural areas. So we are going to uphold those mandates with any resources that we are given.

I am having a slight challenge, and Commissioner, it is not with you, but you did mention that park workers and the work that parks does is essential. Unfortunately the way that the current preliminary budget looks, it does not seem as if it is essential to the administration as it stands. So I want to just go back to a question I asked in the last hearing regarding the snowstorm.

Regarding the staff that were required to work during the snowstorm, would the department be willing to use funds from accruals, given that accruals from the current vacancy rate are projected to provide more than enough funding, to provide retroactive pay comparable to the pay provided by DSNY to those DPR staff who worked to shovel during the last snowstorm?

I just want to make sure I understand your question. So those staff who responded to the snowstorm — and I am happy to give you the larger overview — when we have major snow events like the two that we had in February, our entire maintenance and operations crew responds to those storms. Nothing else takes higher priority than ensuring that we are doing our part to help New Yorkers get to where they need to go. We have a very thoughtful, very thorough, extremely detailed winter weather response plan that really prioritizes perimeter sidewalks, high-traffic areas, major transit hubs and high-priority areas at the top. We work with our brothers and sisters at DSNY to help clear bus stations and crosswalks and really understand this to be a full City effort to get out of a storm and recover as quickly as possible, knowing that there are priorities to helping people get around. That works very closely in hand-in-hand with our other sister agencies DSNY, DOT, NYPD and FDNY to respond to the storm. While those parkies are responding, they are getting paid for that work.

I do not think the question has to do with them being paid. We know they were paid, but it does not seem that the pay was comparable to those in the Department of Sanitation and those that were hired by the City. I personally feel that it is only fair to provide equal pay for equal work, especially since some park staff had to sleep in rec centers overnight. That is a huge ask. It speaks to the essential nature of park workers, parkies in general. I would like to know if the agency would consider matching that pay to that of those who worked the snowstorm in DSNY or as PDM workers.

Thank you. Just one caveat to that — we are happy to uplift the work of parkies. We would have to look closer and I do not know if I can speak to exactly how those DSNY or DOT staffers were compensated or do a comparison between them. Although we did provide overtime for when parkies were there. The only caveat is that, to talk a little bit about that snowstorm, which was so intense, only in rare occasions did we request park staff to stay overnight. We offered it though, because we do want to take care of our staff and oftentimes we know how important the work that they do is, and that they would go through extraordinary lengths to show up for work the next day. So oftentimes we were helping them accommodate and stay overnight in parks and rec centers because we knew that it was going to be dangerous for them to travel back and forth, and that was an offer to them, not necessarily a "you have to do this" sort of thing. That was just a small caveat.

Out of curiosity, were meals provided to them for those who stayed overnight?

I would have to check, but in most cases — and I myself was going around to the centers and checking on staff during the entirety of the storm — park staff were overall in really good spirits. They were very happy about the situation. Most of them had gotten pizza or other food, as the managers had gotten pizza for them and helped support them. In some of our rec centers they were watching movies during the night and then getting up the next morning and getting back to work. So I think overall we are happy to look into that further, but overall we do what we can to make sure that they are supported and most of all safe.

I would appreciate you all following back up with us. I do not want to take too much time. I have a lot of colleagues who are here who have questions. I want to acknowledge CM Pierina Ana Sanchez who has joined us as well. For questions, we will start in Harlem with CM Yusef Salaam.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for your testimony as well. I want to start with Central Park's maintenance decline. As noted, there was a decrease of about $18.7 million from fiscal year 26 to 27. I want to know what services or maintenance activities will be reduced and does this decline affect park cleanliness, safety, or recreational programming.

Thanks for the question, Council Member. To my knowledge — and I will look to my team to confirm — I do not believe that we actually have a decline of $18 million to Central Park, although we can double-check that to confirm. I am happy to talk about a line in our budget that goes towards funding that goes directly towards the Central Park Conservancy's maintenance. That is around $14 million, although we can confirm. I can talk a little bit about that because it is a somewhat unusual thing to see in our budget. Essentially this came out of our license agreement with the Central Park Conservancy. The overall maintenance of Central Park, just given the prominence, the landscape, and the long-scale vision of this park, is well into what I understand to be like a hundred million dollars a year if not more. So that kind of matching from the City came out of the license agreement that the City struck with the Central Park Conservancy many years ago. While the City does contribute — I think it is $16 million — that is matched many times over by the Central Park Conservancy. To my knowledge, that has not changed. There is nothing in the next budget that I think is going to impact that.

I do want to point out that out of this relationship has also come something that I think spans beyond Central Park, which is very important to me. The Central Park Conservancy has agreed to partner with parks to expand the horticulture practices and maintenance of that park and expand it to other parks throughout the City. That is through an annual fellowship where the Central Park Conservancy puts their resources into other parks around the City to help maintain and teach our staff some of those practices. We are happy to talk a little bit more about that. In fact, our relationship goes beyond just Central Park. We were in your district in Marcus Garvey Park for a while, and then I think we finished up two years in Highbridge and are now moving to a different park entirely. You see this kind of residency happen with Central Park Conservancy staff and generally we see a lot of benefits from that.

Thank you. The capital program budget decreased by $2.675 million from fiscal year 26 to 27. What capital projects are being deferred or delayed and how will this impact the East River Esplanade phase three and the Heckscher Park pool reconstruction timelines?

Thank you again for the question. I am happy to talk through those two projects in particular, although we are happy to also get you more specific details. I am not sure about the budget reduction component and where that number is referring to, although we can look into it and get back to you. Our 10-year capital plan reflects $12 billion of capital projects. We have 500 capital projects that are currently either in design, in procurement, or in construction, and then we have 91 projects that are coming up in the next year that have not yet started design. As for the two projects in particular, I am not aware of any outright delay for the East River Esplanade. It is one that is very close and near and dear to my heart. You should see construction happening right now on portions of the esplanade, particularly in East Harlem. I think we just did a groundbreaking with you just in the last year on the Harlem component right at 135th Street with the Half-In project. We are moving right along with this and are eager to see that rec center back and reopened.

Yeah, thank you, Chair. I just have two more quick ones. Recreation membership growth versus funding: the recreation center membership increased 5.3%, with 7,737 new members in the first four months of fiscal year 2026, driven by young adult growth. Does the fiscal year 2027 budget include increased funding to support expanding programming and staffing for this growing membership base?

Thank you for the question. I too am looking at membership and rec center visitation very closely. The truth is that we have over $1 billion going into recreation facilities over the next several years. We opened up Shirley Chisholm this year. This will not even be the end of the conversation around rec centers that we are opening. We will be opening up Mary Cali Dalton, I hope by the end of this calendar year. We have four more rec centers in the queue, particularly in the Bronx and Queens. Really exciting projects. Typically when we do open up these new facilities, particularly as you saw with Shirley, we do receive additional funding to staff those facilities. The budget that you have in front of you does not reflect any additional staffing at this point, although we are constantly in conversation with OMB as we open up those new centers.

I will say, as proud as I am of this major investment and opening of new rec centers — the first in a decade truly — the rec center component is just one piece of a larger puzzle of how we serve New York City in terms of our recreational programming. Outside of our rec centers, we have playground associates, shape-up classes and other recreational programming that helps get New Yorkers access to these incredible services even if you do not live near a rec center. So we are very excited and can provide you additional information around that type of network. You should look at our rec centers as just one component and then see this larger mosaic of services that we provide even without a stationary building attached to it.

And finally, DPR received $1.6 million in state funding for lifeguard recruitment bonuses to achieve 1,200 lifeguards. Is this sufficient to meet the workforce needs for a full pool and beach season? What is the current lifeguard vacancy rate and how does this compare to fiscal year 25?

Thank you for the question very much. I just want to say, in recognition of my predecessors, particularly Iris Rodriguez Rosa but also Sue Donoghue, both of these commissioners really saw what was a nationwide issue with lifeguarding and focused on changing the narrative in New York City. Truly, anywhere in the country you would see lifeguards coming in short supply, and particularly Iris really took on the challenge of changing this around and working very closely with our union and with our lifeguards to both change how they were received within the agency but also deliver on some real financial incentives to increase our numbers. So now lifeguards are making $22 an hour, which was an increase, and they also receive a thousand-dollar retention bonus. Those two things, mixed with also just a cultural shift — and I wish I could spend an hour talking about this — have really resulted in increasing numbers instead of that continuously decreasing amount. I really want to say thank you to Iris and Sue who really took this on.

We are going to continue that under my leadership here. We have seen significant retention, to the tune of around 70 to 80% of lifeguards now returning back. That is higher than the national average. We had just shy of 1,100 lifeguards last year — we had 1,082. It is still too early to tell you exactly what we are going to have this year, but I am very hopeful and the numbers are looking good. We are just in training right now, so it kind of depends on who sticks through training and ultimately we do the last tests. We will not be able to know for sure until frankly the end of June or start of July in terms of our total numbers. But you do feel a difference here. Particularly even at our pools, you saw at our big Olympic-size pools just a couple of years ago we were only able to open those pools to like 15% capacity. This last past summer you saw diving pools opening up and we were able to bring back adult swim and senior swim, which was such a beloved program. We are really hoping to see continued growth and are very grateful to my predecessors for their focused effort here.

Thank you, Commissioner. Thank you, Chair.

Absolutely. I also want to give kudos to former commissioner Iris Rodriguez Rosa. She did amazing work. I know she is watching, so...

Yes, she will happily be texting. Yes.

I want to let us travel to Queens, to my neighbor, CM Lynch.

Thank you, Chair. And Commissioner, welcome. I did this privately and I will say it publicly: I think you are going to be a great commissioner.

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I know you from a lot of other things. Plus you are the Manhattan borough commissioner, so you have a wealth of knowledge and all of that, and you have been particularly helpful to me recently. Anyway, we look forward to your great work. I have a few questions. One is about accessibility. I have actually funded accessible access to Forest Park, and then I am told that it is going to take years for anything to happen because you do not have enough engineers. This is a fully funded project that I did in my first year here. So that is the first question.

Yeah. Thank you, first and most importantly, for your partnership and for your continued advocacy for our parks. I very much appreciate it. Thank you also for prioritizing accessibility in your parks. I truly think at a very high level we should be judged based on how we serve our most vulnerable, and that means our accessibility. I appreciate the funding and the continued follow-up here.

While I am happy to get you a specific update as to where we stand on this, it is true that these capital projects — and it does not really matter if we are talking about a bathroom, but in this case we are talking about accessible pathways into our parks — they do take quite a long time. I can go into details around this, but the truth of the matter is that we are looking very closely at how we can shave down some of this time. What you see is that when you start design it has been pretty typical around twelve or so months.

Haven't even seen a design yet. So we are told that there is not enough personnel to...

When you see those design projects get into design... but for any project that is right before your project or after the design phase, you really do see — and what we are looking at very closely — a kind of prolonged time when we are trying to get through some regulations and checks with our other agencies. All good things, truly good things, but things like — and you may hear this word a lot — the SWIP process or something else like that. Those kinds of checks within our other agencies are very important but also can really lengthen projects significantly. We are looking at this closely. There are some things that the agency has done — actually a piece of legislation that CM Krishnan had passed just a few years ago around the whole capital process and ways to actually shorten this. I both read your legislation and the report that came out, which was very helpful. The agency has taken steps to actually reduce some of this. We need to be doing more. We will certainly get back to you on this one.

Because it is a park that is accessed by everyone including the chair's constituents, and it is rather big. So... all right, that is one. The other is: what is the new process now for getting trees planted? Because a lot of the public does not know about that or there are issues.

Yeah, thank you for the question. In recognizing that every single community in New York City deserves trees and every single community needs to benefit from the overall canopy, the agency has shifted away from what was a very long, kind of ad hoc list of 311s and elected official requests — where we were jumping around to different areas based on the requests that came in — and decided to shift to a comprehensive tree planting plan. The good news is that with this plan I can tell you that in nine years, which I know is a long time, I can confidently say to you that every single corner of this city will have been reviewed, assessed and planted for. Not only are we planting, but we are also expanding tree pits for overall tree health. We are removing stumps. We are filling empty tree pits that can no longer sustain trees in them and really touching every single corner. So typically, in these nine years, we will be able to touch every single corner of the city. For specifically your exact neighborhood, or if you have a specific location, we are happy to look that up and tell you where we are in the queue.

It is done through the parks department now — sorry, it is done through the parks department. Yes.

And can you explain artwork in the parks? Because a lot of people do not realize — and I have figured that out. So if you can...

I love artwork in the parks. Frankly, just to be very clear, we have a really great program where for 364 days you can work with our agency to put up artwork in our parks. We know that this is not just a luxury. This is something that shows investment. It shows excitement. It can show a sense of place and pride of place, as in the case of the one that you and I were just working with in Queens. We are very excited to work with artists of all types to really think through how they might be able to showcase their art in the parks. I actually think there are some advocates here today who have run really successful sculptural programs and photography programs who are showcasing their works in the parks. They should work with us. We are excited about the opportunities here. If you have a park space or a green street or some other space that you think could be activated by artwork, we would love to hear about it. But do you mind if I just finish up? So just so folks understand, it is for a year. There is the charter — that is what I want people to know.

Yes, it is. So we base our rules off of the public design committee, which is also based on the charter. If you hold a piece of artwork for over a year, it then requires additional reviews. It is then seen as a permanent artwork. But we are committed to having temporary artwork that can have a revolving kind of audience and have other opportunities to bring in other artists. So in order not to trigger some other problems with adherence to the charter and around permanent artwork, we do it for 364 days.

Okay. And then my last question is: who has responsibility — because we get a lot of constituent complaints about the sidewalks when they are lifted up by the tree roots.

Like, who has responsibility for that? Because we cannot seem to get answers to that in general.

Well, first of all, I am very sorry, because I understand how frustrating this is. We are a very human, people-focused agency. I do not want any of your constituents or anyone in the city, frankly, to not feel like they are getting a direct answer from parks. We are happy to follow up directly with you and your constituents. But it typically is the property owner's responsibility. However, there are some situations where we do have a program for single family homes where parks can help take care of some of that work. We still want to know about it so that we can monitor these things. It is probably worth a longer conversation, but we would love to follow up directly with your...

Chair, thank you for the accommodation.

Absolutely. I just had a follow-up to the council member's question regarding that nine-year plan. Given the budget, is the nine-year plan set to stay on track?

Yes, it is the nine-year plan. We have received baseline funding to continue with this comprehensive tree planting program. So yes, it is funded.

Okay. Speaking of great predecessors, the former chair of this committee, CM...

Well, thank you very much, Chair, but you are taking it to another level now with your leadership, so great to see all you are doing with this budget hearing too and asking all the important questions. Commissioner, first of all, good to see you. Good to see you too, and everyone from parks, very nice to see you all. I just want to echo what has been said before. I want to thank you very much for your leadership, Commissioner. You have been great both with your passion for parks and your prior work and how you are leading the agency right now too.

I know that Commissioner Rodriguez Rosa, who may be watching as well, would be proud of all that you are doing to take her work to the next level. I just had a few questions to follow up on some of the things that we have talked about already. I have to say I am disappointed that the mayor's preliminary budget does not fund parks at the level that we need. Essentially, if you take out the one-shot — as you testified to as well — the preliminary budget proposal is lower than what it was last year, and if you put it back it is about the same. So at best it is the same, at worst it is actually lower. We obviously need to be much further along.

One question I had for you was: what gets impacted most? We all agree, and I know Mayor Mamdani agrees too, on the importance of increasing our parks budget to 1% or more. So when we are not there, what gets impacted the most? I think we should have an honest conversation about what that means. Of course you are going to do all that you can with all that you have, but I do think if we are all in agreement on where we need to get, what are the trade-offs that are being made right now when we are not getting there with each successive budget?

Sure. Thank you, of course, CM, first and foremost, for your leadership and for your continued advocacy. I really appreciate it and your partnership. I will just say, this being my first time around, that the preliminary budget is just that — it is a preliminary component to this. I understand that there are many conversations that are happening. Certainly we are having them with the administration as well, but we are grateful for the Council's continued advocacy and the Council's understanding on a very granular level of what is at stake here. I think that is really what your question is about too.

To respond with as detailed and granular a level as possible: when you look at those one-shots, I think our deputy commissioner for public programs had mentioned it before, but the ranger program — I think it is a fact that the amount of funding going to our ranger program is almost 50% of the ranger program. It is a fact that, as the chair mentioned, the PEP program has around 250 baseline PEP officers, but the one-shot is 100 additional officers. So a significant component of that overall unit. I think you can see that, and the same thing with forestry management — even if maybe not to that high a degree, there is significant supplemental support. You can look at those and understand that even though overall it is around 270 positions out of our 5,000-person workforce, they are significant, supplemental components of these work units.

I mean, it sounds clear to me. I think we all know these are all the core functions of the department. Obviously when you have more funding where you need to be, you can better address these core issues, but also do it more equitably too. I do hope to see improvement in the executive budget that brings us closer to it. Even though it is a process and it will take time to get there, we have got to start somewhere and not be sliding backwards. I am glad to hear the conversations that you all are having with OMB and City Hall to get there too.

My next question is: where do things stand with the hiring freeze that we have had for a long time at the parks department? If it is going to be lifted, what were the conversations to get it to that place?

Yeah, thank you for the question. Just to give a little bit of background: over the last several years, as I understand it, the agency has been instructed — as many agencies have — to not be allowed to replace one for one the vacancies of people who naturally leave our agency, be it through retirement or finding another job or what have you. We do have a number of vacancies in our agency, and we are very excited about the possibility of bringing on additional folks and filling those vacancies.

I want to say that this is a really direct result of this administration's desire to see an honest, transparent and functional budget that allows agencies to do the essential work that they are able to do. We are very excited, because this news will both be freeing up and right-sizing those vacancies, but also will be allowing us to hire from outside of the agency, which is great. Really exciting news. Those details are still getting finalized with OMB. We are in discussions with them right now around how many vacancies will be released and along those lines. We are very excited. It is really welcome news to us. As you know, it has been difficult, and while we are always happy to see somebody from rec going into operations or somebody from PEP going into rec, it is tough because ultimately a loss of a person is a loss of a person. So we are very excited about that.

So just to finish up, Chair, if you will allow me to ask my final question. I just wanted to confirm: the hiring freeze is going to be lifted, but part of that is a conversation on what vacancies will be removed as part of that too, right? Does that not work against itself? Like, if you have the ability to lift a hiring freeze but positions that you would want to hire for and fill are now going to be reabsorbed, does that not kind of limit the impact of lifting the hiring freeze? Why pit the two against each other?

