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?”

“I’m starting to hear more and more concerns about the lack of maintenance because the cuts [in park personnel] are so deep,” Mark-Viverito said. Disparities in security were another concern, she said, “because the conservancies have the ability to hire additional officers to patrol the parks.”

Basic questions not examined

Alyson Beha is director of research, planning, and policy for New Yorkers for Parks. She agreed that “there is certainly the perception in parts of the city that some parks and some neighborhoods are getting short-shrift.” The problem, Beha says, is that the lack of data on how much money the city is investing in each park — something she characterizes as a “huge missing piece of information” — makes it “impossible really” to reach definitive conclusions as to what problems do or do not exist.

Geoffrey Croft, president and founder of NYC Parks Advocates, a non-profit parks advocacy group, said, “The most basic — one of the ABCs — of management is that you have to know” facility-by-facility information. “Look at anything from your car to your house…for you to properly manage and maintain something, you have to know how much that will cost so that you can plan…That’s just a basic in management.”

Remapping Debate asked Melissa Schilling, a professor of management at NYU’s Stern School of Business, whether she thought it would be useful for the Parks Department to maintain cost data on a park-by-park basis. She was surprised that the data were not available. “It’s a strange decision because that strikes me as data that would be easy to collect,” she said.

Schilling said the data would be helpful from a variety of perspectives: determining whether and why some parks were run more efficiency than others, evaluating whether there were funding inequities between and among parks or neighborhoods, and promoting greater public participation in parks decision making by providing greater transparency.

Schilling emphasized that these data — like all data — need to be analyzed with care, making sure, for example, not simply looking at whether a park was being managed cheaply, but whether it was being managed well, and recognizing the need to use both quantitative and qualitative measures where appropriate.

Asked about the expense of collecting data on costs, Schilling rejected the proposition that doing so would be expensive. The Department is already paying people on an individual level and therefore collecting such data, she said, and it is a matter of “just being accountable for keeping track of [people’s time and where they spend it] on a spreadsheet.”

E.S. Savas is a former first deputy city administrator in the Lindsay Administration, currently a professor of public management at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, and author of a 1974 report that examined Central Park’s conditions and management and offered recommendations that led to the creation of the Central Park Conservancy. He believes it would take additional staffing and monetary resources to track the information, but that failing do so is penny-wise and pound foolish: what look like savings wind up resulting in “poor management.”

Getting stonewalled

Remapping Debate reached out to the Parks Department seeking both facility-by-facility data and to interview a Department representative. We had multiple telephone conversations and email exchanges with Vickie Karp from the Department’s press office. Complaints about the scope of our initial request (which included historical data) caused us to narrow the requests substantially to current fiscal year facility-by-facility information on funding and staffing. (See box for full request, including request for interview.)

Promised cooperation was not forthcoming, and we were told by Parks to speak with the city’s Office of Management and Budget. OMB said it didn’t have the information, and suggested we try to get it from the Parks Department. Parks, through Karp, ultimately took the position that Remapping Debate should “FOIL (submit a Freedom of Information request) for your information or direct your queries to the Office of Management and Budget.” “I will not correspond further on this,” she added.

Remapping Debate had made clear that we wished to “conduct an interview of the relevant Parks official even in the absence” of the data sought, but Karp — who had a few days earlier emailed to say, “I have referred [Remapping Debate’s] concerns to senior management here so that we can best expedite and address your requests” — insisted that no Parks representative would be made available until after we had somehow gotten hold of the data Parks was not supplying, “not before.”

It turns out that Remapping Debate was joining a line of others who had had difficulty in obtaining information from the Parks Department. In July, for example, the New York Daily News reported that Parks watchdog groups “charge the Parks Department is chronically tardy in answering Freedom of Information Law requests, which are considered crucial to a transparent government.”  The News itself did not have several requests responded to for months, and, when it pressed for further information, it was given false excuses for the delay.

Back in Dec. 2006, the city’s Independent Budget Office, in response to a request from a member of the city council for information about private funding of public parks found that “the total amount of private funding available for city parks and recreation is not readily determined. The available information is often not current, or not publicly available. [The Parks Department’s] biennial report does not provide a full accounting of private funding, and does not show contributions by borough or purpose.”

IBO went on to say that “it is not possible to determine if and how the department re-allocates public spending in response to private contributions, or to what extent private funding may have substituted for city spending in public parks.”

Geoffrey Croft of NYC Parks Advocates suggested that the Parks Department, having been “vastly underfunded for decades” and having “no money to do with what they are charged to do,” is deliberately resistant to the release of information that could document disparities in funding. The Department has long had  “defensive culture,” he said.

The Mayor’s view

Pointing to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s history of statements identifying the collection and analysis of data as being central to good management of city agencies, we sought through the mayor’s press office to determine whether the mayor thought it was important for the Parks Department to collect information on costs or staffing on a park-by-park basis in order to assess the extent to which resources are being equitably distributed or for other managerial purposes.

The mayor’s office did not respond.