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Environment

Mayoral Issue Grid: Environment



Mayoral Issue Grid

ENVIRONMENT
-Mayor's Waste Plan?
-Bronx Water Filtration

Garbage is a critical issue for New York City. Since the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, the city has paid high prices to ship its waste out of state. And 80 percent of the waste is currently handled by waste transfer stations in four, low-income neighborhoods

In October 2004, the Bloomberg administration issued a new solid waste plan, which would move most of the 50,000 tons of trash the city produces each day by rail or barge, instead of by truck. To do this, the city proposes reopening four marine transfer stations, piers where trucks can dump trash onto barges, to handle the city's residential waste. Critics say the plan does not address many issues like commercial waste or recycling. And it does not solve the problem of where the garbage ends up and how much the city must pay other states to dispose of it.

Safe, clean drinking water is also a critical issue for New York City and a state court ruled that the city must filter water that comes from the Croton Reservior. A water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was first proposed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the late 1990's and generated heated political debate. Some environmentalists argued that the water does not need to be filtered; parks advocates said it should not be built in limited green space; and residents of the north Bronx fear years of construction, noise, and dust. The plan was abandoned in 2001 because it lacked support of elected officials.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg revived the plan by offering two concessions. The city committed $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx and the city's Department of Environmental Protection agreed to do an environmental impact study.

Fernando Ferrer

At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.

Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg proposed the solid waste management plan that uses marine transfer stations rather than trucks.

Bloomberg was responsible for reviving the filtration plant project in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. He won the support of many local officials by offering $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx.

 

Mayoral Issue Grid: Parks



Mayoral Issue Grid

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation oversees more than 27,000 acres of parks, playgrounds, beaches and other recreational areas, giving New York the largest city park system in the country.

But the figures can be misleading. While the number includes masterpieces such as Central Park and Prospect Park, it also includes areas so decrepit that Park Commissioner Adrian Benepe said they should essentially be abandoned. Even counting those wastelands, New York City has fewer acres of green space per person than any other major American city.

THE ONE PERCENT PLEDGE

Advocates blame many of the parks' problems on a lack of resources. In response, many want the city to devote one percent of its budget - or about $500 million - to park expenses, almost twice what it spends now. They have asked candidates to pledge that they will work toward this goal.

EARMARK FEES

The parks department licenses about 600 businesses that pay to operate concessions, such as skating rinks, golf courses and restaurants, on park property. In 2003, this generated about $60 million. But instead of being spent on parks, the money goes into the city's general budget. Many parks advocates would like to change this and see the money go for parks – assuming, of course, that the city would not reduce its appropriation to the parks department as a result.

VAN CORTLANDT FILTRATION PLANT

Faced with a federal court order that the city filter some of its drinking water, Mayor Michael Bloomberg authorized construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. To offset the loss of parkland - and to mollify Bronx residents angered by the decision - Bloomberg will spend an extra $240 million on Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks. This has not satisfied many parks advocates, who argue that using parkland for anything other than its intended use sets a dangerous precedent.

GREAT LAWN PROTESTS

For years, the Great Lawn in Central Park was the scene of massive rallies, large concerts and other huge gatherings. But in 1997, the city spent $18.2 million to restore the 13-acre Great Lawn and now the city says it is too delicate to support the trampling of hundreds of thousands of feet. The Bloomberg administration has limited large gatherings on the lawn to six events per year, at no more than 50,000 people at one time. And four of those would be for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, sharply curtailing the opportunities for political expression.

The administration argues that that's not the point – protecting the lawn is. But civil liberties advocates note the issue arose when demonstrators wanted to use the Great Lawn for a massive protest against the Republican convention last summer. The Bloomberg administration denied the request, citing the need to protect the lawn.

CAR-FREE PARKS

<p,>Parks advocates would like the roadways of Central Park and Prospect Park to be closed to automobile traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Ferrer

While he says he would like to take the one percent pledge, Ferrer says he cannot do so, given the budget deficits the city faces in the next several years.