Yeah, it is a good question. I would say that this kind of inability to really bring on and replace one for one, as we had before, has been in effect for so long that frankly our agency — as I am guessing others have — has evolved. So positions, roles and functions of units have not dramatically changed, but certainly how the portfolios of individuals have shifted. I think it is fair to look closely at ourselves and at what lines we are accounting for, to make sure that those are actually truly the vacancies that need to be filled, versus just looking at numbers and saying that we absolutely need these numbers.

We are trying to be honest and work with the understanding that ultimately we all have a role to play in getting a balanced, fair, transparent budget. We are looking at this and trying with the understanding that it has been several years and these roles and positions have shifted and evolved a bit. We still are very excited to fill these vacancies, but it is fair to be honest and look at our division of labor here to make sure that, with OMB, everybody is on the same page with the jobs that absolutely need to get filled and whether there are any new roles and different responsibilities that need to get filled.

And I would just say, I hope that in those conversations OMB is also aware that it does not turn into a zero-sum game of the freeze taking away with the other hand. My final question is: every year we are looking at these one-shots that we are arguing over and putting back in. I strongly believe that these one-shots should be baselined, because it is both people's jobs and, as I have always said, a parks budget is a workers' budget. It is workers' jobs on the line. I have heard it from them numerous times. There is always uncertainty coming this time of year. Is it your belief as well that they should be baseline positions? How have the conversations been with OMB and City Hall to help us move to a world where we are not every year trying to fill positions that are about to expire?

Yeah, thank you. I want to say that the relationship and the conversations and dialogue between City Hall, OMB and the agency have been very, very promising. I want to say it has been very understanding and very supportive. I truly believe that this administration really sees the benefit of parks and sees the importance of the work that our staff do every single day, be it in a rec center or in a park space or in our natural areas or anywhere in between, taking care of a green street or anything else in between.

My understanding is that the kind of one-shot funding is really the mechanism that the Council has in order to advocate and get funding in. So I think there is never a world where we can get rid of one-shots altogether. In fact, I would welcome as many of them as you are able to negotiate. It would of course always be wonderful. But ultimately, as I said before, the baseline funding is a different beast and a different benefit altogether. There is a level of certainty with baseline funding, and you said it yourself with workers — it is...

It is always about caring for our staff and understanding operationally how they function. Certainly I think we can talk about how helpful it has been to see an increase of our baseline for PEP over the years. Even just ten years ago we were not seeing 250 baselines in our PEP, and as that has grown it has just been very helpful operationally to have that consistency.

And I just close by saying I appreciate that. I know we all share the same perspective. To your point, you are absolutely correct that one-shots over time keep adding up. Four years ago we were able to baseline a number of those positions, so the new one-shots were additional ones. I hope that as we move forward we can keep up an approach like that, so we are baselining, adding more, baselining, adding more. So thank you, Chair. Appreciate it.

I want to acknowledge Deputy Leader Chris Banks who has joined us, and I would like to turn it over to Finance Chair Linda Lee.

Thank you so much, Chair. Just really quickly, hi Commissioner.

Hi. I just wanted to reiterate and make sure — going off of the one-shot question — so for FY27 it is 33.7 million lower, and you are saying in your testimony that that is typically due to the one-shots?

Yeah, almost largely. I think the one-shots consist of maybe around 22 or 23 million of that 33 million. The other 10 million that is not accounted for is some other grant funding and other...

Yeah, the Council's discretionary funding initiatives that amount to about 6 million as well. But of the 33 million that we noted in terms of the delta from adopted, about 22 million of that is what we are referring to as the sort of one-shot bundle of funding.

And in your conversations so far — I am glad to hear that they have been promising — so what are some of the one-shots from the admin side that hopefully will get put back in?

Unfortunately, I am not able to speak on — I do not want to put the cart before the horse.

What is it that you would like to see back?

I mean, I think all of those six buckets or the six one-shot initiatives that are being discussed here, each of them are absolutely critical. We have spoken a lot about them again, but I would say operationally the PEP one-shot and the ranger one-shot are oftentimes with one-shots maybe a little more difficult, in that it requires us at least 16 weeks to train — and more weeks to recruit. So first recruit, then train. In order to get these folks into the field, it does take a while. So it is nice to have our baseline funding for those positions because there is a little bit more certainty. But I also want to say that the amount of support that we get for our forestry maintenance team, which also heavily supplements it — the stump removal, the green thumb — these are also...

(01:53:54)

Of course, it is our responsibility to both increase the amount of tree canopy, but also ensure that every single neighborhood benefits from what trees can provide, particularly shade, particularly resiliency, water retention from storms. And one more thing to add. So Staten Island homes love their solar panels because that is one way we can be environmentally conscious, and those trees harm them from doing that. So we just add that in.

Yeah, and as in any part of New York City, it is pretty common to see infrastructure butting up against other infrastructure, be it solar panels or sewage underneath the ground or electrical or streets and sidewalks. So it is, you know, I kind of believe in just embracing the conflict there and understanding that all of these pieces of infrastructure have a role. They are all incredibly important, inclusive of trees, and we have to find the best way to coexist with all this infrastructure.

So one thing is that I really would love to make sure that your constituents know and can anticipate when a tree is getting planted. We should have no surprises to the extent possible. I do not want them to wake up one day and just realize that a tree is there. I would like them to know beforehand. We want to make sure that you know beforehand, that the community board knows beforehand, that they can be excited about additional infrastructure coming in. So one is just trying to manage everybody's expectations and have them understand what we are trying to do and what we are trying to accomplish.

The second is that when those trees eventually grow, and we hope that they do, we do have a mandate and we are trying to plant on every plantable street in New York City. So that does mean that we are looking to do it regardless of... the staffing of Staten Island. Very impressive.

So what I would say is that we are not just looking at every single bureau to make sure that they have the exact amount, but we really are looking at it, we take a data-driven approach. We look at our PIP ratings, our parks inspection report ratings, to see where we stand, to see where we are hurting in terms of maintenance. I spoke to the Council member from Brooklyn just a couple weeks ago about wanting to make sure that for her constituents who live in Brooklyn, they should not have a vastly different experience of their parks and the cleanliness of their parks in Brooklyn than they do in Queens.

For Staten Island, Staten Island has a really good picture right now of overall incredible PIP ratings. I can tell you when I was the Manhattan Borough Commissioner, I used to hate going behind Staten Island in terms of our reports because it would always be a dip compared to what is happening in Staten Island. But you are also right that there are some pieces to the maintenance and operations plan that we are keenly aware of when it comes to making sure that the team in Staten Island has what they need in order to carry out their responsibilities. We are in constant communication, particularly with this administration and all our colleagues at OMB, to try to make sure that we are continuously advocating for what Staten Island needs to continue to have high ratings, high performing parks, and also make sure that the rest of the city is also getting the support that they need.

But we do use a data-driven approach. Staten Island's data is very strong. They do currently have one deputy chief of operations. We are always happy to look at this more closely to make sure that staffing does not impact their overall performance.

So in general, Staten Island has the most parkland per capita in the city, right? We are proud of that. That is why we are the borough of parks. In general, do you think we are receiving staffing and maintenance resources proportional to that responsibility or are we being asked to do more with less?

Yeah, thank you for the question and I appreciate the advocacy. It is really not just the amount of park space per capita. We really look at overall usage. We look at overall where we see most New Yorkers gathering. We look at our PIP ratings which are like our secret shopper program that is completely neutral, to see where we are performing highest, where are the most folks going, what overall picture that paints. Of course, how much ground are our staff covering and how much are we responsible for? Where are we seeing additional support needed? With all of that bigger picture in mind, we make our staffing decisions.

Ultimately, I think that given Staten Island's consistently high ratings, we are very happy with that. But I trust me when I tell you that I just came from Fresh Kills just yesterday. I was spending the day out there with my kids. I was just at South Beach just two weekends prior, walking along the boardwalk, looking at the boardwalk there to think about what can be done in the future. I certainly do not want anybody in Staten Island to think that they are secondary to any other portion of this portfolio that is parks. They are a very important borough to me. The parkland over there is incredibly important to make sure that we upkeep to the highest degree possible. Thank you. And the next time you are on Staten Island, I hope you will let me know so I can show you some of my favorite places to go. I was looking around.

You just let me know the next time you are there and you will not be disappointed.

Okay.

Thank you, Commissioner.

All right. I know I stepped out for a second. Back to the time clock for me. I am going to go back to Brooklyn. Yes. CM Narcisse and Deputy Leader Banks. For the sake of time, we can give them an additional two minutes each to their time clock. So seven minutes each.

Thank you, Chair. But Staten Island took 20 minutes so I am going to take 30 because we are the best part of the City of New York. Commissioner, again, congratulations. I appreciate you so much. I had to go to the best part of New York City but I had to stay here because it is Brooklyn in the house. So we have to ask a question because I have the pleasure to represent one part of New York City that has a lot of parks and thank you to all your leadership because I love parks.

I do not know if you know we fought very hard to get that billion dollars but we did not, but God knows we probably will get it, probably before we leave here. So thank you for all the work you are doing. I am looking at the lifeguards. I wish I could have some in my district. I am helping to hire, but I do not have anywhere to place them. We do not have a swimming pool except the beach. So I hope we are looking at how we can get swimming pool equity around New York City. The prior speaker fought very hard for that.

And congratulations for Shirley Chisholm. I know my colleague CM Louis worked very hard to get that. Yes, you can go like this for her. She worked very hard to get it and I am looking forward to having one before I go. Even if I would not cut the ribbon, I would like to see it happening.

Marine Park playground, I know one of my colleagues started talking about it six years in the making for the playground. The families are getting to me every single day. I hope we can do something about it. The delay is so bad. Six years in the making, fully funded, that is not acceptable. It is a playground for the children and it has become a safety issue.

So I am going to leave that there. We have a few more things because I have some of my colleagues in the house that really helped me. NYC2O, thank you, and all the organizations that are doing amazing things. To follow up with the Chair's question about park department salaries, the average salary for a New York City parks gardener is $55,000. The gardener at Tompkins Square Park has not been filled in two years. How many gardener positions need to be filled?

Yes. Thank you so much for your questions and for your partnership and advocacy. It was really good to see you at Shirley Chisholm a couple of times I think, and I also look forward to talking to you about certainly additional funding for either pools or just access to the water for your constituents. It is incredibly important. We know that what parks is doing is teaching life-saving skills that completely change the game, change outcomes for constituents, and it is very important work. So I would love to continue to partner with you on thinking through what that looks like.

When it comes to Marine Park, I want to tell you that I was in Fresh Kills yesterday, but I also took my kids to Marine Park. They loved it so much. We wanted to see for ourselves the playground project. I wanted to take a walk around there. So I definitely hear you that it is far past time to see this capital project move forward. We are happy to give you specific updates on where we are, but I will just tell you that oftentimes, and I admittedly do not know for certain if this is the case here, but it is worth mentioning when we look at Marine Park, it is so big and the scope of these projects does have a tendency to grow. It is good that it grows. Oftentimes it is good to make sure that if we are going to do construction in your park, we get in there once, we do it and then we get out of there, because ultimately it does take too long to see these projects go forward.

We want your constituents to really feel a comprehensive difference in these spaces and then to continue to go on and service other parks throughout the area. The kind of increase in scope, the increase of design, oftentimes what we see when it comes to storm water retention and things like that, all very important parts, have expanded the timeline for these projects. I take no pleasure in saying yes, it is completely acceptable to have a six-year project. Certainly I want your constituents to see faster results than that.

What I will tell you is that we are seriously looking into ways that we can shorten this timeline. We are happy to give you specific updates here, but we are looking to partner with our other agencies to try to speed up these internal agency reviews. We want your constituents to understand that these projects are moving ahead. Any ways that we can try to shave down what is already too long of a process, just know that we are deeply committed to looking at that. I know I have only been here for about six weeks, but I do commit to you to coming back to you with any ways that we can find to try to shorten that up while consistently delivering long-term good projects that are going to serve your community for decades to come.

And then when it comes to gardeners, happy to look to my team to talk through exactly the vacancies here, but we have noticed that our gardener lines were kind of difficult to fill just with the requirements needed for getting gardeners. So this was one specific title that we actually tried to create a gardener training program for, to help build a pipeline to get folks more interested in coming into these roles, similar to what you may have heard around climbers and pruners. Another forestry role was also a piece where we tried to build out a pipeline program. We are really excited about it. It is early, just less than two years old, but we are very excited about the results that we have from that.

So we are very excited to see a new wave of gardeners coming into our ranks. It is very promising. We are very eager to see that happen and we will continue to be creative around ways that we can increase this workforce because the requirements are pretty high. I thought actually, naively enough, before I came to the agency, that it would be something where if you had enough experience doing gardening in your backyard or if you were a bit of a green thumb person you could do it. But we actually have pretty high standards when it comes to being hired for this role and you need to have a lot of work experience. That has been the reason why it has been hard to get folks into this field. But I am personally very encouraged by this new pipeline program that we have coming out and we are seeing some promising results. So happy to talk about that more to come, and I really thank you for your attention to it because the more we can get New Yorkers and other folks to think through what a horticulture career could look like, it helps me attract more people to forestry, it helps me attract more people to gardening programs and other resiliency and natural areas.

I appreciate you, but we have to move on because my time is coming up. We need equity around it because compensation attracts people, and when you give them that you can retain them and more people will come. Given the shortage of resources for natural areas, what concrete steps will parks take to establish a reliable and sound protocol for entering into legal relationships with governmental park stewards? How will parks ensure an accessible, transparent and actionable pathway for nonprofits to have formal status in fulfilling essential services as park stewards?

Yeah, thank you so much for the question. So we are only able to do this work frankly with the help of not only the team that we have at parks, and I am very proud of them, but also a robust group of partnerships, many of the folks who are in this room or who are listening in from home to this hearing. Our park partnerships come in all different types. They come in volunteer groups who are three people strong who show up every Saturday to weed, to robust conservancies and friends groups and alliances that have much more of a formal role. We are in constant communication right now about ways to make sure that we are supportive and open partners with them, be that through creating maybe some sort of MOU that could better encompass some more best practices, or even just being the convener to allow for more of these dialogues to happen across different groups and different bureaus. All options are on the table, but we certainly hear the desire from our park partners for easier ways to fast-track and streamline formal relationships. The answer to that is that parks is definitely working on talking through what this could look like.

I appreciate you because I have great colleagues as partners and collaborators that help me with my parks in my district. There is something I am going to ask you as a last question. Dog waste in the parks. I know it is a very minor thing for some but for my community it is persistent. Every day there are complaints coming through about folks bringing their dogs and not cleaning up after them in the park. Now I want to know what are you doing, what parks is doing to help us out? Especially in the parks, if they are getting summonses, that is not a way that I would like to go. But what are we doing to educate folks and let them know, signage, something that has to be done, because you do not want to lay down at a park thinking you are bringing your kids and that is what we are getting in the park. And in all fairness, it is not only in the parks, it is all over. Now we have to re-educate our folks. Say, "Well, you have a dog, you have to clean up after yourself."

You are absolutely right. And frankly, we rate ourselves through our parks inspection program on the prevalence of dog waste. As minor as that may be, our internal rating system holds ourselves accountable to a very granular level. We rate ourselves on whether or not there is soap in bathroom dispensers, whether or not there is toilet paper, whether or not there is dog waste, graffiti, whether the grass is cut, whether there are broken steps, any of those features, and if a light pole is open and leading to the electric wires inside, we get dinged for that. So it is not minor. It does impact people's experience. It does speak to the level of care and investment in these parks and it is something that we take very seriously.

We can do additional signage. We can talk through with you. We can think through if maybe the area needs a dog park somewhere. We should think about that. Maybe we should be flagging for our PEP officers who are education first. So they would not be doing a summons first, but they would be there to try to educate folks first, warning people. So let us follow up with you offline because particularly if you have a given park, especially as the weather gets warmer, we know it gets more prevalent, but it is an important aspect of your park experience. We take it seriously.

My Chair is ready and I have to go too. But the dog park is so expensive. I do not know. I am going to try. But the old bathrooms, the intake, the ones that we can probably put up for auction, we need to look into them too. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

I am going to keep it in Brooklyn with the Deputy Leader and then we are going to jump to Council.

Thank you. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to my amazing partner, CM Nurse. Particularly Brownsville Recreation Center. I spoke to you the last time about it on my way out of the room at the last hearing. I want to know the project status, the timeline. We are constantly getting calls from our seniors and our young folks and just everyone in the community who, you know, the BRC is a staple in Brownsville and East New York.

We want to know, we know $160 million was allocated to this particular center from the last administration along with the Council. Can you provide an update on the current status of the project, whether the design has been completed and when the groundbreaking is expected? And then I am going to also move on to my next question as well and you can answer. Capital delays and budget execution: large capital projects often face delays due to procurement, design or inter-agency coordination. Can you speak to if this project has any challenges it is currently facing and whether the FY2027 preliminary capital plan includes the necessary funding and timelines to ensure that this project moves forward without further delay?

Sure. Thank you so much, Council member, for the question and for your continued advocacy for our recreation centers. So we do have $160 million that is allocated for this project. Right now the project is still with our colleagues at DDC and frankly the amount of damage that has happened at Brownsville and the scope that we are looking at covering is still something that we are trying to reconcile, which is why I believe you have not seen a design yet for this project.

Is there a time frame? Can you give us some sense of when we are going to see some progress? Because the residents constantly call. I mean, you have got seniors calling your office and they are petitioning. This is a commitment that was made to them and they are in limbo now because, as you know, the situation at the center is such that they cannot utilize the building. They are operating in the building where half of it is cut off from them. Even the young folks, and we know in Brownsville and East New York, when we have activities, these centers are lifesaving for our community. So we need a lifeline and we need to move forward with this.

Yeah. We can reach out to our partners at DDC who are going to be managing this project to get a tighter timeline for you. I will point out that the good news is that this is going to be using the design-build approach, which you may have heard helped accelerate things at Shirley Chisholm. So what will be happening is that the design and construction services are going to be retained at once and therefore there is a little bit more work that is done on the front end, in terms of what they call front-end planning, to make sure those bids go out appropriately. But you see some real savings. So we hear you loud and clear though. Obviously, you know, a lifeline to all the local residents there, a

(02:14:27)

beloved and very important facility, and nobody wants to bring it back online more than us.

All right. So we are hoping to see some progress being made on that, and I am going to continue to bring it up whenever I can. Now, going back, I know the last hearing we had was on tree pruning services. When it comes to homeowner input on tree planting in my district, do homeowners currently have any formal mechanism to provide input or opt out regarding tree placement adjacent to their property?

Yeah, I appreciate the question. Unfortunately, no, there is no opt-out policy or opportunity with this program. We have a mandate really to look at every single plantable area in New York City and to put in trees where...

