Open spaces, closed files

Dec. 7, 2011 — Why doesn’t the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation have facility-by-facility information on operating costs, staffing, and utilization on its website or otherwise readily available?

The Parks Department operates more than 1,700 parks and other recreation facilities. Some parks — most notably Central Park — receive substantial funding from private sources while others rely wholly on public funding. The issue of whether there is equity in funding between and among parks — and the related question of whether and to what extent to rely on private as opposed to public funding — has been raised over the years. Its relevance today is underlined by the fact that the staffing level of the Parks Department is down at least 30 percent since 1986, its peak since 1980. (Some argue that staffing has, in reality, dropped even more dramatically because 1,600-plus seasonal workers who had been working full-time were omitted from the count of full-time workers until 2008.)

In approaching this article, it seemed apparent that using facility-by-facility information as to operating costs, staffing, and utilization would help the Parks Department manage its operations in a way to ensure equity and to assess the proper role of private versus public funding. Those same data would allow for easy outside analysis and oversight. This expectation was fueled by the fact that the Bloomberg and his Administration has, for 10 years, prided itself on being data-driven.

Several long-time observers of the city’s park system thought this kind of information was essential to have available — both as a basic matter of good management and as data to help assess the issues of equity and funding. But facility-by-facility information is not available on the Parks Department’s website, and the Department neither had the information at hand nor was willing to provide a representative to be interviewed by Remapping Debate. Advocates have told Remapping Debate that this is in line with the Parks Department’s record of being resistant to the kind of transparency that the collection and dissemination of facility-by-facility data would provide.

A multi-tiered system?

In 2007, the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit budgetary watchdog, released a report that The New York Times characterized as “the latest analysis to suggest that city parks have devolved into a multi-tiered system, with parks operated by nonprofit groups like the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation at the top, and parks that are in poor neighborhoods and are run by the Parks Department at the bottom.”

An Oct. 2011 report from New Yorkers for Parks gave 80 percent of large parks surveyed a grade of “A” or “B,” but noted that the “quality of large parks varies widely even within neighborhoods.” According to the group, the report found that, in an era of shrinking maintenance dollars for park staff, “parks with active volunteer groups have better overall maintenance.”

Melissa Mark-Viverito, chair of the New York City Council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation, told Remapping Debate that she was concerned about disparities in park maintenance.  The parks with conservancies, she said, “are great and taken care of, but what happens to the other parks in terms of the level of attention and upgrades and repairs?”