The former Bronx borough president said that using the money from concessions for parks is one of three things that any mayor serious about parks would have to do. (The other two are providing minimum staffing levels at all parks and offering a completely transparent and ongoing review of parks operations.)

Ferrer said he would use some of the money from the fees to hire staff to supervise play after school and "make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks."

At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.

At the parks forum, Ferrer said he supported steps that would have avoided the need for the plant. He expressed concern about parkland being used for other purposes, such as parking cars and storage. "That's got to come to an end," he said. "Parks are for people."

While saying he treasured the Great Lawn, Ferrer opposes the policy limiting gatherings on it. "Blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not," he has said.

Ferrer said the United for Peace and Justice, which had sought a permit for the convention protest, had offered to put up a bond to protect the city from damage to the lawn.

The former Bronx borough president told the parks forum, "I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks...There are alternate means to getting around the city.

Bloomberg

During his four years in office, the mayor has kept funding for parks fairly constant at around $260 million - or, for this year, at only a bit more than one half of one percent of the city budget. The administration says it has tried to use partnerships with private groups and federal and state money to maintain and operate the parks.

Bloomberg says he advocated earmarking concession fees during the 2001 campaign, but that this plan was derailed by the city budget crisis. He says he has instituted a program that allows concession fees above a baseline amount to go to the parks department. This, he said has result in $14 million for the department since 2002.

Bloomberg's department of Environmental Protection chose the Van Cortlandt Park site as the preferred location for the filtration plant and Bloomberg negotiated the deal with Bronx politician to provide the additional funding for Bronx parks in return and so win their support for the project.

The Bloomberg administration has aggressively sought to limit use of the Great Lawn, with the mayor telling protestors they can go elsewhere to express their political views.

The administration has extended the hours that cars cannot use the parks but has not banned auto traffic completely.

 

Air Pollution


City and state politicians have done a lot to try to make New York's air healthier. But should they do more -- and can any local action make a real difference? 

The Mayoral Candidates On Parks



What would you do? Play Gotham Gazette's Parks Game

Four candidates for mayor discussed issues facing city parks, including staffing, maintenance and safety, at a forum on July 26 sponsored by Parks1, a campaign to have the city spend at least 1 percent of its budget on park maintenance. The discussion included Democratic candidates Fernando Ferrer, C. Virginia Fields and Gifford Miller and Conservative Party candidate Thomas Ognibene. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was invited, but did not attend. Representative Anthony Weiner could not attend because of a vote in Washington. Dave Evans of WABC TV, Erik Engquist from Crain's and Daily News columnist Errol Louis questioned the candidates. The following is an edited transcript.

MAJOR ISSUE?
PROTESTS ON THE GREAT LAWN
ABANDONED PARKS
1 PERCENT PLEDGE
PAYING FOR PARKS WITH CONDOS
FIRE THE COMMISSIONER?
CAR-FREE PARKS
SUPERVISED PLAY
LITTERING AND VANDALISM
OPEN AIR WI-FI
GIVING UP PARKLAND
AFTER THE OLYMPICS BID
COMMUNITY GARDENS
IF I WERE MAYOR...

THE MAJOR ISSUE FACING PARKS

Dave Evans: What do you see as the single greatest challenge facing our parks today?

Thomas Ognibene: As a City Councilman, one of the things I committed myself to was rehabilitating the parks in our community. I worked with the community leaders of the civic associations and the community board and I think the total we spent, my district alone, was about $25 million. On every park I found a civic association in the community that was wiling to police that park, go in there and clean it up and make sure in the morning that all the debris was removed. The people who drove in the community, one of the first things they saw when they came in was a real beautiful park.

Gifford Miller: The biggest challenge we face for our parks is in fighting the notion that parks are an amenity -- that parks are a luxury. Parks are something much, much more. Parks are important. Parks are a necessity. Parks are at the heart of what makes our city strong, our city safe, our city prosperous and our city livable.