You do not engage the community at all?

We definitely... that is the other piece, but I do not want your constituents to feel that this is a surprise to them. This is essential, absolutely critical infrastructure. What happens with our trees not only helps retain water but also cools down... We get the benefits of placing trees, but there needs to be some level of input from local residents as to where trees are being placed. It is about the placement. When you are just imposing on a community, on residents, that is not fair to them.

Unfortunately though, it is not actually just like a sewage line or an electrical line being placed in. The decisions around where we place trees are not based on where people would like to see them. It is where we actually can. So I definitely hear you. I have served on my own community board. I do not like any surprises at all. I would want to make sure that your constituents anticipate...

Notification, and I think that will go a long way with helping to ease the surprise. So typically we notify constituents, and I am sorry just because I know you have limited time, but typically your office is notified, our community board office is notified, and we just came out with additional messaging that we put on individual residences so that they know when trees are coming in. So we definitely want everybody to be aware. I cannot allow for decisions like placement of trees because so much of that decision is based on infrastructure that nobody can see.

And I hear you on that. I just want to let you know that in front of my residence there was no notification given. How I found out a tree was being placed there was at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning when I heard the vendor come and they drilled the hole, and then I woke up and I saw a bed, and then a tree was placed there a couple of weeks later. Let me move on to tree root damage and infrastructure coordination. In many parts of my district, tree roots are causing damage to sidewalks and the surrounding infrastructure. How has the parks department coordinated with agencies such as DOT? Is there any adequate funding in the preliminary budget to proactively address these issues rather than relying on reactive repairs?

Yes. So thank you for the question. There are a couple of parts to this. We are regularly in communication with our colleagues at DOT, DSNY and FDNY when needed, both in general when it comes to all of this infrastructure. A clear example of that was in front of my building actually, where we had a tree go down and we were talking to FDNY, NYPD and our forestry team to make sure that we could clear things out. When it comes to proactive repairs, how we are learning and thinking about tree planting is evolving so that we can make sure that we are planting trees that do not have these tremendous large deep roots that are causing these popups of the sidewalk. We also have a program for eligible single family homes where parks will come in and do those repairs to help ease that sidewalk tension and expand those treatments.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, chair, and to the commissioner, thank you. Looking forward to continuing to work with you.

Thank you.

All right. Going to the Boogie Down Bronx. CM Pierina Ana Sanchez.

Thank you. Thank you, chair. I just want to share that I have had to resist the urge to cheer. Okay. All right. Thank you, chair, and congratulations in person, Commissioner. I am very happy to get to work with you in this capacity.

I also just want to start with a shout out to the Bronx team, to my commissioner over there, and the recreation team. We put on incredible events that my neighborhood would not otherwise be able to afford, and I really appreciate that partnership. So my first question: I know this is a common complaint to parks and your partners at DDC, that we are seeing the cost of capital projects at our parks reach levels that make it nearly impossible to deliver improvements with speed

right, with speed in our communities. I personally, in conversations with the capital team about Bronx parks, cannot fund any parks upgrades in a single fiscal year without heavy lobbying to the mayor or without heavy lobbying to the speaker. At the same time, I hear from staff in the capital divisions that targeted fixes are not possible because projects have to be bundled into holistic renovations. Specifically, ASM guidelines, which I then Googled, have been cited. From the user perspective, this approach does not really make sense to me. Families do not experience parks as capital projects. They just want to go and not trip on the floor mats, which is the example that I have been raising to the staff. Why can not we just fix the floor mats? Why do we have to fix the whole park? They are just tripping. Just fix that part. Everything else looks great. So the question is: why exactly does the parks department need to opt for larger scale full rebuilds rather than allowing for smaller, faster, user-centered improvements, and what changes could we consider to make capital and maintenance practices deliver those kinds of fixes more quickly and cost effectively?

I really appreciate your question and thank you for the continued advocacy. It is true. So typically when we are talking about safety surface and that piece where you see safety surface starting to buckle, we typically like to see, instead of doing a targeted repair, we want to deliver for the community. If this is going to be our time where we have to shut down this playground, we want to deliver as many new improvements to this space as possible. We definitely do not want to do a piecemeal approach where we have to close it down for safety surface but then do not use the opportunity to create more ADA accessibility, or do not use the opportunity to frankly redesign the space so that it is more age appropriate, where we have a three-to-five area space and then a larger big kids space and then maybe expanded swing sets and those kinds of pieces. It does mean bigger scope and bigger projects. But typically it has been our policy to try to do as much good in one go as possible. I hear your question too about then having to wait years for something that starts out as simple as safety surface.

What I would say is that in the Bronx, we have actually seen some success with trying to have our cake and eat it too, essentially, where we do focus on raising the funds and getting together a big capital project, but not letting that be the reason why your constituents do not see any sort of improvement in the meantime. So what we can do in house, where we can think through creatively to show a little bit more investment, I really call that low-hanging fruit, and I think we need to double down and do more of that. What I would say is that we are interested in trying to just be in there once, do one disruption, do as much good as possible, and get out of there. It should not be an excuse for your constituents not to see any sort of increased attention to a space. So we are happy to work with you. Jesse Puonte, as you mentioned, is a great borough commissioner who focuses on this too. In my capacity, we should work together to try to find other opportunities to show at least a little bit of increased care for these spaces that are very important.

Yeah, thank you so much, Commissioner. I appreciate that and I appreciate the partnership. I just want to double emphasize: floor mats. They have got a big problem. I heard there was a contractor issue. Get our money back. Please replace those floor mats with new ones that are still rising up. Just a sidebar. Second question. Okay. Second question, and then I will bundle in the third one. How is it possible that $50 million is enough to renovate or reconstruct 10 parks through the community parks initiative? Because almost every estimate that I have for an upgrade in district 14 is like $11 million, $20 million, $15 million.

That is question two. Question three is around Bailey playground and the example of that being a park across the street from public housing, next to the highway, certainly in an environmental justice highlighted park that has not seen upgrades in decades. I cannot quite figure it out. I just want to understand how a park like Bailey playground can be in the high need priority category for parks for years and years and years but not see upgrades. And then the last question, sorry, thank you chair. So that is question two. The third question is just any updates on swim education. As a Dominican who cannot swim, I am particularly interested in what the parks department is doing with the laws that the previous Council passed.

Yes, thank you so much. I really appreciate your question about CPI. It is just my favorite — I am allowed to have favorites. It is my favorite funding initiative. So just very broadly, the community parks initiative, which we just very proudly announced our new parks that we are going to be undertaking major renovations on, is one of our premier equity-driven capital programs where typically, as you know, a lot of the funding priorities that come to us for capital projects come from council members taking it on with advocacy groups or a borough president maybe taking it on with an advocacy group. But it can just be based on maybe popularity or where you are hearing the most voices, and that often can lead to a little bit of inequity around the parks that are also serving populations of people but are not getting the investment that they need.

So that is when several years ago we decided to try a new approach that was based on parks that have not been renovated in 20-plus years that were also serving vulnerable, underserved, underinvested-in communities, and what we could do with a pot of money that could really inject some major capital improvements there. I will tell you that you are right that the $50 million is kind of a starting number, but it actually is not encompassing all of what is happening. Your investments, even if they are $1 million, $50,000, $500,000 or $300,000, we take that into account when we look at which projects we are going to fund next for CPI, because it shows that there is a council member, a borough president, somebody who has got some skin in the game who knows that this is a renovation that is really worth it.

I will give you one example from Manhattan because I know this best. CM Salaam funded St. Nicholas Park for $2 million just maybe a year ago. St. Nicholas Park is a massive park and it was supposed to be just for a little tiny playground. Then the then-borough president Mark Levine funded that project another $1 million. So technically it could have been done right there with the $3 million. But then we saw that there was an opportunity with CPI, that this whole area had not been invested in for over 20 to 25 years. So we decided to put additional CPI funding into that project, and then to increase the overall scope of that project, start dealing with erosion issues, start dealing with the adjacent basketball courts, barbecue areas and picnic tables. On top of that, we were able to tap into some baseline funding for public restroom buildings. So all of a sudden a project that started with CM Salaam's $2 million — that could be your million dollars — has now ballooned to $14 million that can actually deliver big changes for that one park in that one area.

So I would say thank you for asking about it. It is a tremendous initiative, something that I am very proud of, something that I think we should be doing more of: data-driven, equity-lens sort of work that looks at capital projects and what can happen with them. What I would say is that we will happily look at Bailey playground. We will happily keep this in mind. We want to work with you on thinking through additional projects and where they are needed, but please do not forget to fund them even with modest amounts of money, because that does make an impact on us and how we think about prioritizing projects.

When it comes to swim education, we are very proud of what we are doing. I am happy to give you more numbers on this. I do not know how much time we have, but we are increasingly partnering with New York City public schools, with other partners like Asphalt Green and others, and then doing our own swim education to try to serve and teach as many kids as possible how to swim. I think in this concerted effort, which has been underway for just a couple of years, we are aiming for around 5,000 young people to learn how to swim in the next year. I will look to our deputy commissioner Margaret Nelson to confirm that number for me. There is always more to do. That 5,000 is not every single second grader. We would love to have more, and even though you are not in second grade, I want you to know how to swim. We are constantly in conversation. I was just in a conversation with your borough president about thinking about access to water, access to pools, and trying to think through creative ways of partnering with the YMCA, partnering with others, looking at pools that are defunct even if they are not parks, to think through how we comprehensively approach access to water and swim classes.

Thank you, chair, for the time. Matt Drew is the best, by the way. Good to see you.

Yes. Yes.

All right. We are going to go to Southern Brooklyn, CM Susan Zhuang, and following, some questions from your neighboring council member.

Thank you. Very nice to see you in person, Commissioner. We are excited. After the meeting, you can actually come meet my team, and we feel we see the hope for Southern Brooklyn.

Thank you.

And I have some questions. First, in my district, we have a lot of huge trees. During storms, they always damage house roofs, and sometimes when it is storming, they fall down and have branches drop on cars and break car windshields. We have not seen any improvement in this type of situation.

Thank you for the question, and it is good to see you in person too. I am really looking forward to working with you and your team. During storms, when it comes to tree damage, you would think that it is these bigger trees that are the only ones susceptible to storms, but the truth is that any type of tree, be it a small new tree or a large, hopefully not but oftentimes 40, 50 or 60-year-old tree, can also go down in a storm. Truthfully, as we were just talking about, trees are very important living infrastructure. It is common to see this butt up against other types of infrastructure like our streets where folks are parked. I believe that when it comes to claims on this, any sort of claim for damage should be directed to the comptroller's office to file those claims. I am happy to work with you and your office to make sure that your constituents understand this. But really the best approach and offense to this type of damage is regular block pruning. That is the best thing that we do, meaning that on a seven-year basis, all of the trees in your neighborhood need to be pruned. That means that we go through proactively before a storm hits, cutting down extra branches, making sure that there is no interruption with power lines or things like that. That is the goal of the parks department: to make sure that every block in every neighborhood is pruned on a seven-year basis.

Okay. Thank you. My team is going to follow up with you because it is always the same block every single year that has the same issue, and we have been sending emails and letters to the previous commissioner and did not get a response.

I would be more than happy to look into this. Please do follow up. We are happy to respond.

Thank you. Also, my colleagues talked about dog waste. I actually have a good idea for you. We need more PEP officers. They can help to address this issue and also help to generate revenue for the City. I just want to know how many PEP officers you have right now, how many you think you need, and I rarely see any PEP officer in my neighborhood. I personally believe they are peacemakers because they do not carry any weapon but they come to talk to the people in the community and make sure everything runs smoothly. When kids actually see them, the bad behavior they have in the park actually improves and they behave themselves better.

Thank you. Thank you for your support of PEP. We appreciate it. We appreciate you talking about them being peacekeepers. They are certified peacekeepers. They do provide a holistic sense of safety. It is eyes in the park. It is education. They are incredibly important. To specifically answer your question, we have 254 PEP officers who are baselined plus 100 through this one-shot funding which we have discussed today. So we are currently funded for 354 PEP officers. In terms of how many we would like, more is more in this case and I would of course welcome any number of additional resources as the leader of this agency. What we do with what we have is to make sure that we are using a data-driven approach to deploying our PEP officers, making sure that we are going to where the people are. You actually have this data too, and I am happy to follow up with your team because we just launched the Vital Parks Explorer just in the last few years, where you can actually go based on council district or by community board district and look at how frequently PEP is in your parks. So we are happy to look at this with you to make sure that your constituents understand how frequently they are there. I also hear you that ultimately, even if we have our PEP officers who are making visits there, it is a sense of safety and you want to have eyes in the park. We do understand that PEP officers provide this kind of sense of uniformed presence in the park and we very much appreciate your ongoing advocacy there.

So if the park hired an additional 200 PEP officers, how much would it cost the City?

Well, I think the one-shot funding that was allocated to us last year was for 100 PEP officers, and so...

And so it is $20 million for 200 officers. Is that the same amount going to happen this year, or...

Ultimately the one-shots are the product of the conversations between the Council and the administration during the budget process. We really appreciate the advocacy that this Council — you and your colleagues — have done in the past, and we are happy to continue to do this work with whatever resources we are given.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you.

(02:56:47)

Space. Cosmetic, but still more. Let us replace those glass panels, make it clearer in there. Let us make sure that every single piece of exercise equipment on the second floor is actually working and functioning and in order. Let us make sure that when this community comes back in, they know that it was time well spent. So we are trying to do everything we can to push this project along, just like the Brownsville project, another rec center that another council member had brought up. But in particular, I will tell you that I definitely hear the community's concerns on this one. We are keeping it close. We are trying to push this along. It is complicated just because some of the filtration system is underground and it just means that it is such a tight space that it is very difficult to do this work. Nevertheless, I do not want your community or your constituents to hear radio silence from us on this. They need to know that we are there constantly, that I myself was there looking at this project, that we are pushing this along. Even if it is not massive updates where they start seeing cranes in that space, I want them to understand that this is not a forgotten project, that we will not let this get lost in the shuffle, that we are going to see this through. Please know that we will be getting back to you with updates as soon as we have them. And then when it comes to containerization, I will let our acting first deputy commissioner give you an update.

First deputy. I am sorry.

Okay. If you can keep your response to 60 seconds. I have to get to the other members. I am sorry.

Sorry. It is my fault. I have too much.

Council member, good to see you. Thank you for your leadership on containerization. We now have a new custom design enclosure for containerization. We are getting the first several thousand units delivered before June 30th. We are already determining which sites will get them for FY27. The funding from OMB is baselined for this. So it will take us multiple years to roll it out, but we are now very much in the implementation phase of trash enclosures and trash containerization.

And do you have a timeline for full containerization of parks garbage?

Four years.

Four years across the City. That is great. Thank you very much, Chair. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Commissioner.

Thank you. All right. Although we are jumping to the other side of the dais, they are not far in geography, so we are going to CM Alexa.

Thank you, Chair, and very impressed that Queens knows the geography of Brooklyn.

It is Queens, or it is just me, but it is okay now.

Many kudos. Much kudos, Chair. Congratulations. Really delighted to have you on board. I hope what you heard from my Council colleagues today is serious support for the parks department, a call for maximized funding, and obviously we believe that 1% of our budget should be dedicated to our parks department and making sure that our funding can fund what we need. As you know, Commissioner, I represent District 38, which has the privilege of having two recreational centers with two pools. I think one of those, Sunset Park, has been under construction for quite a long time. I am getting angry emails as the weather is getting nicer about why this time frame continues to push out further and further. But I will say I am deeply concerned about the capital pipeline here.

When I came in, CPI has been a fantastic project to pick up. Many of the green spaces in my district had never been invested in and CPI is covering a few of them. Among them, Demic Playground, we invested in Piña, we invested in three other playgrounds. So right now we have five spaces including our major parks that have all received multi-million dollars of funding with no seemingly time to see that they are even breaking ground. What is the problem with our capital pipeline and not making sure projects are moving in a reasonable time frame?

Thank you so much for the questions, Council member. It is really good to see you. I want to just talk about two pieces. First is Sunset Park. I too have visited this park and this recreation center. I hear the community's eagerness to come back into this space. Trust me when I tell you that we are continuing to work here and we are eager to see this back open. I was just asking for more updates here. We will happily give them to your office, but it is top of mind when it comes to trying to reopen these spaces. We have had multiple conversations in just my first two months here on the job and a lot of them have been around Sunset Park. We will happily give you some more updates, but know that it is top of mind here and we understand that this is a community that heavily relies on it. It is a beautiful space. It is a beautiful center. It is a beautiful community that you represent over there and I am really eager to deliver for them.

When it comes to your bigger question around the capital process, I am happy to talk a little bit about it, but let me just get to the point. This is a process that is extremely long. We have made improvements particularly around procurement. Procurement has gone down and you do see it faster, but there is still certainly much more that can be done and you have my commitment that we are looking at this very closely. I have already had, I am guessing, at least 10 meetings with our deputy commissioner of capital to try to understand this process step by step and see where we can shave down the time. I do not want to sit here for years to come and just tell you yes, it takes five to seven years to build a project. We are deeply committed to trying to shave this down and make sure that your community can actually see some benefits. Ultimately you do see a pretty standard design timeline of 12 months, but before you get to procurement you do see a post-design process where we are trying to adhere — we have to by law adhere — to a lot of different regulations around stormwater management or other adherence to rules with DEP and others. It is all good things but it takes time and oftentimes the back and forth between our agencies is, in my opinion, unacceptable. So we are working on this together. DEP actually has a staff member who sits in our office to try to increase that communication.

We are in frequent communication with our colleagues at other agencies and I really sincerely hope to come back to you to demonstrate ways that we have improved this. Since 2023 we have made some modest improvements but there is still more work to be done and we are looking forward to continuing to think through this with our other sister agencies to make sure that this timeline can get shortened.

Great. Thank you. We look forward to those conversations and having you come to our district to walk through the many projects that are on the table. I think I would also like to just put forward — glad to hear about the containerization. Certainly Sunset Park is a great park for containerization. It now welcomes illegal trash dumping because it has no place to put trash at its entrance, which is really a new thing that has only happened the last couple of years and it is offensive actually to our community. So I would love to work with you more on these issues and we need to get to 1% for parks. Thank you.

Thank you, Council member. I just want to say to the public, thank you for your patience. The advocates that are here, we are almost there. Thank you for your patience. All right. We are in your district.

All right, CM Chris Marte.

