Park Funds Shrinking Under New 2025 City Budget
Even as the recently unveiled city budget unveiled on June 28 great to a record $112.4 billion, the amount of money being allocated to the city’s Parks and Recreation Department declined by $20 million to $618 million. [This story originally appeared in THE CITY on July 1]
As a candidate, Eric Adams promised that at least one percent of the city’s overall budget would be dedicated to the city’s parks. But the latest city budget moves in the opposite direction, committing the lowest share of the overall budget to the Parks Department in the last decade, documents show.
The Parks Department is getting $20 million less funding than last year even as the city budget grew by $5 billion. The $618 million for Parks in a $112.4 billion budget comes to 0.55 percent, the lowest share of funding set forth in an adopted budget in a decade.
While the budget fluctuates throughout the year and the city ends up spending more than it initially proposed, in recent years that’s often meant Parks took an even smaller slice of the pie than initial estimates in the adopted budget.
The cuts will mean around 768 fewer full-time parks workers, down to around 7,275 full and full-time equivalent employees, according to budget documents.
“Those people are doing physical jobs in our parks to make sure that they are safe, make sure that they are clean, making sure that bathrooms are clean, making sure that trees are well maintained, just basic things,” said Adam Ganser, the executive director of the research and advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, which railed against the cuts. “They’re gonna have less capacity to do that.”
While libraries and cultural institutions were able to lobby heavily to override around $100 million in proposed cuts from the administration, the Parks Department was not as successful.
“The libraries can threaten to close their doors,” Ganser said. “The beauty of parks is that they are purely democratic spaces that are open to everybody all the time,” pointing to the estimated 527 million visits to city parks each year. “Our city’s parks are once again getting the short end of the stick.”
Amaris Cockfield, a spokesperson for Mayor Adams, defended the administration’s spending on the city’s greenspaces, saying the mayor had initially proposed slashing even more funding to the department.
The mayor’s executive budget published in April proposed cutting the Parks budget by $54 million.
“Our administration continues to invest in our city’s parks,” Cockfield said, noting $4.1 million in new funding for 50 Urban Park Rangers and $2.6 million to support community gardens. Over the last year, the city also boosted tree maintenance with more planting, pruning and inspections, she said.
Cockfield said the arrival of more than 200,000 migrants, more than 60,000 of whom are living in city shelters, had also presented a challenging $7.1 billion budget gap.
“We are making parks safer and cleaner for all New Yorkers,” she said.
Still, the Parks Department has struggled to keep up with invasive species, Inside Climate News reported last month, with neighborhood parks in poorer areas unable to rely on well-heeled conservancies to make up the difference hit hardest. With hotter summers projected, advocates say maintaining the city’s green spaces which help keep temperatures around them lower is more vital than ever.
Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, the chair of the Parks committee, said while they secured some wins–like lifting a hiring freeze–“the overall climate for parks, however, is bleaker.”
“We’re moving backwards, not forwards,” he said. “And the impact of that is very real.”
For years, green space advocates pressured NYC to dedicate at least one percent of its budget towards maintaining the city’s parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, and beaches. They pointed to other major cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, which put between 1.5 and 4 percent of their budgets to parks.
As a mayoral candidate, Adams embraced their calls, pledging to increase funding for the agency. He continued to express commitment to that goal into his second year as mayor, even when his first executive budget fell short of that promise.
“The goal is to get to that one percent,” he said in March of 2022, blaming COVID-related financial setbacks for the delay at getting to one percent. “We’re getting there. I’m confident that we are.”
Since then, Adams has cooled on the idea. In February, he cited financial issues from the pandemic and the cost of the asylum seeker crisis.
“I want parks in our communities like these, but I’ve got to be fiscally responsible,” he said in response to a question by THE CITY.
And last week, at the reopening of the Astoria Park Pool following a $19 million renovation, he said to “let the process go through” and predicted “we will all be celebrating.”
The next day, the mayor’s office and the council indeed celebrated the budget with a handshake on Friday, just days before the deadline.
Both sides stressed new spending wins, specifically a restoration of the mayor’s previously proposed cuts for the three library systems and cultural institutions totaling more than $100 million.
They also boasted of an additional $15 million for “second shift” cleaning staff at 100 high-traffic locations inside 60 city parks, and the lifting of the agency’s hiring freeze.
But overall, the department funding went down even as the city’s budget grew.