We see this struggle right now with the parks department and with this administration. This administration looks at the parks and says, "It's not bad," and not bad is fine for something that isn't truly important. But if you look at parks as being every bit as much a part of the fabric of life in our city as education, as transportation and safety and security and in fact as inseparable from those things, because when you have strong parks you're going to have a stronger and safer and more prosperous city, you look at where we are today and recognize that it is not acceptable.

In too many communities in this city, particularly low-income communities, our parks are neglected or abandoned. There was a piece in the New York Times the other day in which the parks commissioner said that he thought it was OK to allow parks to be abandoned and to go "back to nature" as it were. This was a park that was overrun with drug use and prostitutes, which don't seem like "nature" in its basic form.

There is a problem of vision, a problem of commitment and I have a plan to change it. It starts by reclaiming the bottom 50 percent of our neighborhood parks. I have made a commitment to add $10 million to our operating budget and $25 million dollars to our capital budget to reclaim those parks.

We have to enforce park cleaning in every park. You know, they're supposed to clean every park everyday. They don't. We have to actually enforce that.

We should improve the under-funded facilities in every borough. We should ensure that the crime statistics are available, regarding every park, so parents can know whether the parks that they're sending their kids to are safe, and we should encourage more public and private investment in every borough and not just Manhattan. We have to change our vision of what's acceptable in our city for our parks and we have to raise our standards.

C. Virginia Fields: Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing our parks is that of funding because that funding has been systematically reduced and cut over year. Being able to bring the funding level up to the point where it is going to allow us to provide for safe, accessible and well maintained parks is going to require political will, commitment and a desire to do all that we can to ensure that our parks are safe, accessible and well maintained.

As borough president, I have heavily invested in the parks throughout Manhattan. I have invested in the parks because I know the value of parks. I see parks as perhaps the great equalizer -- equalizer in the sense that every community, every neighborhood should have safe, respectable and well maintained parks, because in this city we have people who cannot afford to leave and go away to summer homes. They too have a right to be able to go to a park and enjoy it. In order to do that, we have to invest in every neighborhood and in every community.

I know how to get things done with respect to making parks safe, accessible and well maintained, and as mayor, as far as our economic development overall initiatives, I see parks as a part of that

Fernando Ferrer: I believe the largest problem with our parks today is the unevenness of investment in parks and the maintenance of our parks across this city. That's the problem I saw as the borough president of the Bronx for nearly 15 years and a member of the council for about five.

The efforts to reclaim Orchard Beach, Joyce Kilmer Park, reinvest in Crotona Park, St. Mary's Park and everything in between with a multi-million dollar effort. The effort to acquire new parkland, the effort to get the New York Botanical Garden to create an unprecedented number of community gardens throughout the borough. It was also important to create livable open spaces, but that requires that anyone serious about parks do three things: One, support Intro 327 that will re-circulate approximately $50 million of concession funding back into the maintenance of parks. Second, to have minimum staffing levels and maintenance levels for every park in every community district in every borough or city. And third, to have a completely transparent and ongoing review of our parks, so that everyone in every neighborhood can not only see the condition of their parks, but be part of the constituency for better parks in every community.

PROTESTS ON THE GREAT LAWN


Should it be a right to mass gather at the Great Lawn

Errol Louis: This question is about the free speech issues that were raised about the use of the Great Lawn in Central Park and in particular, the city policy that limits large events to six in the course of the summer, four of which are by the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera. Do you agree with the current limitation on the use of the Great Lawn or do you think it runs contrary to sentiments expressed by the Supreme Court when it said, in a case in the 1930s, "Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and … have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions"?