Thank you, Chair. And thank you to the advocates for waiting for so long. And thank you, Commissioner, for being here. Sorry that I was late. I had a hearing next door. But I want to thank the administration for investing in Vladic Park. It is a hidden park within a massive public housing development that has been overlooked for decades. And so to see that announcement last month brought joy to me, joy to the tenant association and many of the residents. It really shows where this administration's values are and their moral compass when it comes to investing in green spaces. So thank you so much for that. My question is, the parks department has made a commitment for tree canopy all throughout the City. However, there are certain neighborhoods that cannot have tree canopy like SoHo and Tribeca because we have vaulted streets. What methods are you looking at to help green or make those streets greener, to try to at least accomplish something in those neighborhoods if we cannot accomplish tree canopies?

Yeah, thank you for the question. If I can, I just want to spend just a quick moment on Vladic. Vladic is very near and dear to my heart. Even our community board was unaware of it as a park space for years, and that community board knows their stuff. So it was amazing to know that this park went under the radar, smack dab in the middle of very dense NYCHA housing, and has not been touched in over 20 years. This is the beauty of CPI. This is the beauty of projects like this. It is done in partnership with our elected officials. When we know that something needs to get done, when we know that it is going to take a major influx of money, we are very proud to be able to have a program like this. So thank you. I look forward to breaking ground on that project.

When it comes to parks in your neighborhood that have an inability because of the underground infrastructure to grow trees, this is where we look at other tools in our toolkit, particularly around green streets. You and I have both worked on one in particular. We have a good partnership with DOT to think through some of these green streets and the areas where we can add more green infrastructure. We know what is at stake. This is not just luxury tree trimmings. It actually creates water retention and a real sense of community in these spaces. Where we can, we are happy to work in partnership with our elected officials and with the community members there to think through how we improve these green streets and make the most of these spaces. It is always in partnership with our other agencies and I want to emphasize that because sometimes it gets frustrating to work with more people and more pieces of government. But to the best of our abilities, what I can commit to you is that we are trying to ease this as much as possible, that we are trying to be the convener, that we are happy to work in partnership with DOT and others to try to build out as much green infrastructure as possible.

Parks is really the human entity that is the difference between us and, I would argue, other agencies. With all due respect to my other agencies, we start every single capital project with community input. We really do think through what is going to activate these spaces, not just what are they going to do and serve, but how are we going to activate it? How are we going to bring in the community? So wherever possible, that is going to be the lens that we take to these spaces. One of high collaboration, trying to build spaces that the community can actually use and appreciate.

Yeah, thank you for that response and also thank you for all your quick work on Bartlett Newman Triangle. It looks night and day out there and I think the community really loves it honestly. Is there a database to show not only all green streets but parks that do not have a friends group, so that as elected officials maybe we can help organize our neighbors to start some sort of coalition or group to be that partner on the ground?

It is such a great question. On the green street piece, we have lists but I do not think we have a publicly accessible database. It is long and we are frankly in communication with DOT right now on refining that list, so we can happily get back to you with the information that we have and think through how we make that more publicly available. When it comes to the friends groups, what you currently have on the Vital Parks Explorer, which is public, is looking at any sort of volunteer projects that have happened. So it is not necessarily a friends group, but it gives you a sense of where there are good things happening in these spaces. We can certainly think through that. We have Partnerships for Parks, which is of course our arm of the agency that helps activate. But I think it is a great goal to set to make sure that we have active groups in every single park, green street and any other space that we have in our portfolio.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Commissioner.

Thank you, Chair.

All righty. I do have just a couple of questions and then that is it. Has the department considered putting housing on top of future recreation centers?

Thank you for the question. Two pieces. One is that in general, parkland needs to be used by law for park purposes. So any sort of... if you wanted to put a piece of housing on Central Park or something like that, it would mean a true alienation would go into effect and you would have to go through several steps, passing legislation on the state and city level in order to make that happen. However, on the flip side, while we are mandated to protect the parkland that we have and use it for parks-appropriate purposes, we are also thinking through creative ways to expand park services and recreational services beyond parkland. One example of that which has just recently come up is what is happening at 388 Hudson. This is a lot of land that will have completely 100% affordable housing go up on it. On the first three floors, we are very excited to be partnering with HPD for the first time ever in a new recreation center that will be located on those first three floors. So we are talking competition-size swimming pool, basketball tournaments that could happen in the new basketball court, weight rooms, media center, dance labs, areas for after school — the whole nine yards — that could happen in partnership with HPD on a completely affordable housing development. It is game-changing and is a really innovative way to think through extending park services on non-parkland spaces.

So we are really excited to see that continue to go through and are happy to think through other opportunities like that.

Okay. I would love to have further conversation with you about that. I think I may have an idea for a space in my district.

Great.

Okay. A couple more questions. Has the department considered completely in-housing certain parts of their operations to provide more New Yorkers with well-paying jobs and lowering the cost of contracts? I am referring to pruners and climbers for the most part.

Yeah, thank you. I think that right now, given our finite resources, the balance that we strike is one where we are very excited to work in concert with both the contracts that we have as well as our in-house crews. Typically, for pruning work, our contractors do the work for the vast majority of pruning on the seven-year cycle. We really want to keep to that cycle because that is the best practice and standard within the industry to prune all of our trees within seven years. However, our in-house team is able to do slightly more technical, highly skilled work that requires a little bit more attention and detail and can come out of a priority list that is not this cyclical piece. So it complements that work in a very good way. Similarly with our in-house tree planting, this is something that we just started to undertake since I think 2024. We are seeing that it is also able to complement the work of our contracted work. Actually, our in-house tree planting — I was just looking this up beforehand — was working in Queens right now, in and around your district, trying to plant as much as we can there first and prioritizing these neighborhoods. So it is something that is a bit of a balancing act between the two. But certainly we are looking at and monitoring very closely the impact of having in-house crews and how that has helped further our work.

I appreciate that. What is the current budgeted and actual headcount for climbers and pruners and what is their average salary?

Thank you. While I looked this up, I believe our climbers and pruners number around 90 individuals. We have 90 climbers and pruners and starting salary is, I am looking again, at $75,000. You may recall this, but our climbers and pruners do very specific, dangerous, very intense technical work and we are very proud of the fact that we have had just the second cohort of in-house training to build up those ranks. I just congratulated 14 new graduates. We have already started training another crew and they will be graduating in a year.

Is there an update on the apprenticeship program?

Yes, that is the update. We have had two successful cohorts go through, each adding around 14 or 15 people every time. This is a really intensive training. I cannot emphasize this enough. Getting up at four o'clock in the morning, starting work, working in very cold and very hot conditions, trying to do heavy duty tree work in very tight spaces and trying to work in New York City is an art. It needs a whole different type of skill set. So we are very proud of our success thus far. We are looking forward to having a third successful cohort in the next year. Out of curiosity, are there any positions or areas where the department could effectively reduce its contract budget by bringing those operations in house?

It is a good question and we will continue to monitor this. Like I said, the in-house programs that we have both for tree pruning and for planting are relatively new. So we are still looking at how that work is complemented or can double down and work in concert with the contracts that we have. So certainly we are continuing to monitor this and look forward to continuing to be cognizant of what happens in-house versus with external contractors.

As you all monitor that, is it more of an informal monitoring system or do you have a formal way of assessing?

What I would say is that certainly we understand the significance of a couple of major things that are coming up. One is that this year we plan on releasing the urban forest plan, which talks about the significance of planting trees and maintaining our canopy in order to get to 30%. Two is that we understand the significance — and we heard it all day today — around making sure that we are caring for our trees but also planting as expeditiously as possible to serve these communities. So it is something that we are internally discussing and we are happy to loop you into those conversations too, to talk about what lessons we have learned thus far. It has only been a year or so since these programs have started. So the ability to understand that impact and what our in-house teams are doing versus contracts is still something that I think needs a little bit of time to fully understand. But I am certainly interested in holding ourselves accountable because frankly it makes a difference in terms of how I advocate for funding and how I talk to our administration, which is very interested in making sure that we are serving New Yorkers as expeditiously and with the best possible services. So we expect to hold ourselves accountable.

I appreciate that. I would like to have follow-up conversations about this as well.

Okay. I am sorry, I almost forgot about CM Santosuosso.

(03:17:37)

Just a couple questions from the Council member. Have the requirements set by Intro 800 and 97A-8 passed in April 2025 been met by parks? That would be publication of criteria for prioritizing tree maintenance, pruning schedule, etc.

Great. So I will look to our assistant commissioner, Ben Osborne, to give us an update on those specific pieces of legislation. At a high level, what I will say is that we are tracking those passages of the legislation and I believe that we are on track to meet those requirements. But I will look to our commissioner.

I am just going to move on. How much does an inspection by a private contractor versus an in-house forester cost the city? And I am sorry, how much does a 12-inch tree removal by a private contractor versus an in-house crew cost the city?

So what I would say before our assistant commissioner comes up to talk about that first piece is that we again frankly monitor the cost of what it costs our City, but are not probably able to speak to the kind of private industry and what the costs can range. What I would say is that the average cost to remove a tree including the stump is $3,028. That is our average cost for FY26. I am happy to give additional cost if it is based on stump or pruning one tree or planting one tree. We can also provide this information to the Council member to give her that entire breakdown.

But we typically, I think if what the Council member is getting at is the cost of private industry versus public, without even looking closely at that private data, I would probably say it would be likely to see that it costs more for the City to do it. But there are good reasons for that. We use labor. We use unionized labor. We are comprehensively looking at this work. We are doing it based on larger contracts. We are not only just planting or removing a tree, but when we are thinking about this work, we said it before, we are not doing this piecemeal. We are doing this comprehensively. We are going to expand tree beds to make sure that this does not happen in the future. We are going to plant a new tree. We are going to fill in other tree pits where trees cannot be done. And when we leave, it is going to be done and we will not have to deal with this anymore in that spot. We will get to continue on and move on to another portion of the City. So what we are doing is more comprehensive. What we are doing is typically more expensive. But I would argue that we are very proud of that work and think that it is the best way to care for the entire City as a whole. I will turn to you, Ben, to give more about the legislation.

Sure. Before I respond to that, Chair, I just want to make sure I am responding to the correct piece of legislation. Was this the one that was ultimately passed as Local Law 59 of 2025 or is this a different Bill? This was Intro 800 and Intro 978 passed in April of 2025.

So the second one would be the building clearance one. I am happy to respond to that. The first we may need to get back to you on. But in regards to the...

I am sure if there is any follow-up the Council will follow.

Certainly. In regards to the law requiring a prioritization for tree work, including a request for building clearance, we are on track to be compliant with that legislation, which goes into effect in May. We are building out the digital tools right now to be able to record the results of our inspections, similar to how we do with risk assessment currently.

What percentage of park bathrooms are open right now?

Great question. I will happily look to our acting first deputy commissioner to give specific data. But I would also just flag, because I think a couple of news articles just came out about this recently, that typically the vast majority of our bathrooms are open and functioning. If they are closed, we report on that internally to ourselves to make sure that we know if a closure is happening due to a reconstruction project or due to some sort of maintenance issue. We do track this pretty granularly on a monthly basis, looking at when these bathrooms are closed and the reasons why, and making sure that we are reporting this internally as well. So we take this seriously. It is not something that we will just openly say that all of them are open when the truth is that we know when some are closed due to some other kind of issue, and we are pretty closely monitoring this. But I will look to our acting first deputy commissioner to give specific details.

Right before you answer, I just want to keep my word. There was a constituent who stopped me and it just came to mind. St. Albans Park, renamed after the late Council member Archie Spigner. The bathrooms, or the comfort stations, there are no doors on the stalls. So just flagging that for you. I do not know who it would go to, but I just want to flag that. I want to keep my word to the constituent.

Oh, well, look at that. Thank you for that note, Council member. That will be taken care of. On any given day, our average rate is 90% of our 700-some public restrooms are open. Again, they change from day to day. They frankly change from hour to hour if we have vandalism or a medical emergency or a longer-term closure. But we are very proud that, as the commissioner said, we track it on a very fine basis and our average open rate is plus or minus 90% on every day, seven days a week.

Thank you. Former Council member Justin Brannan passed a local law that all agencies must coordinate with each other to perform any work prior to repaving road. To what extent does DOT coordinate with parks when repaving? Are there any issues around repaving near trees?

So I will look to our acting first deputy commissioner to give a little bit of detail here. I think the truth is that we are talking to our sister agencies every day if not every hour. Some coordination is happening. One in particular, which I think has to do specifically around paving, is maybe state of good repair, which I would like to take the opportunity to discuss or have our acting first deputy commissioner discuss. But when it comes to tree work, this is something that happens at a staff level regularly. The former Council member who was here before knows this pretty well, but we have oftentimes parks not planting a tree in an area because we have confirmation from another agency that they are about ready to dig up that area for another project or something like that. We do this type of clearance and coordination regularly all the time. When it comes to particular sidewalk pavings and replacement and that sort of work, we actually have a great working relationship with DOT in particular. Our acting first deputy commissioner leads a lot of that work and so we are in close coordination with them. But I will let you talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think for two things. First of all, for paving, we work very closely with DOT on when they are repaving parks assets. We have a great working relationship with them. They have done what we call multi-purpose paved areas, large asphalt areas, they have done parking lots, they have done park roads for us. So obviously that is done at our request, so very close working relationship. And then we are into the eighth year of a relationship with their sidewalk replacement program where we provide the funding and the sites and they come in through their contractors and their partnership with DDC to replace concrete sidewalks adjacent to parks. So both of those are very powerful relationships, two agencies working very closely together, and in both cases, really because they are generally capital-funded, getting very good work done very inexpensively and very quickly.

The next question is somewhat of a follow-up to the last question that I asked. There has been an increase in hiring contractors and seasonal workers in the past 10 years. What barriers does your department face in hiring full-time union-eligible staff?

Yeah, thank you for the question. I think that, to be clear, my understanding is that the work our contractors do is not the same work that our in-house team does. They have kind of specific scopes of work. The contractor work, particularly with trees, has to do with your sort of regular pruning type work and that sort of thing, whereas our work that we have in-house is really more specialized in terms of the type of technique and the technical skill level needed to address those concerns. This is something that is still relatively new for us, to try to have those in-house teams and making sure that we have discrete and specific portfolios of work that we are doing and making sure that they are complementary to each other. So we are still looking at this, but the contracted work is a way for us to be able to still meet those mandates, still meet those best practices when it comes to tree health, when it comes to taking care of our canopy, and when it comes to rolling out this planting.

The amount of time — I know that there has oftentimes been critique of how long it is going to take us to do this entire planting and assessment of the City — but to be able to do that in a nine-year timeframe does mean having the work in complement with the contractors that we are working with. That is how we are going to meet those targets. But I do appreciate the question because it does go towards the idea of thinking through what building out our own ranks would look like. And certainly, going back to the larger question of park staff, we are happy to do the work we know we have responsibilities and mandates to uphold and goalposts to hit. We are very happy to do this work with the resources that we have. Were we given more resources, we would happily receive them. But for the time being, with what we have and with the goal in mind of serving New Yorkers and making sure that they all have plantable trees in the next nine years, this is this is...

I mean, would you say it is more ideal to have certain responsibilities contracted out versus actually having in-house staff handle those? And it does not have to just be about tree pruning, but just whatever work is contracted out.

I think it really depends on the type of work. To go away from trees, we also have things like technology contracts that are doing some of this work. We have a wide range of other work. So I think it really does depend on where we are thinking this through. But I do not know if, since we have our acting first deputy commissioner here, you want to talk about the IT side of things.

I mean, we do not have to go into the IT side. Has there been a full assessment of the entire agency's contracts to see where certain work can be moved in-house rather than contracting it out to these different companies?

I cannot say that there has been a full assessment, but we talk project by project or type of work by type of work. And I think as the commissioner referenced very recently in her remarks, generally what we find is that bringing those resources in-house will be more costly to the City than outsourcing it or having a private contractor do it. Largely, one of the reasons is if you bring the work in-house, you have to buy all the equipment. And when you are talking about tree work, you are talking about very expensive trucks. You have to buy a lot of equipment to outfit those staff members. You have to have a building or a place for them to work out of. So these are costs that are all built into costs that are passed on to the private contractor. So I cannot say we have looked at every contract, but I can say we have looked at specific types of work done by private contractors.

So I guess to make it more specific, just to hone in on the pruning inspector and pruning work, what level of headcount would be required to bring in-house the block pruning inspector and the folks that do pruning work?

You know, we would have to look at this more, but what I would say is that the inspector piece is just one component. And oftentimes I do not actually know — I would look to our assistant commissioner to confirm this — but inspectors, when I have just recently experienced the inspector piece during the storms when we have 2,000 311 calls saying a down tree is there, we will typically send our inspector out first to go assess the severity of the work, the type of response needed, where this is going to fall, the amount of manpower we need in order to respond to those pieces. That is not necessarily the same thing for our block pruning program, which is just more of your routine maintenance of these trees on a seven-year basis. And certainly our entire forestry division is something that, frankly, the work is only achieved, as our acting first deputy commissioner said, through this complement of contracts and in-house crews. So I will let our assistant commissioner for forestry talk more about the role of inspectors specifically, but just to clarify, I am not sure if inspectors are needed for block pruning.

Sure. Thanks, Commissioner, and thank you, Council member.

Yeah, no problem. We do inspect each of our trees using consultants prior to performing block pruning. And while those consultants do receive the same basic level of training that our in-house inspectors, our foresters, do in tree risk assessment, the work is far more routine. So it is not uncommon for folks who have worked as consultant inspectors to eventually seek employment with the parks department as they gain experience. But as the commissioner said, the scopes of work of the block pruning contracted work, whether it is the inspection or the work itself, are complementary to that of the work that our in-house crews do, which is more varied, more diverse and ultimately a kind of deeper technical skill set that gets developed over time.

Thank you. And the final question from the Council member: how many years long is the capital project backlog? How many additional landscape architects does the parks department need to hire to eliminate the backlog?

We have, thank you for the question, 500 projects currently that are either in design, procurement or construction. For this upcoming fiscal year, we have 91 projects that are lined up to go into that process. And I believe that out of those 91, there are going to be 24 that there is a likelihood we will not be able to begin in this fiscal year. So we probably have around 24 projects that will have to wait until the next fiscal year to start. The question around specific landscape architects is a harder question to respond to because every project does not require a landscape architect. Some of those projects are PRBs, public restroom buildings, or require other staff. But right now, 500 are in the process and 91 are slated to start in this next year. Of those 91, 24 are likely to wait until the next fiscal year to start.

Understood. Thank you. Commissioner and deputy commissioners and chiefs and everyone else, thank you so much for being here today with us. That concludes our questions for you all. Thank you again for sitting out five hours, and thank you to the advocates and the public. We are going to open it up for public testimony now.

