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Squadron touts ‘20 percent solution’ for needy parks

Mayor de Blasio, right, with Mitchell Silver at Seward Park on March 21 at the announcement of Silver’s appointment as Parks Department commissioner.  Photo courtesy NYC Parks Department
Mayor de Blasio, right, with Mitchell Silver at Seward Park on March 21 at the announcement of Silver’s appointment as Parks Department commissioner. Photo courtesy NYC Parks Department

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON  |  When Mayor de Blasio recently announced that he had appointed Mitchell Silver as the Parks Department’s new commissioner, he notably chose to do it at Seward Park on the Lower East Side, the country’s first municipally built public playground.

Continuing his “tale of two cities” theme at the March 21 press conference, de Blasio said, “The goal is a more equitable approach to our parks.”

“Fighting against inequality and creating opportunity is the job of every agency, certainly the Parks Department included,” the mayor said. “And this site is so important, because more than 100 years ago, settlement house workers here in the Lower East Side, led by one of the city’s true unsung progressive heroines, Lillian Wald, founded the Outdoor Recreation League. They confronted the reality of thousands and thousands of immigrant families, low-income families, that had no opportunity for recreation, that had no space, and were struggling. And they pushed and pushed until the city finally built a playground here.”

Silver grew up in Brooklyn and attended Pratt and Hunter, where he received his master’s degree in urban planning. Since 2005, he has been the chief planning and development officer for the city of Raleigh, N.C.

“He has a passion for fairness and equality,” de Blasio said, “and understands that we have to ensure that parks and open spaces are available in every community, and are well-maintained in every community in this city.”

Silver, in his remarks, said, “Planning and parks is about place, but it’s also about people, and we have to work together to ensure we fulfill that vision for the entire city.”

The two were asked what they thought of state Senator Daniel Squadron’s bill under which the city’s largest park conservancies would give 20 percent of their budgets to help less well-funded parks.

“I think it is an important and promising idea,” de Blasio said. “How you engineer something like that — it has to be worked on with the stakeholders involved. But I don’t like the status quo. There’s a lot of parks in our city in less-advantaged neighborhoods that aren’t doing well.”

Added Silver, “Well, the first step you want to find out is that you have legal authority to actually make a proposal like that happen. I’m going to start with a conversation, bring the conservancies to the table. Places across the country are trying to find different models about how to fund parks, and so the status quo is not working, I agree with the mayor. But there are many examples we’re going to explore, sitting down with the conservancies.”

Talks with the conservancies will definitely happen, de Blasio said, though stressing, “No one has said that we’re closed on this matter.”

Meanwhile, the New York Post on March 22 reported that Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is “sitting on the park fence” on Squadron’s idea.

“My initial reaction is not to be very supportive of that,” she was quoted saying. “I understand the intent and what it aims at, but I think that that’s something we need to discuss further.”

Former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe also took issue with Squadron’s proposal.

“The objective data do not suggest that there’s some tremendous lack of equity [in parks] across the city,” Benepe told The New York Times. “If there’s a perceived lack of equity in how funding is spread around, that’s easy to fix. It can be done by the mayor talking to the Parks commissioner.”

In addition, some conservancy members and park activists are concerned that Squadron’s idea, if approved, could discourage contributions from donors who want control over where their money goes and would regard it as an unwelcome “tax.”

Yet, Squadron told The Villager he was very encouraged by the remarks of de Blasio and Silver regarding his idea.

As for Benepe’s statement, Squadron said, “It’s shocking that anyone claims equity in our park system isn’t a problem that needs fixing. Commissioner Benepe has made a number of shocking, fairly extreme comments as part of the conversation my proposal has started. What we’re talking about is folks who want to help — very highly funded conservancies that have a contract with the city. It’s absolutely appropriate for the city to say, as part of that agreement, that we have to help parks most in need.”

Asked for examples of local parks suffering due to funding inequities, Squadron mentioned Seward Park and Sara Roosevelt Park, citing cracked pavement, peeling paint on benches and “ponding” — where puddles form because of poor drainage.

Specifically, under Squadron’s bill, conservancies with budgets of more than $5 million would be required to give one-fifth of their funding to a “Neighborhood Parks Alliance” that would set up “grassroots conservancies” for specific, needy parks to accept it. These well-funded donor conservancies would include, among others, the Central Park Conservancy, Friends of the High Line, the Prospect Park Conservancy and the 34th St. Partnership, which runs Bryant Park.

The bill hasn’t been voted on yet in the state Senate or the Assembly, where it’s being sponsored by Brian Kavanagh. However, Squadron said he believes the initiative could also be approved administratively by New York City as a local law.

As for Mark-Viverito’s remarks, the state senator, putting a positive spin on things, offered, “I think she said that she’s open to discussion, and I look forward to that discussion.”

For her part, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, in a phone interview, said there is the concern, with Squadron’s bill, that “people might not give as much if they felt their money was going elsewhere. The real issue,” she added, “is that the Parks Department budget has been slashed dramatically and inappropriately.”

Indeed, Squadron, in his recent testimony before the Council’s Parks Committee on the city’s fiscal year 2015 preliminary budget, noted that Parks “receives a paltry .52 percent of the city’s $73.7 billion budget,” down from .86 percent in 1986. Up until the late 1950s, the figure was around 2 percent.

In addition, at the March 21 press conference, De Blasio was asked about a thorny issue at Union Square Park, where local politicians and community activists want him to cancel the Bloomberg administration’s deal with Chef Driven Market to operate a seasonal restaurant in the restored pavilion.

“I have to be straightforward, I don’t know all the details,” he said. “We are reviewing the situation and we’ll have more to say on that soon. … We have to create financial sustainability for our parks. And, again, sometimes there’ll be ways of working with private partners, but it has to be on the public’s terms.”

Although de Blasio said he doesn’t know all the details about the pavilion issue, when he was public advocate, he wrote to the State Liquor Authority asking it to deny a liquor license for the private concession. More recently, he’s been deluged with letters from elected officials and activists asking him to cancel the Chef Driven Market contract.

De Blasio also said his administration is moving forward on banning horse-drawn carriages in Central Park and replacing them with replica, old-fashioned, electric cars. The cars, de Blasio said, “are going to be a great solution, and can provide real employment opportunities, as a clean alternative, and a more humane alternative.”