Gifford Miller: I'm with the Supreme Court on this one. This is clearly a wrong policy. We've introduced legislation in the City Council to repeal it. As important as the Dave Matthews Band is to a lot of people, I don't see how it's more important than the right of the people who wanted to protest the views that were being espoused in Madison Square Garden during the Republican convention. The grass is important as well and there could be I think reasonable accommodations made for bonding for damage that is done as associated with rallies and free speech at the Great Lawn, but to reserve it for just a couple of Philharmonic events and maybe one or two others is wrong and if I were mayor, I would revoke it.

Fernando Ferrer: Like any New Yorker, I treasure the Great Lawn in Central Park. But blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not. It seems to me that that's what bonds are put up for. In fact, the group that wanted to use the Great Lawn offered not only to do that but presented a sensible plan for their assembly and their demonstration that in fact would've been better for this city than the plan that the police commissioner and the mayor ended up approving. I agree also with the Supreme Court on this issue.

ABANDONED PARKS

Erik Engquist: The parks department admits that it no longer maintains a certain number of parks, because "investing in them would be throwing good money after bad." Do you reject that out of hand, or is there some logic to ignoring parks that the surrounding community does not seem to take care of?

Virginia Fields: I do reject that out of hand. It is absolutely irresponsible for the city to assume that it does not have the responsibility to keep parks well maintained and to provide the resources to make it happen, because this is public land and if the city does not invest, then no one will assume that responsibility. That is why I propose that, as a part of development plans for parks, we also factor in how [the park] will be maintained. Part of my commitment to parks is to invest in maintenance workers.

Thomas Ognibene: There's no such thing as a community that doesn't care about the parks that are in it. Just think what would happen if we adopted the same attitude toward policing or to our schools. If you work with the police, the Department of Environmental Protection and other agencies and you renew the park and you make that investment, the people of that community will cooperate with you to keep their park beautiful for their senior citizens, for the people and their children. That attitude by the city of New York is unfortunately reflective of the attitude of many people in that administration about many of the aspects of life in the city of New York, and it's totally wrong.

THE 1 PERCENT PLEDGE

Errol Louis: Mr. Miller and Mr. Ferrer, you know many of the people here favor setting aside 1 percent of the overall city budget for parks. I'm wondering, why haven't you done that in the past and if you might take a pledge to handle it differently?

Gifford Miller: I think that the 1 percent pledge, what it actually says, is to work toward 1 percent. I take that pledge. We should work toward 1 percent. But it is an enormous increase in our city's maintenance and operating budget, and I don't think we'll be able to get all the way there. I do think we need to work toward it.

If you look at my record as speaker of the City Council over the last four years, I have fought against the cuts that the mayor has proposed every single year to our parks, restoring millions and millions of dollars of cuts even during the toughest budget that the city ever saw. This mayor proposed drastic cuts, I stopped them. In this past year's budget, just for example, I restored more than $9 million in cuts that the mayor proposed and then actually added $2.4 million for additional parks personnel, for parks enforcement to make sure that we are doing more to make our city's parks safer.

Do I think we're going to get all the way to 1 percent? That would be an enormous increase, up to $500 million from around, a little less than $200 million. It would be great, but I don't think we're going to get there in four or eight years.

Fernando Ferrer: Bringing the budget up by more than $270 million is a promise that is difficult to make given the current budget and the budget deficits that we all predict.

There are things, however, that we can and must do to work toward that. I would like to see the parks budget in my lifetime go back to about half a billion dollars in pre-1990 budget terms, about 1 percent of the budget. I think we have to work toward that. A good first step is allowing parks to keep the $50 million of concession funds and to spread them across the parks that have been neglected the most.

And let me react to something that was said before. When it was pointed out that an official of this city said that "in some parks to improve those parks would be throwing good money after bad," that individual, as a spokesman for this city, should have been summarily fired. If that's the attitude, if that's the belief of this city, Mike Bloomberg should've acted on it quickly and made a real affirmative statement about fairness and equity in parks and excellence in every one of our parks, no matter where they are.

Dave Evan: Do you feel it's impossible to take this 1 percent pledge because of current and future budget issues?