All right. I want to remind members of the public that this is a formal government proceeding and that the quorum shall be observed at all times. As such, members of the public shall remain silent at all times. The witness table is reserved for people who wish to testify. No video recording or photography is allowed from the witness table. Further, members of the public may not present audio or video recordings as testimony, but may submit transcripts of such recordings to the sergeant-at-arms to the left and the right of the room for inclusion in the hearing record. If you wish to speak at today's hearing, please fill out an appearance card with the sergeant-at-arms and wait to be recognized. When recognized, you will have two minutes to speak on today's hearing topic, the FY27 parks preliminary budget.

With that, we are going to call our first panel. If I mispronounce your name, my apologies. Just please correct me at the mic. Dean Williams, president of Local 299 DC37. Ralph Bonelis, vice president of Local 983 DC37. Marshall Lee Wilmer, DC37 Local 375. Raina Wong. Are you all staying? Oh, I appreciate that. I really... No, let me take a moment to say that. I really appreciate that. In several other committees we have seen agencies leave as soon as their testimony was completed. So thank you. Thank you for listening to the public and the advocates and the union. Thank you so much. Really. All right. We are going to get started. Start to the left.

Good afternoon all. My name is Dean Williams. I am local president of 299, representing recreation workers in the parks department. And today our concern is retention, which you all talked about a little bit earlier. Some years ago before COVID, we were slated to receive about 200 employees. Then COVID hit and those employees never really transpired into jobs. We service different programs for seniors through toddlers: swim for life, kids in motion, puppeteers, senior fitness, community festivals, movies under the sun, after school programs, summer camps all throughout the City. The shortage and backfilling is also an issue. When we have members who are promoted, those recreation center staff are not replaced due to the hiring freezes that have been on for some time now. With seven facilities closed at the moment, those staff have been maneuvered out. We have several facilities starting to be reopened. Our concern is where those staff are going to come from now that they are in other locations, with the brand new facilities that are opening having budgets for staffing. But what are we going to do for those other staff locations where those staff people were spread out within boroughs?

Every summer we get about 200 to 250 summer hires in Kids in Motion and summer camp. Those are great programs that we run, but again sometimes those numbers do not reach 200 to 250 due to low salaries, which start at about $20 an hour. So those are some of our concerns for staffing areas, and just making sure we have great programming being run throughout the parks department.

I want to say thank you to you and your members for the work that you do.

Thank you. As someone who was a camp director with an agency that had a license agreement with the parks department, it is one of the most difficult jobs in the world but it is still one of the most rewarding as well.

I do want to ask you one question.

Yes.

Because of the shortage, have your members at times had to work additional hours or cover shifts?

Yes, they are usually compensated with comp time or overtime depending upon what the budgeting system is looking like for that borough. But yes, there are times where they do work overtime.

Thank you.

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Ralph Bonelis, DC37 Local 983. We represent a number of titles. I am here today on behalf of the APSWs, the associate park service workers, the urban park rangers, the park enforcement officers as well as the city seasonal aides. So I will try and be quick. These titles, not just because they elected me to represent them, are the backbones of the parks department. The APSWs — all the things that management spoke about today, those 9,500 trees that were planted — there are four APSWs assigned to them. They operate all the...

(03:41:07)

Heavy duty equipment within the parks department. They are required to carry a commercial driver's license. They remove all of the garbage. They plant the trees, the beach rakes, all of beach operations. Those beaches would not be able to function. In addition to all the other property without the APSWs, those wingo wagons that everybody loves, they operate those as well. So the 1% is not enough. We want 2% but we will start with 1%.

And now we will go over to the UPRs. As the commissioner stated, she did a great job of identifying all the titles. I am a park enforcement officer by title. We all take a UPR exam. We are required to pass a 16-week academy. We have to pass a pretty thorough investigative background by the police department to be special patrolman in order to make arrests and issue summonses. At the beaches, in addition to everything the park enforcement officers do to preserve and protect this free recreational space, when there are not enough lifeguards, which happens more often than not, they close a section of beach. They put up red flags. It is the park enforcement officer's job to make sure the public is educated not to go in there, obviously, and horrible things happen if you swim without lifeguards. So I am just scratching the surface.

And then we have the urban park rangers who do the educational programs. Now, to put him on the spot, there is one in the back there, Harry Aguilar. He can also testify if you guys would like. They basically do free educational programs all throughout New York City. Popup programs, camping programs, education about wildlife, trees, and so on and so forth.

Lastly, I will be quick. The city seasonal aids go to maintenance as well as security. They are also at the beaches and pools keeping them clean and keeping them safe. With PEP, they do security at all the pools. To sum everything up, all these services are one of the few things that are left free in New York City. Parks is free. The rec center, 17 and under, you are allowed to sign up for free. The beaches, the pools, they are free. The ranger programs are free. The budget is already in place. This current mayoral administration spoke a lot about free stuff. Instead of reinventing the wheel, just fund the stuff that is already there. Not because I get more members out of it, but these are free services to New Yorkers whose cash-strapped parents are being priced out. They are paying for garbage cans. Our members, and I could speak for all of us, the rec centers as well, which are staffed by the AM members, these are free services provided to New Yorkers. So please give us the 1%, give us more, and thank you. And I need a Red Bull.

(03:43:51)

I do have a follow-up question for you if that is okay. What is the morale like amongst your members?

(03:43:57)

It is, you know, it is positive. It depends on the day. You know, ask me on a hot day when it is 100° at Rockaway Beach or there are seven and a half... everything could always be better, but I could speak for our titles. We need to retain members more. The salaries obviously need to go up. The APSWs, you know, they are required to carry CDLs, which is a major responsibility. They see Amazon, they see UPS, they see sanitation making these crazy salaries. That comes up a lot. The park ranger salary has gotten better over the course of my 20-year career, but things could always be better and it would help with retention and training all these individuals, which costs money. So you would probably save money there if everything could be bumped up just a little bit.

(03:44:43)

Thank you.

(03:44:44)

You got it. Thank you guys.

(03:44:52)

Hi, my name is Raina. I am a park tree planting forester at New York City Parks. I am here representing DC37 as the president of chapter 7 of Local 375, the Civil Service Technical Guild. I wanted to speak a little bit to the staffing shortages we have in forestry, in the tree planting team. It is an immense challenge. Ever since I started in 2023, we have had staffing shortages, with a team of about 20 people surveying every street and every park in New York City. We have people regularly managing multiple multi-million dollar contracts. I am currently stepping in to help another team manage a contract because of staffing shortages. I would imagine this work will only become more intense with the neighborhood tree planting program, where we will be required to plant every available space every nine years.

A lot of people have brought concerns about the sidewalk. This is obviously a big concern for members of the public. The only way we can get sidewalks repaired quickly from tree damage is to expand staffing of the trees and sidewalks team. Particularly, we need to be hiring construction project managers for this role because this team has one of the highest turnover rates. The contract management is extremely complex and the members of this team do not feel fairly compensated.

I would say the biggest staffing shortages are probably for tree maintenance. I would really like to advocate for the continuation of the climber pruner apprenticeship program because that is the only way we are able to guarantee an adequate stock of staff to do the essential tree maintenance work alongside the borough foresters, to be able to keep our city safe and meet our goal of 30% canopy, which tree preservation is actually one of the most important parts of, and I think that is overlooked.

Currently, non-union contractors are used to fill a lot of these gaps and their quality of work and their speed of work is typically not on par with parks workers because our training is centralized. So yeah, I just wanted to point out some of the ways the staffing shortages are affecting our work day-to-day.

(03:47:08)

Thank you. Would you say with the apprenticeship program that the individuals who have completed the program... does it seem, just from your conversations with your members, that they are likely to stay with the department? I know I am asking you to kind of speculate, but...

(03:47:28)

Yeah, the climber pruners I actually do not represent in my local. They have their own local. But in my conversations with them, it seems to be a good job. I think they would like higher pay, of course, like a lot of their other titles do. But it is an incredible opportunity to get a very unique training while still being paid during the training. So I think it is something that is really necessary for both the career development of people in New York City who do not have a lot of opportunities to get this kind of training, and in order to ensure that we have qualified individuals for this type of work.

(03:48:06)

Understood. Thank you.

(03:48:10)

Good afternoon. My name is Marshall Lee Wymer. I am Manhattan Borough Forester with DC37 Local 375. I am a delegate for chapter 7. The city currently spends about 20% of its budget on outsourcing public work to private contractors, which has been increasing on average of 6% every year since 2009. This is a problem particularly felt within the parks department and agencies whose management and operations have been continually outsourced and privatized since the city's fiscal crisis over a half century ago. This is true in who designs our green spaces, who maintains them and who effectively controls them.

In parks forestry, private contractors complete the regular maintenance pruning of all city street trees and parkland trees and much of our maintenance work, as the commissioner explained. It also includes stump removals and forest pest management of contracts, which I oversee for Manhattan. However, the consultants and contractors do not have the same safety standards. They do not have the same training and they also do cost the city more on average. In-house forestry is about two-thirds the cost. Parks should be doing a lot of this work in-house, and we can, whether that be in-house tree planting or, like the city of Chicago is able to do, in-house block pruning of all of their city trees.

If we want to reach the goals of the urban forest plan by achieving 30% canopy by 2035, we should be moving more of this work in-house and not spending so much on these expensive contracts. This is also in line with making sure we meet the budget gap that the city is currently facing at 5.4 billion dollars. There is an opportunity for the city to both save money on forestry operations while expanding them, by moving this contract funding to in-house workforce development and permanent line funding of forestry, landscape architect and resident engineer staff in the parks department.

And just as a constituent services matter, if you want your constituents' residences pruned, you want to reduce the flooding and heat island effect inside your districts, increase the economic activity of storefronts since shade does do that, and ensure every New Yorker can have a safe, equitable and enjoyable experience under the shade of your urban canopy, we have to fund public works for public workers.

(03:50:19)

Thank you.

(03:50:22)

All right. Thank you all.

(03:50:28)

I am sorry. This is a committee of the Council. I am the member. I am the one listening to you. Thank you.

(03:50:56)

All right, our next panel is going to be Maximus Barton, Arena Goldstein, Adam Ganger and Heather Labove. Sorry, Adam. I know this does not seem right. The testimony. Thank you. All right, you can begin. We will start to my left.

(03:52:06)

Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Arena Goldstein. I was raised and currently live in City Council District 39. I grew up in New York City. I come here today as a New Yorker, a union member and a parks worker. I specifically work for the NRG, the Natural Resource Group, that works to preserve and protect our forever wildlands, which are what we think of as a traditional forest.

Right now the mayor is proposing to cut funds to parks. This means that people who have dedicated their lives to environmental stewardship in their communities will probably continue to receive paltry wages, $24 an hour. Try raising your family on that wage. This means that workers will probably continue to have long commutes because they do not earn enough to live near the parks they maintain or there are not enough parks jobs in their local communities. Right now I commute about an hour to work and some of my fellow co-workers are commuting an hour, an hour and 15. And this means that the city will probably not make people who have seasonal positions funded through Playfair permanent staff, allowing people to live with job precarity.

From the federal to local level, when governments need to tighten their budget belts, politicians cut funding to parks. I believe this is because park labor is invisible to the public. People think working in our public green spaces is cool, niche and an enjoyable alternative to an office job. But these laborers use their bodies to maintain parklands, which are places that boost our mental health, forests to capture carbon, much-needed third places and wetlands to mitigate the effects of flooding from storms charged by climate change.

And who are the gardeners, foresters and ecologists? They are people who can identify an oak tree, a maple, a sweet gum in the winter, in the summer, in the fall, and have knowledge that they have developed over years. So please do not cut funding for our parks, for our planet and for our workers.

(03:54:40)

Thank you.

(03:54:46)

Good afternoon. I am Max Barton, Laborers' Local 1010, union rep, 200 members. We build New York City's infrastructure. New York City parks and our city trees provide a critical canopy, our natural infrastructure that mitigates heat, reduces storm water runoff and improves our air quality. The city has set an ambitious goal to increase its canopy to 30% by 2035. New Yorkers are struggling with affordability. The city is trying to address aggressive affordability all while doing their best to respond amid a budget deficit without cutting services, especially on our beloved parks which offer free recreation and low-cost or free programming for all New Yorkers to enjoy.

This administration is looking for ways to improve government efficiency, an approach we support, and being creative on how we achieve this. One way to do this that has been proven time and time again to be efficient is project labor agreements. For decades, project labor agreements have provided consistent labor standards across all bidders, ensuring that contractors compete on efficiency and quality rather than lowest possible labor cost. They also support workforce training, safety standards and predictable staffing for complex public works.

As reported by the New York City Mayor's Office of Contract Services, the City of New York and the Building Construction Trades Council of Greater New York have been parties to various project labor agreements since 2009. These PLAs have been an important component of the city's completion and delivery of public works by establishing consistent work rules across construction projects, reducing the administrative burden and cost on construction agencies and providing opportunities for city residents and businesses. The recent PLAs have also increased opportunities and added flexibility for minority and women-owned business enterprises, MWBEs, allowing their workforce to gain valuable experience on city projects and build their companies and provide good-paying career opportunities for low-income communities.

The city has multiple active PLAs, but absent from this inclusion in New York parks is forestry work. An oversight hearing held in September 2025 that focused on the parks department contracting practices and vendor accountability found that testimony provided by Cornell University School of Industrial Labor Relations showed promising results from contractors operating on project labor agreements. In recent parks databases, tree planting by union signatory firms demonstrated faster planting completion and higher short-term survivability rates. My time is over, so I will end it right there.

(03:57:18)

Good afternoon. I am Heather Lubov, executive director of City Parks Foundation, a nonprofit that delivers free programming reaching 300,000 New Yorkers, enlivening our city's parks and creating social cohesion and community through SummerStage, the puppet mobile, sports lessons and environmental education. Our free programs encourage people to use their parks. Through partnerships for parks, a public-private collaboration with NYC Parks, we support more than 420 grassroots volunteer groups and 28,000 volunteers who care for parks. Through the New York City Green Fund, we raise and regrant 2.5 million annually to support groups that are programming and maintaining parks.

Central to our work is the Parks Equity Initiative, which we are asking the Council to expand after years of flat funding. This initiative pays for the staff who engage volunteers, provide technical assistance, distribute grants and build stewardship capacity, particularly in environmental justice communities. Every dollar invested through the initiative multiplies into more volunteer hours, community capacity and greener neighborhoods. Expansion of funding will not only help us to continue supporting the groups that we work with, but will also help us implement the pilot work we started on the urban forest plan to identify and train stewardship groups, increase our tree canopy and support climate goals.

Ultimately though, our work really depends on a well-resourced parks department, which is why the preliminary budget is so concerning. We are genuinely excited to work with an administration that has an ambitious and progressive agenda, but in its current form, the preliminary budget does not match that ambition. It proposes millions of dollars less than last year's adopted budget, eliminates staffing lines and fails to protect the 276 parks workers set to lose their jobs at the end of the fiscal year. The department has been cut to the bone and staffing is inadequate in every possible way. From maintenance and forestry to permitting, from legal and capital planning to recreation, it becomes harder and harder to do our work when the agency can barely do its own. New Yorkers deserve a thriving public realm. Please add funding per the Playfair Coalition's agenda and expand the parks equity initiative. Thank you.

(03:59:36)

Hi there. My name is Adam Ganszer. I am the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. I want to thank everybody for sticking around. Thank you very much. I have a long thing that I want to read, but I am not going to read it. I just want to talk about where the parks stand from a staffing perspective. The 276 positions that we are talking about, these are one-shot positions. The idea that half of the Ranger team or a third of the PEP enforcement patrol team is funded with one-shot deals. These are colleagues of full-time staff and they do not know if they are going to have jobs at the end of the year. These are Playfair positions that we got many, many years ago. Yes, they have been restored year after year, but it is no way to run the agency and they were never meant to be permanent.

The second thing is the hiring freeze. The hiring freeze has been terrible. Yet to get rid of the hiring freeze, the agency is being asked to eliminate vacant positions. That is another significant loss to the parks department. That is just not a negotiating point. Those are baseline positions that are just going to disappear. And in many ways, this administration has been dealt a bad hand. Yes, the headcount is the same as last year. Yes, the budget is the same as last year. But that does not take into account the nearly 600 positions that were lost from three years ago. Whether it is parks workers, people that are working managerial or admin jobs within the agency, forestry, we have heard about capital projects teams. You have heard nothing but complaints from other Council members. We all want to work together, but unless this administration recognizes the previous losses, they are not going to be able to advocate for future gains. We need 1% for parks. We need a plan to get there. Thank you.

(04:01:28)

We are going to call our next panel. Carolyn Harris, Elizabeth O'Connor, Sophie Stub, sorry, Christina Taylor. I should use my glasses.

(04:02:01)

Ah, yes. Thank you.

(04:02:21)

All right, we can begin.

(04:02:24)

Thank you very much. My name is Caroline Harris. I am a land use attorney from Goldman Harris. I am representing myself and other seniors who live in my neighborhood. I want to start by saying this has been an amazing hearing and I have a huge compliment for the commissioner for, in such a short time being commissioner, being able to absorb the breadth and significance of all the work that you have to do. I know you have been with the agency a long time but still it is an extraordinary job that you are doing. Thank you.

Having said that, I also strongly support the increase in budget for parks. Parks are the primary resource for health and welfare for our residents and the environment. In addition to its other priorities, the department should prioritize active recreation for adults, especially seniors and smaller local parks. New York City has the second highest rate of dementia in the country, with the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens having the highest rates of dementia in the country, not Staten Island, maybe because they have so many parks per capita. Medical studies show a remarkably high correlation between dementia and a sedentary lifestyle. Sitting on a bench, as seniors have usually been relegated to instead of having active recreation, is also critical for bone and heart health as well as preventing dementia.

It is not only a personal issue for many families. Mine experienced a senior with dementia. It is a public health issue and it is also an issue of immigration, finance, socioeconomic benefits and other health issues. New York City's local parks can be a key tool in endeavoring to stem the tide of and to prevent further dementia. For example, the proposed design of my local park in Manhattan includes a dog area to the exclusion of an area for active recreation for seniors and adults. Yet both uses could easily and rationally be provided without substantial, if any, delay on procurement or parks, recreation and final design. The commissioner said just today we should be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable. That includes not only the

(04:04:51)

disabled, who were discussed by CM Schulman, but it should also include seniors. Parks can be a leader in the prevention of this growing senior health crisis by facilitating the active recreational use of local parks by seniors and adults of all ages. It would not require a huge financial investment, just thoughtful design. Restore the parks department's funds, push for the 1% and do not forget grandma and grandpa or forsake your own long-term health. Thank you.

(04:05:20)

If you do not mind me asking, what is the park that you were referring to?

(04:05:24)

Rupert Park.

