The Asian long-horned beetle has struck again, this time infesting trees along Luther Gulick Playground near the Manhattan approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. The trees were chopped down, chipped and burned to kill the insect and its eggs, the only way to stop the spread of the insect, which has no natural predators in the United States.
The tree-killing beetle made its first attack in New York in 1996, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Parks Department believes that it stowed away in the wood of crates brought from China to the Greenpoint docks. Since then, nearly 3,000 trees in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan have had to be destroyed to stop its spread. Last year, the beetles were discovered in Ruppert Park in the Upper East Side, too close for comfort to Central Park.
"The beetles pose an enormous long-term danger to the city's forests and to trees all along the Northeast," Parks Commissioner Henry Stern was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "All of humanity is together in fighting this. This is biological warfare and we are on the side of the trees."
The Parks department has stepped up tree inspections in special zones around areas where the beetle has been found, and is asking people to report sightings of the insect or the characteristic pencil-sized holes it bores in upper tree trunks. In April, the department announced a $10 million federal, state, and city effort to battle the beetle, with funding for inspection and the destruction and replacement of infested trees with seedlings.
Adult beetles are about one and a quarter inches long, shiny black with white spots, and have long black-and-white striped antennae. They chew out depressions in the bark higher up in the trees to lay their eggs. The larvae bore into the tree to feed, coming back through the trunk when they reach maturity, leaving the telltale holes. Other incriminating evidence is a pile of sawdust at the base of a tree or at the intersection of a branch and the trunk. See the Asian long-horned beetle alert. To report any sign of the beetle, call the Parks department at 1-800-201-PARK.
Anne Sounds Off:
A recent article in the Albany Times-Union documented the depressing result of funding cutbacks for park maintenance in a number of upstate cities. Albany, for example, has slightly more than half the park workers it had two decades ago, with predictable deterioration of parks, particularly small ones. When budgets are tight, Schenectady's Mayor said, "the parks are the first to get whacked."
Sound familiar? New York City just approved another budget that continues an inadequate level of spending on park maintenance. Though this year's funding is $3 million higher than last year, the extra money goes to salary increases for existing staff and 31 new seasonal workers, not to increasing much-needed skilled maintenance staff, like gardeners, tree pruners, and plumbers. In fact, the budget includes a hiring freeze that aims to cut 100 fulltime park workers through attrition. The Parks department has been supplementing its maintenance staff with welfare workers, and private fundraising and volunteers are helping to maintain some parks. But many parks, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, are in terrible shape. Less than one-half of one percent of the City budget goes to the Parks department operating budget. It's time for our elected officials to stop thinking of parks as frills and realize that investing in open space and recreation pays off„in higher real estate values, crime reduction, improved air quality, and the kind of city where people and businesses want to locate.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
Final Stages of Brooklyn Bridge Park The final master plan for the Brooklyn Bridge Park will be presented in mid-June. Earlier in the spring, after a six-month process that included numerous public workshops, the park planners presented the draft design for the 1.3-mile-long waterfront park. The reaction was reported to be positive from the Port Authority, which owns the piers where much of the park would be built. Some Brooklyn Heights residents remain concerned about an increase in pedestrian traffic on Joralemon Street, a residential street that would be the only access route to the park from Brooklyn Heights; park planners have met with the residents, but the issue has not been fully resolved. Meanwhile, park advocates have been working to build support for the park as well as to get more people down to the waterfront even before it is built.
Litterers Beware! The Parks Department launched an anti-littering campaign in May, hoping to change our wayward ways with trash. New Yorkers are champion litterers, as anyone who has visited the parks on a summer Monday morning knows. The Parks department says it picks up nearly 1,300 cubic yards of litter every day, a fact that it will dramatize with cubic-yard-sized plexiglas boxes (a new form of art installation?) The campaign is stressing public education, including children's anti-littering contests and clean-up projects. The department is posting signs in five languages warning of $100 fines for littering. Large groups that are required to hold permits will have their permits revoked if they leave a mess, as well as forfeit their clean-up bonds. It is not clear, however, whether there will be additional enforcement. On Staten Island, Borough President Guy Molinari launched his own anti-litter initiative two weeks earlier, but with more teeth: the assignment of ten specially designed sanitation cruisers as well as ticketing by the police.
Parade Grounds' New Duds The construction of a new football field will kick off the restoration of the dismal playing fields in Brooklyn's Parade Grounds. Renovation plans also include new soccer, softball, baseball, and multi-purpose fields, basketball courts, a concession stand and a new playground. Drainage problems will be addressed and several fields will be covered with a new low-maintenance artificial turf. It is a happy ending to a controversy that erupted when the City decided to build a temporary minor-league stadium in the park. Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden blocked the plan, refusing a compromise in which the City would have paid for fixing up the entire Parade Grounds. Now Golden has come through with $10 million that will make the complete restoration possible.
Anne Sounds Off:
Anyone who cares about parks and open space and outdoor recreation should be drumming up support for a landmark piece of legislation now working its way through Congress. In May the House voted to dedicate, for the first time, nearly $3 billion a year in offshore oil revenue to a variety of park, wildlife and recreational needs, including the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The receipts would go into a trust and could not be diverted elsewhere. The measure, called the Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA), passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, despite opposition from the House Republican leadership.