Fernando Ferrer: I think knowing that this pledge in four years would bring us to nearly half a billion dollars, as much as I would like to do it, there's no way I can tell you forthrightly that I have the means to do that if I were mayor. And by the way, the proof of that is this mayor, who says he loves parks, hasn't even begun to do it and won't even commit himself to keeping $50 million of concession funds in our parks

PAYING FOR PARKS WITH CONDOS

Erik Engquist: Brooklyn Bridge Park addresses the oversight that, for many years, Brooklyn Heights and the surrounding communities did not have a real park. The government stepped in and said, "We'll build you a spectacular park. We'll allocate the money, but we will not allocate one penny to pay for the maintenance of this park. Therefore, we need to build commercial, revenue generating facilities in this park, which has turned out to be condominium towers." Is this a good model?

Thomas Ognibene: No I don't think extortion is ever a good model. To say that you're willing to commit to build a park, automatically when you utter those words, there is a commitment to maintain it. If you're trying to put pressure on people to build a development that has nothing to do with parks, and using that as leverage, then in a sense, you're breaching your pecuniary duty to the people. So, I would never allow it. The people deserve the park, and I think they should get the park.

Virginia Fields: Clearly that should not be a part of the decision in terms of building a park in any neighborhood. So, I certainly do not accept that.

One of the things that I would advocate to make sure that parks are part of the planning process is to establish a unit within the department of parks that works directly with the planning agencies so that, as projects are being built in neighborhoods, we are also planning for open space. Part of that planning is to identify how it would be maintained. And that would help us in moving forwards to make sure that we have adequate open space and parks in areas as we developed new communities.

FIRE THE COMMISSIONER?

Errol Louis: Mr. Ferrer said that he might have fired the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, for the statement he made about parks that are deteriorating. I was wondering if the other candidates agree.

Virginia Fields: No, not on the basis of what I heard about the statement, but there will certainly be an expectation that all the parks would be well maintained in this city and that budgets will be reflected so that we can do the necessary maintenance.

Gifford Miller: Occasionally, I've had my remarks taken out of context, and I wouldn't want to get fired on the basis of one comment I made to a paper. I certainly don't think that any parks commissioner in my administration would make such a comment under any context. But the commissioner is a well-meaning person who's worked hard on behalf of the city of New York, and I wouldn't fire him for one comment.

Thomas Ognibene: I would have had him clarify that type of an answer because it's the kind of insensitive remark that hurts a lot of people and a lot of communities. I don't know if it justifies firing him, but I certainly would have brought him to the office immediately and asked him what he meant by it and, if he had a good explanation, I'd make sure to get a hold of the press and explain what he meant by it.

Dave Evans: Mr. Ferrer, is there any way you would want to respond or clarify.

Fernando Ferrer: There is no way I would want to clarify what I said. If you are committing to equity and performance in all our parks, not just some of them, all of them, then you have to hold the highest-ranking members of your administration to those standards.

CAR-FREE PARKS

Erik Engquist: Some advocates say that cars should never be allowed in the parks. I hear from motorists that driving through parks is a way to enjoy them. Some also say it reduces crime if they can drive through parks. Would you be in favor of a flat prohibition on cars and vans in the parks?

Virginia Fields: What I have supported and continue to support is a balance between transportation and use of parks. And I think it can be done, as we look at what we've been able to do in Central Park. I would prefer looking to see how we can do that as opposed to outright prohibition.

Gifford Miller: We need to strike a balance, but I would come down further on the side of car-free parks. As somebody who drives around the city sometimes, it feels great when you get that shortcut through one of the parks and get there quicker than anticipated. But I would like to see us do serious traffic studies and I like to see us do experiments eliminating traffic completely from the parks because my gut is that we would be a better city if we really made our parks car-free places.