(04:05:27)

In Manhattan Community Board 8.

(04:05:31)

Thank you.

(04:05:31)

Thank you.

(04:05:34)

Good afternoon, Chair Hankerson. My name is Sophie Stelb and I am the New York program and operations coordinator for Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that connects everyone to the outdoors. As a member of the Playfair for Parks Coalition, living in New York is exciting and it is hard. The city has a major affordability crisis. The struggle to live here is not just about housing. It is also about quality of life. Families raising children in a small apartment wonder where their kids can play without adding another line to the budget. The answer is in the city's nearly 2,000 parks. They represent one of those amazing tech-free environments where you get to feel the earth, the sun and the wind. But parks also need care, people to take care of them. The budget cuts 33 million compared to last year's budget. 276 positions will be lost. We need to restore those positions and move the parks budget up to 1% of the city's budget. That is what it takes to make these parks thrive.

Another major opportunity for outdoor play spaces in New York is New York City schoolyards. We strongly support CM Brewer's position that schoolyards remain open after school hours and on weekends. These spaces exist in every neighborhood, including the ones with the fewest parks. Opening parks means children have somewhere to run near their home. Parents have somewhere to exhale and neighbors can sit in the shade of an activated and joyful place. Mayor Mamdani, we see you. Many of your videos are filmed outside. You clearly love these spaces. Now it is time to fund them. And to the Council, we urge you to include 33 million more than what is in the budget just to restore what was baseline last year. Give the people of New York what they want, what they need. Invest in our parks. Thank you.

(04:07:13)

Thank you.

(04:07:20)

Good afternoon. I am Christina Taylor. I am the deputy director for the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance and I am testifying on behalf of BCPA's board and staff and as members of the Playfair for Parks Coalition. Thank you so much for holding this important hearing. In a city battling record inequality, extreme heat and flooding, and declining quality of life, parks are not a luxury. They are essential infrastructure. Yet for decades, parks have been underfunded, understaffed and unevenly maintained. In the last four years alone, the parks department has faced continued disinvestment, causing our park system to tumble in national rankings. While most major cities dedicate 2 to 5% of their budgets to parks, New York City has been stuck at just 0.6%, trailing the nation in nearly every park metric.

We were extremely disappointed to see the mayor's preliminary budget for NYC Parks at 33 million less than last year's adopted budget. I wish I could say we were surprised, but unfortunately this seems to be a continuing pattern. While it is great that the hiring freeze will finally be eliminated, it comes with a loss of nearly 100 unfilled staffing lines. In addition, 600 lines were lost in the Adams administration through cuts and the hiring freeze. While New York City Parks is asked to do more and more each year, New York City Parks has lost 700 positions in the last five years. The budget also fails to address the nearly 300 park workers set to lose their jobs at the end of the fiscal year because they were not baselined. We had hoped the mayor would put an end to the annual budget dance, but here we are dancing once again.

These 300 positions need to be baselined. Year after year, NYC Parks staff does more with less. The staff is already stretched too thin. They are tired and frustrated, and so are we. The preliminary budget maintains a status quo of historic underfunding, leaving communities without the safe, accessible green spaces they deserve. The time is now. The mayor and City Council need to work together to dedicate 1% of the city's budget to parks. There is no substitute for public dollars for parks. In reality, parks deserves and needs much more than 1%, but let us start there. Parks are essential. They should be funded and cared for accordingly. Thank you.

(04:09:37)

Thank you. While you were speaking, I asked our committee counsel if there was an existing report that compares New York City to other big cities. I was informed that Trust for Public Land has that. Would you mind sharing that? Our team can get your...

(04:09:57)

Sure. It is called Park Score and I believe it comes out in May, but I would be happy to follow up with more information. Yeah, for sure.

(04:10:04)

Thank you.

(04:10:05)

Thank you.

(04:10:15)

Our next panel consists of Elsie Sodto, Merritt Burnball, Tammy Lynn Mus and Morgan Monaco. Again, I apologize if I have mispronounced your name.

(04:11:01)

Good to see you again as well.

(04:11:02)

Nice to see you, Council Member. Good afternoon to CM Hankerson and members of the committee. I am Morgan Monaco. I am the president of the Prospect Park Alliance and a proud member of the Playfair for Parks Coalition. Prospect Park is Brooklyn's backyard, hosting over 10 million visitors annually. But a backyard is only as good as its upkeep. Currently, the city's budget is failing New Yorkers who rely on these spaces. Mayor Mamdani's FY27 preliminary budget is 33 million less than last year's. Instead of moving towards the 1% for parks we were promised, we are hollowing out our green infrastructure.

Since 2023, we have lost 600 staffing lines. This budget would eliminate 100 more just to end a hiring freeze. Furthermore, 276 of our dedicated workers are in positions dependent on temporary one-shot funding lines. These workers are the backbone of our parks. They must be baselined and they must be baselined now. The lack of operational funding creates a maintenance gap that wastes taxpayer money. There are ample capital funds, but not the requisite maintenance funds to care for what we build, and therefore we are rebuilding capital assets rather than having them last through their useful lifespan.

We ask for the additional 460 second-shift workers to keep 400 high-use parks and restrooms clean. Prospect Park welcomes 10 million users each year. Most visitors come to the park in the afternoon hours. They should be able to access a clean park just like morning visitors. This underfunding is dangerous. In just three years, Prospect Park has faced devastating flash floods and a severe brush fire. We cannot build a resilient city if we do not invest in the hardworking New Yorkers who manage our forests and keep our parks clean and safe. Let us make sure the administration's affordability agenda is accomplished by funding our parks and providing New Yorkers the quality green spaces they deserve. I urge the Council to restore these cuts, baseline our essential workers and finally put NYC Parks on the path to 1% of the city budget. Thank you so much.

(04:12:53)

Thank you. Can you speak to some of the pressures that such budget cuts have had on conservancies?

(04:13:04)

Yes. So we are proud... I am also a member of the leadership committee of the Parks and Open Spaces Partners, the POSP coalition, and we are proud partners with NYC Parks. We raise private dollars to help supplement city services. Many of us do direct service in terms of caring for our forests, our woodlands, do trash pickup and some capital work. This is essential. We do not do this in a vacuum. We rely on the city and the city's budget to be able to maintain our parks in partnership. So when there is a decrease in funding for NYC Parks, that is a pressure on the private sector. We believe in this administration's commitment to all working New Yorkers, regardless of whether there is a conservancy or not, and therefore are urging the Council to join in our efforts to make sure there is 1% for parks.

(04:13:56)

Good afternoon. My name is Tammy Lyn Bogus and I am the director of the Nature Conservancy's New York City program. The Nature Conservancy is the world's largest conservation organization. In New York City, we convene the 200-member Forest for All NYC coalition that works to increase investment in the urban forest and to expand tree canopy cover to 30% citywide by 2035 equitably. The Nature Conservancy is also a proud member of the Playfair Coalition. I am here to urge the mayor and City Council to finally dedicate 1% of the city budget to New York City parks, starting with $150 million in capital and expense funding for the New York City urban forest starting in 2027. These funds would restore and baseline critical New York City Parks workforce, expand forestry and natural areas staffing and support implementation of the urban forest plan across city agencies.

With the city's first ever urban forest plan about to launch this spring, this is a defining moment. This 10-year plan charts a path to reach 30% canopy citywide and foster engagement across city agencies and community stakeholders. But it cannot be implemented without restoring and expanding the very workforce that sustains the urban forest. Despite managing over half of the tree canopy in New York City, New York City Parks has lost more than 600 staff positions since 2023, with another 100 on the chopping block this year as a condition of ending the hiring freeze. These cuts directly affect the urban forest, tree health and livability of New York City.

We commend the city's previous commitments to parks and the urban forest, including Mayor Mamdani's pledge to doubling the parks budget. However, the preliminary budget's proposal of cutting 33 million from parks is not in line with that commitment and does not set up the urban forest plan for success. This budget also fails to safeguard the 276 park workers set to lose their jobs at the end of this fiscal year. These critical park staff positions must be switched from annual one-shot City Council funding to baseline roles, ensuring operational stability. I will submit a longer written testimony, but thank you so much to Chair Hankerson and members of this committee for considering the vital role of parks and the urban forest to New Yorkers as you continue to work on the city budget.

(04:15:53)

You did that in under two minutes.

(04:15:59)

Thank you.

(04:16:02)

Good afternoon, Chair Hankerson. Thank you for holding this hearing. I am Merritt Burnbound, president and CEO of Riverside Park Conservancy and also a co-chair of the Parks and Open Space Partners and a proud member of the PlayFair Coalition. I would like to share a quote by the 19th century naturalist and founder of the national parks movement, John Muir. "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike." These words could not be more relevant today. Access to nature is not a luxury. It is a basic need and it should be available to everyone. We have an opportunity right now to bring our park system back to glory, to give New Yorkers beauty, wonder, and that most powerful of all tools, hope. But we will not get there with the current level of funding. Not even close.

To sustain a great park system, we have to invest in the foundational resource that makes any system work: people. We need more parkies. And I want to be very clear — our park staff are extraordinary. As the agency testified today, every day they are doing more with less. They are maintaining landscapes, responding to emergencies, repairing infrastructure, and supporting millions of visitors, all while stretched far too thin. In Riverside, we see the dedication of NYC Parks staff and the consequences of this underinvestment. The bathroom in our volunteer house is shuttered due to plumbing issues and suddenly a local senior group loses the place where they gather each week. A sinkhole just opened up near a dog run and the entire community of pet owners now has nowhere to go. The 158th Street basketball courts are suffering from a filthy deluge of runoff from the highway. There is not enough staff to powerwash it, so the kids have no access to their local spot for sport and connection.

These may sound like small things, but they are not. They are daily disruptions to the fabric of community life in our parks. And New Yorkers notice. They feel it. And at the same time, we know what it would take to change this. You do not need to know the exact math to know that we need more maintenance staff to keep parks clean and safe, more tradespeople to fix what is broken, more forestry staff to care for our trees, and the capacity to move long-promised capital projects forward. It is not about asking for something unrealistic. It is about aligning our investment with our values as a city. Because imagine what we could have — a park system where every New Yorker, regardless of neighborhood, can rely on clean, safe, vibrant green space. A system that reflects the pride, care, and resilience of this city. The future is within our reach, but only if we choose to invest in it. We have the opportunity to break the cycle of doing more with less and invest and build something lasting, worthy of the people of New York. Thank you.

(04:19:03)

Thank you. If I may ask, can you tell me the locations of the sinkhole and the basketball court that you mentioned? The basketball court is at 158th Street...

(04:19:17)

under the highway, and the dog run is at 87th and Riverside. And our volunteer house that I also mentioned, where we have been hosting the senior group for the last couple of years, is at 108th Street.

(04:19:40)

Thank you. Maybe our team can follow up with the Parks Department regarding some of those issues. Thank you.

(04:19:52)

Hi everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Elsie Sto. I am a professional public health practitioner and I am also a family member of two people who are buried on Hart Island, which is the New York City Municipal Cemetery, and an advocate for many families who are navigating a similar experience. For us, visiting Hart Island is not optional. It is how we grieve. It is how we stay connected to the people we love. Right now, access remains limited in ways that make the grieving process even more difficult. Visitation is primarily on the weekends, which does not work for many families. People have varying work schedules, lack of child care, and responsibilities that make weekend access unrealistic. I am asking that at least two weekday visitations be added to the monthly calendar so family members have the opportunity to visit.

There is also a growing concern that is deeply painful for families like myself. It was brought to our attention that New York City Parks Department public tours on Hart Island are being advertised for about $39.99 by touring companies and offer around three and a half hours on the island. If those proceeds were being used to expand family visitation, we would understand. However, that is not happening and families are still given significantly less time, sometimes under one hour for visits. Yesterday, my visit was for one hour and 15 minutes — still significantly less than public tours. This is unfair. Access for loved ones should come first.

Transportation is another major barrier. A shuttle service already exists, but it currently runs between the Hart Island Ferry and the BX29 stop at Fordham Street, which is only three blocks and only at the end of the visit. Families traveling by train must still find their way to and from the Pelham train station, relying on extremely limited bus service on City Island. It is only one bus. The distance from the Pelham train station to the ferry is less than three miles, about a 10 to 15 minute drive. Yet for families using public transportation, it can take over 30 to 40 minutes due to transfers, weekend service, and wait times. Now, if we look at someone who is traveling from Staten Island, they literally have to take a bus to a boat to a train to another bus to another boat. And it sounds like a joke, but it is reality for a lot of New Yorkers.

I am proposing that we take this existing shuttle service and expand it to pick up visitors directly from Pelham train station and bring them straight to the Hart Island Ferry. This is a simple change that would make a meaningful difference in access and reliability. Hart Island is the resting place of over one million New Yorkers. The families and loved ones connected to this island deserve dignity, fairness, and equitable footing to mourn our loved ones. Thank you for your time.

(04:22:58)

Thank you. Thank you for that. On the more immediate note, if you can find someone from the Parks Department that is here — you mentioned something about tours being advertised for $39.99. That does not sound... I cannot even think of the word right now. But if you can just talk to someone from the Parks Department about that so they can

(04:23:24)

look into that immediately. I believe it was removed. However, to know that it has been in existence for over a year and none of that funding has transpired to expanding family visitation or even transportation to the island, it seems unfair to me.

(04:23:41)

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.

(04:23:45)

Thank you all.

(04:23:55)

All right, we are going to go straight into our next panel. Pardon me if I mispronounce your name. Asinet Gomez, Oed Holzinger, Caitlyn Cruz, Helen Turgos.

(04:24:40)

Good afternoon, Chair Hankerson and everyone here. My name is Asenet Gomez and I am a senior director of programs for El Puente. El Puente is also a member of the Forest for All and the PlayFair Coalition. We are a 43-year-old community human rights organization that promotes leadership of peace and justice in North Brooklyn and Puerto Rico. We represent a historic environmental justice community where poor air quality driven largely by vehicular pollution remains one of the largest threats to public health. Approximately 6% of our residents report having asthma, linked to our community having the eighth highest concentration of fine particles, otherwise known as PM2.5, in New York City — one of the most dangerous air pollutants. As a result, respiratory-related hospitalizations in our neighborhoods are twice the rate of the entire borough of Brooklyn and New York City overall.

Access to healthy open green space is essential to mitigating these severe public health outcomes. Yet the lack of sufficient parks and green infrastructure in our community only worsens air quality and compounds environmental risk for our community. Parks and public spaces are not optional. They are essential. We need quality parks where residents can gather, heal, and thrive. If the COVID pandemic taught us anything, it is how vital parks are. They become lifelines — safe, accessible spaces for the most vulnerable New Yorkers when other public spaces are closed.

We urge the Council and the administration to work together to deliver on Mayor Mamdani's commitment to double the NYC Parks budget and to ensure full funding for the staff and programs critical to the maintenance, protection, and tree planting efforts that will help the city reach its 30% canopy goal. NYC Parks is responsible for half of the city's tree canopy. Yet the staff and programs that sustain this urban forest continue to face cuts. This is unsustainable and not equitable for all New Yorkers. We need sustained, equitable investment in our parks, not just to maintain them, but to ensure environmental justice, public health, and climate resilience for all New Yorkers. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

(04:27:17)

Thank you so much.

(04:27:21)

Good afternoon, Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Ad Holzinger and I am the executive director of the Natural Areas Conservancy. We are a nonprofit that works together with New York City Parks to steward more than 12,000 acres of forest, wetlands, and grasslands. These are the landscapes that really allow our fellow New Yorkers to have the experience of being in true wilderness. Those landscapes also contain more than 5 million of the city's 7 million trees and are really essential to achieving our 30% canopy goal. We are joined today with our partners from the PlayFair and Forest for All New York City coalitions in urging increased and sustained funding for New York City Parks in the fiscal year 2027 budget. I also want to thank you for your earlier question to the commissioner regarding the one-shot funding and specifically its impacts on the natural resources...

(04:28:23)

Group. We are very concerned to see that this preliminary budget does not include the renewal of FY26 one-shot funding. That funding supported critical forest management staff and without it we risk further reductions in the natural resources group, which is already under-resourced and responsible for more than 12,000 acres. I do not need to repeat it — it has been talked about here again and again — but actually I should repeat it because it is really critical to understand the impact of this reliance on one-shot funding, and also for us as advocates to be trapped in this need to beg for these one-shot fundings. That is just not the proper system. So if I remember the numbers correctly that the commissioner mentioned earlier, 37 employees were hired through this one-shot funding on top of the 63 — that is 30% of the workforce sitting there with this uncertainty. We are asking today for a baseline of $16 million to provide stable support for this work. This is based on data. Since the release of our forest management framework in 2018, we see that this inconsistent funding led to staff losses and a sharp decline in acres receiving care. Only 569 acres in fiscal year 2025 were receiving care. At the same time, our 2024 ecological assessment found signs of decline in more than 90% of forest plots. Again, this is while we are just releasing the urban forest plan and calling for the expansion up to 30% canopy. I want to remind everyone that our natural areas are not a luxury.

They are essential green infrastructure for climate resilience, public health, and biodiversity. Thank you.

Hi, I want to offer perspective. I am one of those natural area employees on playfair funding in the natural resources group. I want to reiterate it is not a sufficient solution to budget shortages.

I am sorry. Can you just state your name?

My name is Helen Shurigas.

Helen. Thank you.

I am full-time and indefinitely a seasonal employee. It does not make any sense. I do not receive the same benefits as those on permanent lines until 18 months of full-time unbroken seasonal employment. I do not have federally recognized holidays off, paid holidays off. I cannot apply internally to annually posted positions at parks that are open to baseline full-time employees. I have not bothered to buy into the pension because I assume it is more likely than not that funding will lapse in the four years that I will need to work here to receive those benefits.

I am new to the workforce and with a lot of luck, I actually turned down other job offers to work here. I am proud. I am from New York City. I am now a public servant for the City and I contribute to the City that I am from. But our salaries as parkies across the board do not compete with the private sector. I say this from my experience to spell out that for these reasons, parks is and will lose skilled staff, experience high turnover, lose institutional knowledge and dedicated public servants. This also harms the baselined workforce by putting more strain on the remaining staff who are already stretched thin. It takes so much time to rehire and retrain instead of build long-term capacity and expertise. It is so inefficient. It is not a good position to be in as an employee. It is not fair at all. Fortunately, it does not have to be this way. These playfair staff need to be added to the baseline and the budget. Thanks.

Thank you. Would you mind providing us with the written version of your testimony?

Sure. How do I do that?

