A staff of just 302 people tend to a crop of over 865,000 trees across the city. Adams’ preliminary budget aims to slash $46 million from the Parks Department, which environmentalists fear signals a step back in the mayor’s promise to keep New York City’s canopy alive and growing.
Across the country, cities are transforming asphalt schoolyards into spongy, shady community centers. The new playground at PS 184M Shuang Wen School in Manhattan’s Chinatown, for example, has a porous turf field that can capture an estimated 1.3 million gallons of stormwater runoff.
“During Sandy we saw evidence of how parks can be built to weather the worst impacts of storms. Areas that suffered less damage overall had infrastructure in place that served to alleviate some of the harsher impacts: facilities such as beaches, wetlands and parks which, if built right, can serve as a cushion for harsh weather conditions that might hit coastal and neighboring communities.”
The mayor’s office has approved the highest funding for tree planting in half a decade, officials say, allowing the Parks Department to plant 20,000 trees a year for the next four years. But some councilmembers say that pace isn’t fast enough to keep up with extreme weather events that damage the city’s tree canopy.
The Central Park Climate Lab will start data collection this spring to examine how extreme weather could affect the park’s plants and wildlife.
Newly passed legislation may lower the threshold for acceptable lead levels in water fountains in New York public schools. Hundreds of fountains in city parks have tested above that new number.
In addition to paying for more than 200 park rangers and patrol officers—positions cut from the previous year’s budget—the allocated money will support community gardens, forestry management and equity initiatives.
‘If you wait for the city to do it for you, you’re going to be waiting forever,’ Mike Young, founder of the Padre Plaza Community Success Garden. ‘Why are we waiting for someone else to be resourceful for us?’
‘Now is the time to realize a new era for parks, a vision for recovery with green open spaces at the center of our new urban landscape. The first step towards doing that is restoring the devastating budget cuts that have brought us to this inflection point.’
Parks groups and BIDs believe the city has tried to offload legal liability onto small organizations that are built to rally volunteers and sweep plazas, not battle lawsuits.
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