Beginning in 1964, when the LWCF was established, royalties from offshore oil and gas leases were supposed to go to federal land acquisition and matching grants to states for local parks and recreation. A fund called the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program (UPARR) was later set up to give matching grants for recreation projects in the inner cities. But in reality, oil receipts have been included in the general federal revenue that gets divvied up during the annual appropriations process, and actual funding for parks and recreation has never been close to what was authorized. Even so, many significant open space acquisitions and recreational projects in the New York were made possible by LWCF money -- a listing is available on the web site of Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation.
Looking at LWCF-funded projects in the five boroughs over the past thirty-five years, there is a noticeable pattern: many projects funded in the late 60s through the 70s, fewer in the 80s, virtually nothing in the 90s. For four years in the late 90s, Congress appropriated zero dollars state in matching grants.
If CARA becomes law, federal spending for conservation could not be held hostage to politics during the budget process. Every year the LWCF would automatically get $900 million, with half going to the states. Of this, $102 million would go to New York State, including $28 million for land acquisition. UPARR would receive $125 million annually.
CARA has broad public support, but could face opposition in the Senate, particularly from a small but vocal group of property-rights advocates. The bill is scheduled to be marked up in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in mid-June. With only about 40 working days left in this session of Congress, early consideration by the full Senate is important if the legislation is to be finalized this year.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
At an Earth Day event on the steps of City Hall last week, Council members Ken Fisher and Adolfo Carrion announced new legislation to protect community gardens. City Council members and dozens of community gardeners gathered at City Hall (after being disarmed of the wooden "stems" of their fake flowers) to laud the legislation, which would create for the first time a City policy governing community gardens.
The legislation establishes a moratorium on developing community garden lots, which is legally necessary before the other provisions of the new law can be enforced. It designates the community gardens as an existing use of City property rather than as "vacant lots," and no longer allows the City to develop community gardens without a thorough review process, including an EIS, and public input. It also provides the opportunity to preserve existing gardens through a transfer to the Parks Department or a land trust. "This is very reasonable legislation," said Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition. "It is not asking for all the gardens to be saved. It is asking for a rational planning process to be put into place to take into account more than one need."
The gardens were built on vacant lots leased from the City with the understanding that it could reclaim them at any time. Over the last twenty years, they have become part of fabric of their communities, and sometimes the catalyst for the revival of neighborhoods. In 1998, the City transferred the gardens from the Parks Department to the Department of Housing and Preservation, and canceled their leases. Last year, as more than 100 gardens were about to be auctioned off by the City, the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project stepped in to purchase them. Now more garden lots are slated for housing, and several have already been razed. The gardens have become a victim of their own success, improving their neighborhoods to the point that developers find them attractive.
For the time being, a moratorium on developing community gardens is in place, the result of a lawsuit filed by New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. There is also community garden preservation legislation before the State Senate, but none in the Assembly. State legislators are not expected to act until the City Council does.
Anne Sounds Off:
The economy is good and tax revenues are up, but the Mayor's proposed budget for FY2001 further pares down operating funds for the Department of Parks and Recreation. The executive budget reduces the Parks operating budget by $10.7 million from what is projected to be spent this fiscal year. It eliminates 102 seasonal playground and maintenance workers, projects a reduction of 97 full-time staff members through attrition (replacing half with part-time workers), and cuts other maintenance expenditures. Though a number of other departments have funding increases, once again Parks gets just crumbs from the budget pie, about four-tenths of a percent.
During the fiscal crisis in 1992, the City greatly reduced its workforce in many areas, including Parks. Staffing for other departments, like Police, Fire, and Sanitation, has since been restored, but the number of Parks employees has actually declined. At a time when the City has added almost 2,000 acres to the Parks system, it provides less money for maintaining the green and recreational space it manages, which amounts to 13% of the City's acreage.
Parks Commissioner Henry Stern has kept the parks functioning by using thousands of welfare workers and paying for repairs (often made necessary by the lack of routine maintenance) through the creative use of the capital budget, which is borrowed money. The department has focused on keeping up the smaller and more heavily used parks; the larger parks are in worse shape, except Central and Prospect Park and a few others where private funds and capital spending have picked up the slack. You have to wonder what will happen to our parks during the next fiscal crisis.
Although the welfare workers clean the parks of litter and graffiti, there are not enough skilled Parks employees to keep up with tasks like tree pruning, gardening, and electrical and plumbing repair. In December 1999, the Parks Council surveyed hundreds of park volunteers and community groups about the services and features most in need of attention. Among the items that were ranked highest were gardening and tree pruning.
While the mayor has tackled a number of "quality-of-life" issues during his tenure, he has given low priority to maintaining the open spaces that make the City a better place to live and visit. It is interesting that the Mayor is proposing to increase maintenance staff next year for just two parks„and one is the newly restored City Hall Park. As Mark Caserta, Director of Public Policy at the Parks Council, said, "The Mayor realizes he needs maintenance workers for 'his' park. His park is built with $20 million of borrowed money, and he realizes that he needs to take care of it. That's what the rest of the City needs, too."
The City Council should at very least restore the 102 seasonal workers--positions the Council originally created, two for each district. Beyond that, let's look toward increasing the Parks operating budget to truly meet maintenance needs, and begin to dismantle the capital spending house of cards.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.Â