Sergeant-at-Arms, when you leave, they will get your email or something like that. Sure. Thank you. We like that. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, we are going to call our next panel. Rosamond. Is Rosamond here? No. Okay. Aliyah Sumro. Benet Chisum, Leslie Gomez Rivera. Okay. Marissa Lica.

Ashima Harris.

All right, you may begin.

Good afternoon. My name is Aliyah Sumro and I am the deputy director for New York City policy at the New York League of Conservation Voters. Thank you, Chair Hankerson, Commissioner Ishimura, and all the staff and advocates here today for the opportunity to testify. I have submitted longer written comments. As co-founders of the Playfair for Parks Coalition, we advocate for a city budget that gives New York City parks the fair funding they deserve. NYLCV is also a member of the Forest for All New York City Coalition, which is committed to protecting, maintaining, and expanding the city's urban forest to equitably achieve 30% tree canopy coverage by 2035 from the current 23%.

If we want to maintain our city's park system, invest in our city's workforce, increase our tree canopy, and prepare our open spaces for climate change, first and foremost, NYLCV urges our elected officials to increase funding for our city's park system. Mayor Mamdani's FY27 preliminary budget for New York City parks is $33 million less than the FY26 adopted budget and does not provide critical restorations after four years of cuts. However, we think the administration and the City Council has the opportunity to rebuild an agency that has been crippled by decades of disinvestment. This includes, but is definitely not limited to, safeguarding the 276 parks workers set to lose their jobs at the end of the fiscal year since they are dependent on the annual one-shot City Council funding. These positions must be baselined to ensure stability and consistent service. Additionally, we urge the City to increase staffing for second shift workers as well as forestry staff, capital project staff, and PEP officers.

Now, despite the benefits of parks and tree canopy, due to historic disinvestment and structural racism such as residential redlining, our trees, parks, green spaces and access to the city's waterfront are not equitably distributed. As a member of the Forest for All Coalition, we strongly support allocating $1 million to MOCJ to publicize and begin implementing Local Law 148 of 2023, which will be the city's first ever urban forest plan, to ensure our city's tree canopy is not only properly maintained but is equitably expanding. Just wrapping up, NYLCV also supports the City exploring new revenue-generating ways that our park system can maintain the funding that they deserve. We look forward to working with you, the administration and other parks advocates to get the funding that New York City's parks workers deserve. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair and members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation. I thank you for this opportunity to testify today. My name is Benet Chisum and I am a community garden coordinator for Blaine Community Garden in upper Manhattan for 16 years. I am here to express my support for organizations like Green Guerrillas, which hosts councils of gardeners, and for programs like Green Thumb that provide critical support to community gardeners across New York City. These resources help gardeners like me maintain spaces and serve as a hub for food access, education, and community connection.

At the same time, I believe the City can do more to support community gardens and address challenges that we face on the ground. For several years, my garden has been dealing with serious rat infestation caused in part by an abandoned lot. This lot has become a site for illegal dumping, drug activity, rodent nesting and ongoing safety concerns that directly impact our garden and surrounding community. The infestation has become so severe that I have literally had my foot caught in a rat hole throughout the garden. Because of these conditions, I have had to limit community activity and public access due to safety concerns. This undermines the very purpose of community gardens as safe, welcoming spaces for the neighborhood. I strongly encourage the City to increase funding for the Get Stuff Clean initiative and sanitation and rodent control efforts so that gardens facing these conditions can receive timely and effective support. Community gardens contribute so much to the health and safety of our neighborhoods. We strongly support the City ensuring that we maintain safe, accessible spaces for all New Yorkers. Thank you for your time and consideration. I am grateful for this opportunity. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Miss Chisum. There are a couple of questions for you. Do you know by chance if the lot that is adjacent to you is private land or a city-owned lot?

The last time I spoke with a health inspector, they informed me that it went back to foreclosure. It went back to the bank.

Okay. Do you have the location of the garden?

Yes, our location is 1651 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The zip code is 10029. I believe the address for that abandoned lot was either 1655 or 1651.

Okay. Thank you. Okay.

Good afternoon, Chairman Hankerson. I know it has been a really long day and you are very tired, but I appreciate your time being here. My name is Leslie Gomez Rivera. I am the policy associate at Green Guerrillas. We are a nonprofit organization that supports community gardeners like Benet. We also keep youth engaged in food and environmental justice across New York City. I am also speaking on behalf of the Green Guerrillas Council of Gardeners. We are a coalition of over 300 community gardeners. We work across New York City to advance stronger investment and protections for our gardens.

New York City hosts over 550 community gardens that have been here for decades. We are an essential asset to every neighborhood. Community gardens serve their neighborhoods in a multitude of ways, like providing food access, environmental education, climate resilience and safe green spaces for our communities. Today I want to take this opportunity to ask you for these five policy actions.

Green Thumb is continuously being cut in the budget and so we would like to ask you to restore the $2.6 million. Green Thumb is an essential program that aids most of our gardens with materials, seeds, tools and things like that. Second, we also call on the Council to introduce stronger legislation to permanently protect our community gardens. As you may know, gardens are located on city-owned land and so they are subject to redevelopment and rezoning. Third, we also call on the Council to increase funding for the parks equity initiative. In addition, allocate $300,000 to create a pilot program that allows garden groups to directly access funding through a simplified application process. Fourth, we also ask that you continue to invest in a greener New York City. A greener New York City supports youth employment programs, green infrastructure, and environmental education in our gardens. Finally, we ask the Council to strengthen the Get Stuff Clean initiative as Benet mentioned. This addresses rodent infestations... sorry, I missed the last one.

Yeah. The Get Stuff Clean initiative, as Benet mentioned, is a program that would help address rodent infestations, illegal dumping, and issues that increasingly affect our community gardens. By investing in our community gardens today, the City is investing in healthier neighborhoods, stronger communities, and a more resilient New York for generations to come. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you. Would you mind also emailing your statement as well? I do not think I have...

I have all of our...

Oh, you do?

Yes. Thank you.

Hello and thank you to Chairman Hankerson and the members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation for the opportunity to submit this testimony. My name is Marcela Chica. I am the youth program coordinator at Green Guerrillas, a nonprofit organization that, like Leslie said, supports community gardeners and youth engaged in food and environmental justice across New York City. In my role, I oversee two youth programs serving 15 youth interns during the year and 30 in the summer. Through this work, I see firsthand how important it is to create meaningful job opportunities for young people.

One of my interns, Fatum Mata, joined the program in 2023 — shy but very eager to learn. Over time, I watched her confidence grow through leadership opportunities and public speaking practice. She is now a third-year returning intern and a mentor to our summer youth, supporting the next generation of leaders. Through our programs, youth build leadership skills, develop responsibility, and form strong community connections. That is why I strongly support continued investment in a greener New York City. This funding allows organizations like Green Guerrillas to provide green jobs, hands-on learning, and advocacy opportunities in community gardens. It also strengthens intergenerational relationships and ensures that gardening knowledge continues to be passed down while youth bring these skills back to their own communities.

I also urge the Council to fund community-based organizations to ensure resources are distributed equitably. For over 50 years, Green Guerrillas has been a vital resource for community gardens. Continued investment allows us to expand opportunities for youth to gain skills and grow into leaders. Another intern, Sophia, joined last year with little knowledge of food justice or community gardening. Today, she is a program leader confidently advocating for her community and local gardens. In closing, I urge the Council to continue investing in a greener New York City and to increase funding for community-based organizations like Green Guerrillas. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Good day. Oops. Good day. Thank you, Chair Hankerson and members of the committee for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Aishima Harris and I am the executive director of Green Guerrillas. Like my colleagues mentioned, it is a nonprofit organization that has been established since 1973, creating a ruckus and therefore causing the formation of Green Thumb. So we are also here to champion that city agency and to ensure that its funding is being restored.

But before I jump into what I am asking the Council for, I just want to share a little bit about my background. When I immigrated to the US at the age of 12 from Jamaica, community gardens were where I found my belonging. In those spaces, I found people who shared my culture, food, and stories. I was once mentored there. I grew up there and ultimately those gardens shaped my career and purpose. My journey at the age of 14 started with Green Guerrillas as a summer youth intern. To be the executive director right now shows how community gardens have strengthened and reinforced the vision of what a community is.

For over 16 years, I have witnessed how community gardens serve as critical infrastructure for food access, climate resilience, public health, and cultural connection. And yet, these same spaces remain underfunded and underprotected. Across the City, gardeners are navigating aging infrastructure, rodent infestation, illegal dumping, and the consistent threat of land insecurity. These are not isolated issues. They are systematic and they require a coordinated city response. If we want gardens to continue serving our communities, we must invest in them accordingly.

We are asking the City to restore funding to Green Thumb to ensure baseline support for community gardens, advance legislation to permanently protect community gardens on city-owned land from development, and allocate $300,000 through the parks equity initiative for direct community garden support. Community gardens have long filled critical gaps in our neighborhoods, but they cannot do it alone. If we are really serious about equity, public health, and climate resilience, then we must be serious about investing in the spaces and people who have been doing this work for decades. I stand here today because of community gardens. I ask that you invest in them so that we preserve our essential lifeline. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And thank you all for your testimony. If you can provide us with your contact information so we can follow up with you, that would be great. Thank you. We are going to call our next panel. Miss Austin, Diana McKenzie, Rosa Chang, Jade Benham, Spike Appel. Yes. Just out of curiosity, is anyone else signed up to testify in the audience? Okay. All right.

Go over here. I am not going anywhere.

Okay.

Oh, perfect. Thank you. Okay. So we can start. Yes.

Thank you, Chairman Hankerson, for this opportunity to speak. I am going to be very brief because I know that my message is going to be redundant. My name is Eshel Austin. I am a lifelong gardener. I am from upstate New York and in the City. I am the group leader of Grant Shade Garden. I am also a member of Green Guerrillas, the Council of Gardeners. I will just mention that we know the city's preliminary budget allocates only 6% of the total funding needed to support the Department of Parks & Recreation and continues to fall short. The City has limited ability to provide technical assistance, supplies, and staffing for over 550 community gardens.

In my garden in particular, I am going to take a little different approach to the trees. I actually need eight London plane trees pruned in my garden so that I can grow food, because right now we are ornamental. We can only have hostas and ferns and shade plants growing there. I would like to extend the ability to grow food to my gardeners who live in NYCHA housing. So we call on the City to restore the previously allocated $2.6 million in funding for Green Thumb and create stronger legislation to protect our gardens from rezoning and redevelopment of city-owned land. I just need the London plane trees pruned so that we can reasonably open up the canopy. Even though I know the City has tried to increase the canopy, our canopy is very dense.

What is the location of your garden?

It is at 550 West 125th Street adjacent to the George Bruce Library.

Okay. If you before you leave, you can provide the Sergeant-at-Arms with your contact information.

Sure. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Thank you for your time, Council member, and I am sorry the commissioner just had to walk out. My name is Spike Appel, Lower East Side born and raised, now resident of Bushwick, raising two children. I am here to speak about Bushwick City Farm, which is once again under threat of closure, where I have volunteered for the past 15 years. The commissioner spoke earlier that there were lines of communication which we could use and that we did not need to come to testify at a hearing when CM Sandy Nurse spoke about the garden. However, my wife spoke at this committee in 2017 with our first son when we were asking the City to preserve our green space and our sanctuary space, which sits on a privately held lot. We provide hundreds of meals weekly free of charge as well as providing primarily neighborhood children a place of respite, learning and community. We are a sanctuary space that provided support to thousands of migrants during the migrant crisis when the City opened a shelter across the street.

My son is nine now and the neighborhood children who helped us build the garden have grown up and some have children of their own who enjoy the garden their parents built. We are still asking the same thing: for the City to step in and preserve this critical neighborhood resource. This is a multigenerational project that many depend on. We are currently locked out of our primary entrance as of Wednesday. We ask again, as an urgent matter, that the Council make real and immediate commitments in this budget to preserve the garden and push forward the process that CM Ossé, Borough President Reynoso, members of the parks department, Green Thumb, and the Department of Finance have all been a part of and have been taking their time on. There was a well-attended emergency rally this past Saturday of garden volunteers and supporters. If there are not clear commitments soon, I worry the community will become increasingly agitated.

We have volunteered 15 years of service to the space and the community. We have not asked for any support for our day-to-day operations. We independently fundraised for everything and use the space to help build new gardens in NYCHA housing. Help us enshrine these efforts for the next generation to carry forward. If we do not get immediate support on this, the community will have to step up and defend the space as we have for a decade.

Just thank you for your testimony. Is the space within Council member...

(04:53:58)

Nurse's district or CM Ossé's district? CM Ossé's district. It is right on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. So there is a lot of overlap. Thank you. If you can provide your contact as well before you leave. You are next.

Hi. I am Diana McKenzie. I am here because I live on Eastern Parkway between Washington and Underhill, directly across the street from Mount Prospect Park. I have lived there for 30 years, since I was five. And it actually... there is a lot that plays into what this meeting has been about, since the reason there is a skate park has to do with one-shot funding and private investors. But that does not really matter. One of the things I did when the skate park thing started was actually go to other skate parks in the city and talk to people. Skaters are really fun to talk to. They mostly talk about skating, but it was clear they are really passionate about third spaces, which I think is one thing people in our community who are not skaters can understand, because they are very passionate about Mount Prospect Park. And for years there have been problems with grass loss and cover loss that have not really been addressed, which is understandable. It is not Prospect Park and that does not get enough funding in the first place. But I feel that the solutions they came up with for that do not really take into account how much the park is used and how fond of it people are as it is.

I think it would be worth... it was really hard to have a discussion about anything under the last administration. I think it would be worth having more discussions about this, because I do not think some of the barriers that are up have more to do with how difficult that was than not being able to come to an accord. That is all. Thank you. Also, please increase the city parks funding. It is one of the things most New Yorkers use. We all know it is important. We would not be here if it was not important.

Thank you, Diana. If I may ask, do you know whose district the proposal is in? If not, no worries. Crystal Hudson. Okay. Thank you.

Hello. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today, Chair Hankerson. We are so excited to have you spend some time with our Gotham Park youth ambassadors coming up. I wanted to say congratulations to you and to Commissioner Shimmore, but she has left, who I have actually known since her community board one days. So I have full confidence that she is going to do her utmost to uplift all of our communities in her role as commissioner.

My name is Rosa Chang and I am co-founder of Gotham Park, a grassroots 501(c)(3) created in 2021 to open, operate, and maintain a new community-led public space in a neighborhood that has historically been underinvested and overlooked, right outside of City Hall, just right behind you. The community are the roots of this grassroots endeavor, with over 47,000 people living within a half mile radius of the park. We are incredibly diverse. 20% of our families live below the federal poverty level. 20% are seniors. 64% are BIPOC. We have 12,000 students literally across the street. Parks and public space are where we teach our children how to be good citizens, how to share, how to see and learn how adults treat each other, hopefully with an open heart and consideration. We need more of it and we need to prioritize the care of what we have so that these spaces are here to build the community and the next generation that we are proud of.

Gotham Park advocated for and now manages 4 acres of open space. We worked our butts off to get the space open and we continue to work our butts off to take care of it. We program it, we plant it, we pick up the litter and we work with our neighbors to collaborate on resiliency and education projects, health initiatives, programming and the expansion of the space for our community. We are asking for your financial support to uplift community-led public space initiatives like ours. Help us survive and thrive. Show your support with funding for work like ours and for the parks department so that we can uplift all parks throughout the City and all the people who benefit from access to our public spaces. Parks are not a luxury. They are a basic civil necessity and they are the learning ground where we try and we fail and we pick ourselves up and we learn resiliency. We advocated so hard for Gotham Park and we are making it work, but only 1% of our operational funds is public. Please fund pathways to help us and grassroots projects like ours until we are able to stand on our own and bring up the next generation of legacy public space projects. People need parks and parks need people to fund them. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Okay, we are going to call our next panel. Alma Ortiz Reyes... Reyes Ortiz. My apologies. Marilyn B. Downey. Ia de Jesus. Savannah Bailey Mlan. Okay. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Hankerson and members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation. My name is Alma Reyes and I am representing Queens Community House. I am testifying today as a member of the Play Fair for Parks coalition. I am here to urge you to increase funding to our city parks. We need to restore the 1% of the New York City budget for parks. The preliminary budget for New York City parks maintained the status quo of underinvestment and is even 33 million less than last year's budget. After four years of cuts to the budget, our parks are suffering from staffing losses, a decrease in maintenance and delayed capital projects.

As a resident of Queens since 1992 and longtime user of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, I hold a deep affection for this space. This park serves hundreds of thousands of people and countless Queens residents. The park is where children play after school, elders walk to stay healthy, vendors earn a living and communities gather to celebrate, exercise and breathe. For many residents, this park is the only free and safe outdoor space available to them. Yet its condition does not reflect how essential this park is. For over a year, Queens Community House has been hosting monthly park cleanups at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. While volunteer stewardship is essential for the well-being of our parks, volunteers will never accomplish as much as park maintenance staff. Through our cleanups, we connect with people who raise concerns about the cleanliness, lighting, restroom access and safety of the park. These are not minor inconveniences. They affect whether people feel welcome, whether seniors can walk safely and whether families allow their children to play. When a park of this scale is underfunded, the message received by the community is clear: our needs are not prioritized. Increasing the parks budget is not optional. It is urgent as a matter of public health, equity and dignity. Thank you.

I am Marilyn Downey and I am a retired high school teacher and I have lived on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn for over 50 years. Across the street is a park called Mount Prospect Park and I am here speaking as a member of the Friends of Mount Prospect Park. We also have a block association, so we are very conscious of what is going on in our neighborhood. In January 2024, we learned from Mayor Adams that there had been a plan to pour over our park 40,000 square feet of concrete to create a skateboard park. We were never consulted. We did not support it. We started putting up a fight against it pretty quickly. We have petitions that were signed by thousands of people.

When we finally got Crystal Hudson to have a hearing on this in our neighborhood and we packed an auditorium, we were told by all the city representatives there — Crystal, the parks commissioner and others I will not name — that "this is not a residential neighborhood." I want to say that Mount Prospect Park is directly across the street from... if you go from Plaza Street to Washington Avenue, there are at least 20 high-rise apartment buildings, from six floors to 15 floors, and there are thousands of people living there. So there is a residential neighborhood. What they were going to put there, as they told us at our meeting, was a destination skateboard arena for the East Coast, bringing in thousands of people all the time to make noise over this concrete in our former park.

I am here to say we want you to stop this project. It is a community park for all the purposes a community park serves. Please do not vote for this project. I am also told to say the City should halt planning and construction of this project until there is an investigation of violations of city law and policy. They have now reduced it to 20,000 square feet from 40,000, but it is still going to ruin our park. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Thank you to Chair Hankerson and members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Ia de Jesus and I am engagement coordinator of Jardín de la Familia, for the past six years, located in the Bronx. Our Green Thumb garden, Jardín de la Familia, has a rich history of community involvement and has been a vital green space because it addresses our community's food insecurity as well as environmental justice in our neighborhood.

I am here today speaking on behalf of Jardín de la Familia and all New York City gardens. The preliminary fiscal year 2027 budget allocates only 0.6% of the total city budget to the Department of Parks & Recreation. This has severely impacted the New York City Green Thumb program, which has seen significant reductions in its budget since the Adams administration. This impacts its capacity to provide technical assistance, necessary supplies and adequate staffing, thus impairing its ability to effectively support community gardeners. Therefore, we call upon the City to invest in and restore $2.6 million in funding for Green Thumb. We call on the Mayor to allocate 1% of the total city budget to the Department of Parks & Recreation.

I, Ia de Jesus, have been a gardener since a young age, with parents in Puerto Rico. Community gardens provide community access to me and other members of my community, which must be safeguarded for future generations. I urge the Council to introduce stronger legislation to protect all gardens located on city-owned land from development and under-resourcing. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Hello. Good afternoon. My name is Savannah Bailey Mlan and I am the executive director and chief curator of the West Harlem Art Fund. My organization presents public art in West Harlem and across the City of New York and we have been doing that for 28 years. While I am saddened to hear parks operations may be reduced by 33 million, potentially losing 100 jobs, I want to see some reforms in the agency before they get any more money. I am in a neighborhood of color where we struggle to get good programming, which I do provide in the area of art with very little funding. I have been doing this for a long time.

In the last two years going on three, I have actually presented one of the largest outdoor sculpture park exhibitions in the City of New York. We have actually created a public art district spanning 67 acres. The Commissioner knows me. So what did we discover? We discovered climate change. We discovered that land management and public art go together. We are dealing with flooding, soil erosion and soil compaction. We have seen conditions that are so severe we actually had to use a jackhammer to break the surface to install a piece of art. So yes, we need more money, but we need more training. We have used a lot of young people to work with us and help us, teaching them about composting and gardening, but they cannot get a job with the parks department. Because if you look at the parks department, and I did the numbers, 44% are people of color and they stay in maintenance jobs. You talked about tree pruning and tree climbing. There are a lot of able-bodied young men who can do tree climbing and pruning, yet they cannot get a job.

We tried to supplement that, but we cannot. Why? Because Trees New York has an exclusive contract with the city parks department where we cannot get them the certification to be citizen tree pruners. That needs to change because that is the first step towards getting a real job. We are also trying to get them composting certification through sanitation. There are all these roadblocks. When you look at the tree pruners, the tree climbers, the gardeners, they do not look like people of color. When you look at the contractors that everyone has been talking about, I checked, and the majority of them do not live nor do their businesses reside in the five boroughs of the City of New York. They are in Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey. So how do we have a livable wage?

Even though I am an executive director, I struggle every day to make it. Why? Because the resources are not there for art. I was here since 11:30. Look at what time they brought me here to this table, which shows the disrespect that arts get in this city. I have reached out to your office. I do not see any other council person here to listen to us, to hear what we have to say. There needs to be an adjustment when it comes to this budget to make it work for us. It is not so much about getting more money. How do we make it work? I am sick and tired of seeing it not work. So that is what I want to share with you today. And I did it within my time. Thank you so much.

Enjoy your day. Thank you.

Okay. We are going to call our next panel: Chanti Young, John Sero, Francesca... I am sorry, I cannot read the last name. My apologies. Sonia Ferrero. Thank you all for your patience. Two more. Okay. Did you all fill out a testimony slip? I have your name. Okay. The remaining folks, you can come on up to the table. We will just do it that way and we will have you fill out the slip afterward. Our apologies. Is there anyone else that wishes to testify that has not yet testified? Okay. All right.

Great. Good afternoon. I am John Co, the senior fellow for climate opportunity at the Center for an Urban Future, an independent organization focused on creating a stronger and more inclusive economy in New York. I am also a proud super steward with the parks department, so happy to hear all the tree talk. Thank you to Chair Hankerson and members of the committee for the opportunity to testify today.

Thriving parks and open spaces are essential to achieving the City's vision of an affordable, livable New York. But today the system is struggling under the weight of four consecutive years of budget cuts and lacks the maintenance funding and staffing needed to sustain the vibrant, equitable park system that New Yorkers deserve. Case in point: recreation. The City's athletic facilities and recreational programs — its pools, tennis courts, rec centers, fitness classes, sports leagues and more — play an integral role in offering free and low-cost options for New Yorkers to play, move and connect. That matters today more than ever as over 40% of residents are grappling with chronic disease and loneliness. But decades of underinvestment mean we are only scratching the surface of its potential.

Our recent report at the Center for an Urban Future found that recreation services once accounted for nearly a third of the parks operating budget. Today it is about 5.3%. Full-time rec staff has fallen from almost 2,000 people in 1964 to 659 today. New York allocates among the lowest amount per capita on recreation of any major US city and many core recreation assets that need urgent repairs are closed entirely, with more than 400 million in known capital needs for major facilities alone.

New York City parks continues to do what it can with limited resources, but the gap between needs and capacity keeps widening. Going forward, the City should restore and expand critical staffing across parks operations, capital projects and forestry maintenance, while investing in rec centers and program staff to get parks clean, safe and fully functional again. For instance, these investments can help address New York City's affordability challenges by expanding the park system's summer day camp — the best deal anywhere in the City — from roughly 500 participants today to 5,000. To achieve this, the City Council should reverse the proposed cuts, expand city funding and create new dedicated recurring revenue streams to put the system on stronger, more sustainable footing. I will just close by saying that in January 2024, the center outlined 20 specific ideas to do exactly that. We are about to release two more: the first on harnessing real estate revenue to pay for parks and the next on expanding opportunities for public-private partnerships. Thanks so much for letting me come today and testify.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Patricia Carroll. I live in Assembly District 28. I am here to speak for additional funding for parks, especially for their natural areas. I am a retired professor of geography who for the last couple of years has been a volunteer steward in Forest Park, where every week my fellow stewards and I spend many hours mostly removing invasive species that either strangle the trees or drape over the trees and deprive them of sunlight as well as nutrients.

Many people have spoken about the functional benefits of trees and forests and parks. I would like to specifically address the dollar benefits to our City. According to the Arbor Day Foundation, every dollar invested in street and park trees in New York City returns $5.60. About half of that benefit comes from the reduced need for energy — electricity and gas. Almost a fifteenth each comes from air quality improvement and increased property values and about a sixteenth from storm water management. Storm water management is really important now in the era of increasing climate change. New York City mostly feels that with altered precipitation regimes where we have droughts followed by very heavy downpours. As you know, our storm water goes into the sewer system and very often cannot be safely delivered to water treatment plants and it floods communities.

The annual benefit of a single tree varies by species and size, but roughly the range is from about $100 per tree to $400 per tree. The average small tree in New York is about $200. A medium-sized tree, $250. In any case, as a volunteer steward, I know that keeping trees mature, getting them to maturity, is an impossible task without adequate resources. More funding is needed to do that and given the current federal cutting of all environmental regulations, I think it falls more importantly on local areas to pick up that gap. The payoff for New York City will be very great. And that is leaving aside the fact that trees create beauty that is accessible to people of all stripes who relax and smile when they are there. Thank you for your time.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Hankerson. I am incredibly impressed by how engaged you have been all day. I know you probably have not had lunch either, unless you snuck out and grabbed some food. It is an honor to be here today. My name is Banna Varga. I am from CM Hanif's district in Brooklyn, District 39. I was super grateful when she stopped by the first volunteer day that we had for a pocket park my neighbors and I are creating.

I am here because I believe in the magic of trees. More than 80% of the City's trees are cared for by the parks department. Trees shade our sidewalks. They keep harmful particles out of our lungs. They act as umbrellas during heavy rains and allow the soil to absorb more water to prevent flooding. They have even been shown to improve mental health and reduce crime. The leadership of New York City understands the important role that trees play in creating a climate-resilient and livable city, which is why they invested in the Million Trees NYC project, and the parks department has committed to planting 18,000 trees per year going forward.

However, not all trees are equally beneficial. A mature tree's canopy can shade an entire playground, making its surfaces safe for children in the heat of summer. A newly planted tree simply cannot do that. A young tree is a promise. A mature tree is infrastructure. This is why it is imperative that we invest not just in planting trees, but in the people who steward them towards maturity. We are currently in the middle of Trees Count...

(05:22:46)

the City's decennial tree census. Last summer, over 2,500 volunteers, including me, surveyed more than 46,000 trees, and we will continue that work this spring. In order to be able to act on the tree health data that we are collecting, allow our trees to grow, and keep our urban forest thriving for the benefit of all New Yorkers, the parks department needs to be well staffed and well funded. This is not the time to cut the funding for this invaluable agency. I urge the City Council to invest in parks and the future of New York by joining cities across the country and allocating 1% of our budget to parks. Thank you so much for your time and attention.

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Thank you so much.

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Thank you, Chairman Hankerson. You are my district councilman and also the district councilman for my community garden. My name is Sonia Ferraro. I have been a community gardener for over 40 years and I am a Green Thumb gardener for 12 of those 40 years. I am the founder and leader of Paradise Community Garden located in Jamaica, Queens. Paradise has a rich history of community involvement and has been a vital green space in our community. As a member of Green Gorillas Council of Gardeners, I want to express my support for the policy initiatives that have been uplifted today.

In addition, I would like to amplify the needs of the community gardens. In particular, the much-needed infrastructure upgrades and repairs are vital to ensure that gardens are also safe for the seniors who steward them. Many community gardens across New York City remain inaccessible to people with disabilities, limiting who can fully participate in and benefit from these vital green spaces. To ensure equity and inclusion, gardens should be equipped with ADA-compliant infrastructure, including accessible driveways, curb cutouts, and safe navigable pathways throughout the garden. Gardeners like myself need designated handicap parking on the street close to the garden. Therefore, additional funding to agencies like Green Thumb and organizations like Green Gorillas is very important.

Community gardeners have felt firsthand the effects of the reduced funding. I urge each council member to visit community gardens in their district to hear our needs and walk alongside each gardener to better understand the needs of community gardens. Thank you once again for the opportunity to share with you my 40 years of experience.

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Thank you, Miss Ferraro, and thank you for the work that you have done in our district and also for participating in our participatory budget process in the last few years as well. I do want to say this... someone has left. We do not choose how people sit on the days. We do not, you know, it is not a set order, or else the person from my district would have gone first. But thank you all so much for staying and advocating. We took notes. We will be following up with folks. Thank you so much. It has been a long day. We truly appreciate your... Now we will hear testimony from Drew Stillman, Homeman, Fatima Trare, Sophia Zong, Walter Mugdan and Kasha Pazdar for the folks on Zoom. We can begin. You may begin on Zoom.

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Hello. Can you hear us?

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Yes, I can hear you.

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Can you see us as well?

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Yes, I can.

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I promise you I look better in person. All right, we can start.

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Hello everyone. My name is Drew Stillman. I am calling from the north shore of Staten Island. I also work as one of those seasonal one-shot employees that work with the Natural Resources Group in New York City parks. I also just wanted to clarify and reiterate that though we do have 70 people who are in our group that work with us, that is not the number of field technicians and boots on the ground. I just want to make clear that there are less than 30 of us that manage the entire city and all of the over 20,000 acres of natural areas. And not just forested areas — we also manage wetlands, shorelines, beaches, and fresh and saltwater marshes. So there is a lot of area that needs to be covered.

All of our positions are seasonal, as you have heard. It takes a lot of technical learning and a lot of institutional knowledge to be in these positions and to actually execute them efficiently and effectively within the natural landscape throughout our city. So it really is important to have staff that can be there consistently on a long-term basis as opposed to just a seasonal basis. We need people who can see winter, spring, summer and fall and all of the intricacies in between so that they can properly manage these landscapes effectively and efficiently.

While we do have our executive, administrative and other support staff on our natural resources teams, that does not appropriately reflect the people who are actually taking care of and managing those spaces. As you can imagine, it is very difficult for about 25 people to manage over 20,000 acres of natural areas. Increasing the capacity as well as baselining the positions...

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Thank you. Your time has expired.

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Ah, damn. Thank you.

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Thank you, Drew. I am sorry I cannot extend the time on the virtual, but I did hear your testimony. Thank you so much.

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Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

(05:30:04)

Hello. Can you hear me? You may begin.

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Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you to Chairman Hankerson and the members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation for the opportunity to testify. My name is Fatima Trare and today I am representing Green Gorillas as a youth intern and part of the Youth Empowerment Pipeline Program. Green Gorillas is a nonprofit organization that specializes in engaging with community gardeners and advocating for them all across NYC to promote food and environmental justice.

From my time as an intern, I have learned valuable skills and lessons from community gardens. I have been able to see firsthand how community gardeners support their community, maintain sustainable practices, and work with limited resources to transform vacant areas into beautiful green spaces. From my three years of experience, I want to highlight some recommendations and improvements that I have witnessed that should be made to help community gardeners continue their work.

First, an increase in funding to gardeners that need access to utility resources, including running water, electricity and gardening tools. This will ensure that green spaces are receiving the opportunities they need to create a fully functional environment. Second, an increase in funding to youth gardening programs like A Greener NYC, which provides organizations like Green Gorillas funding to create job opportunities for youth like me to aid community gardens. Youth programs are vital to community gardens because they expose the younger generation to building essential green spaces, passing the torch on to the next generation of gardeners. Youth action is the future of community action.

In conclusion, I urge the City to prioritize youth internships and accessibility to schools for all gardens across NYC to ultimately create thriving community spaces. Thank you for your time.

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Thank you so much for your testimony. Next we will have Sophia Zong. You may begin.

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Sophia.

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Hello.

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Okay. Thank you to Chairman Ty Hankerson and members of the Committee on Parks and Recreation for the opportunity to submit this testimony. My name is Sophia Zongo and I am a second-year Youth Empowerment Program intern with Green Gorillas. Through my work, I volunteer in community gardens across all five boroughs of New York City supporting gardeners with planting, maintenance, composting and general upkeep. While I am not based in a single garden, I have worked alongside many community gardeners who have a rich history of community involvement and serve as vital green spaces in their neighborhoods.

Through my experience, I have seen firsthand how important community gardens are, not just for growing food, but for building community, providing safe green spaces and supporting environmental education. However, the recently released preliminary budget allocates less than 1% of the total City budget to the Department of Parks & Recreation. This limited funding places programs like Green Thumb at risk. I urge the Council to restore the previously allocated $2.6 million in funding for Green Thumb, which supports hundreds of gardens citywide. Community gardens must be recognized as essential public assets and protected from development. I strongly support introducing legislation to permanently protect all New York City community gardens on city-owned land from rezoning and development. These spaces are critical to the health and resilience of our neighborhoods.

Additionally, I ask the Council to allocate $300,000 through the parks equity initiative for direct funding to gardens and invest in community-based organizations like Green Gorillas that distribute resources equitably. Programs like A Greener NYC are also vital. They create green jobs for youth like myself and provide opportunities for environmental education and advocacy. Thank you.

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Thank you so much. Next we will have Walter Mugdan. You may begin.

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Hi. Can you hear me? All right.

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Yes.

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Thank you. I am Walter Mugdan. I am president of the Udalls Cove Preservation Committee, founded in 1969. Our mission is the conservation and restoration of the last undeveloped natural areas in the Udalls Cove watershed in northeastern Queens. Much of the area has already been protected as the Udalls Cove Park Preserve, a New York City Forever Wild area with trails winding through woods and along the shoreline.

We ask that the FY27 budget provide a significant increase towards the objective stated by Mayor Mamdani during his campaign that the parks budget grow to 1% of the overall City budget. In particular, we urge increased appropriations for the department's Natural Resources Group, which has broad responsibilities for natural areas throughout the city like ours, but is seriously understaffed and challenged by having many employees who are not on permanent budget lines. The parks department manages 14% of the City's land area but receives only one half of 1% of the City budget.

Parks are vital to the quality of life of all New Yorkers and in particular those who have the least economic means to enjoy the benefits of nature and outdoor recreation. This includes everything from small vest pocket parks to large public spaces like Central Park, from ball fields and playgrounds to community gardens and nature preserves such as Udalls Cove Park. City parks and particularly our natural areas provide critical benefits to combat global warming and climate change and minimize flooding.

My organization has raised and spent over $350,000 in the past 20 years to combat invasive species, increase tree canopy and carry out other park restoration and improvement projects. We are committed to continuing our stewardship work, but to do so we need the department to be adequately funded as well. We need knowledgeable staff from whom to receive guidance on the projects we pursue. We need our permit applications to be timely processed. We need support for our volunteer cleanup events and improvement projects. And we need an adequately funded department to do the many kinds of things that are beyond the capacity of organizations such as ours. My time has expired.

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Thank you very much. Thank you, Walter. And finally we will have Kasha Pazdar. Can you hear me?

(05:36:46)

Great. Thank you. My name is Kasha Pazdar. I am a parks worker, a DC37 member and a resident of City Council district 35. Thank you for receiving my testimony today. I ask this Council to baseline the Playfair urban park rangers and all Playfair parks workers.

I worked as an urban park ranger in the Bronx for about four years. For the first two years, I was in a Playfair-funded line. I did the same job as a civil service ranger but I did not have the same benefits or rights. I was not paid for holidays for 18 months, could not sign up for the pension and faced delays in signing up for health insurance. I also could not apply for full-time parks jobs because I was not considered a full-time parks employee.

In my four years with the Rangers, I noticed that each April, workplace morale and productivity would suffer as Playfair staff began to apply for other jobs. Massive amounts of institutional knowledge are being lost each year this way. Many of the best, brightest and hardest working rangers would leave city service because they could not count on a job being there in July. It is stressful to experience that for one fiscal cycle. It is demoralizing to experience it for many years.

It is not just an injustice to these workers. The public suffers when program managers cannot plan for a season because they do not know what their staffing will look like. The instability of Playfair funding has had a direct impact on the urban park rangers' ability to plan and book educational and recreational programming, resulting in fewer canoeing, hiking, history, fishing, bird watching and camping programs for the public.

I know that what I say here today is echoed by many of my colleagues working in stewardship, trail maintenance, forestry and other areas of parks. If the parks department is going to deliver on its promises, then the mayor and the City Council need to deliver on their promise for a well-funded parks department. I ask once again that this committee baseline the Playfair positions to help achieve these goals. Thank you so much for your time.

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Thank you, Kasha. Thank you for your service to our city. The FY27 preliminary budget hearing for the Committee on Parks and Recreation is now adjourned.