Thomas Ognibene: In my community, in the 30th council district, we don't even allow parking near the parks after nine o'clock at night. Parks are for people. There are children in parks, there are elderly in parks and they're doing things there without the expectation that they're going to get struck by a motor vehicle. So it doesn't make any sense to me, under any circumstances, to permit cars in parks. Most New Yorkers who drive cars, should be very well acquainted with taking a little more time when they're driving. It's a very little inconvenience to protect those who are our most vulnerable and use the park.

Fernando Ferrer: I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks.

Dave Evans: In Central Park, there all those cars during rush hour and I see numerous accidents involving cars hitting bicyclists. Where do you propose putting those cars?

Gifford Miller: I would put them everywhere else but in the parks. I'm not suggesting, of course the cross-town transverses in Central Park -- those should be retained for the cars. But in the part that's actually in Central Park, Prospect Park, and other parks, we should be trying to eliminate cars. And they're going to have to find other ways to get around. I don't know exactly what's going to happen in terms of traffic studies, but my guess is that New Yorkers will find another way and that life will go on and our parks will be safer and people will be able to better enjoy our parks.

Fernando Ferrer: There's really one choice that becomes evident in this entire conversation. Who do you remove? Cyclists and runners and pedestrians, or vehicles? It seems to me that removing vehicles is the most sensible thing to do, and there are alternate means to getting around the city, as we all know. The sky won't fall if you say you can't use Park Drive.

SUPERVISED PLAY

Errol Louis: The highest rate of juvenile crime occurs between 3 and 6 p.m. and the shift for parks department staff ends at 2 p.m., which leaves parks as possibly the largest unsupervised after-school program in New York. As mayor, how would you ensure that kids play and learn in supervised parks?

Fernando Ferrer: One of the reasons I've talked a lot about after school programs is because of the Police Athletic League on Kelly Street, P.S. 52 playground, with a real human being in the park that was called a Parkie. [These] were the things that kept me off the tough streets. We've got to move back to utilizing our parks, especially in the warm months, as havens for kids in places like where I grew up, who really want that alternative, whose parents want that alternative. That's what I want to begin to use that $50 million concession investment for: a real human being that will be able to supervise play and make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks.

Thomas Ognibene: With all the stakes in this problem, it isn't necessarily just the parks department's problem. Obviously, the highest instance of juvenile crime in the city of New York is that period after school and before six o'clock. There has to be a police presence because there are many people that enjoy the park and it's unfair that their enjoyment be disrupted.

No matter what the statistics say, generally most of the kids that are in the parks are having a good time, playing sports, interacting, not disturbing anybody, but there will always be a few kids who feel that they have some God-given right to vandalize the park and disturb everybody's peace and enjoyment of it. We thought it was a general policing problem and our precincts always cooperated and I would look to have the precincts cooperate in that aspect of it too.

LITTERING AND VANDALISM

Erik Engquist: How do you get people to stop destroying and littering in our parks?

Gifford Miller: One of the important lessons that we've learned in this city is the broken window lesson. If you allow the window to be broken and you allow it to remain broken, someone is going to break the next window. But if you try to stop it and you replace that window quickly, then you don't have greater crimes down the road. The same thing is true with graffiti. If people put graffiti up, and you show up the next day and paint over it, eventually people will give up.

If somebody vandalized a park bench, of course that person is responsible for vandalism. But the parks department's job is to fix the broken bench. In the end, the problem is not just that bench, the problem is that way too many parks across this city get that kind of treatment, they deteriorate. After 10 years, the borough president's office comes in and puts a bunch of capital money into renovating the park. Then there's no maintenance, there's no commitment to keeping that park in nice condition. Then you come back in [after 10 years] and put the capital budget in to completely overhaul the park again. So at the end of the day, we're wasting a lot of money by spending a huge amount of money on the capital infrastructure of our parks instead of spending our money wisely on maintaining the parks.

If we treat our parks with respect and we put a quality park in play, the community will keep it that way. But if you allow a park to deteriorate and you treat it like it's not worth anything, the community will start to treat it that way. We have to respect all of our parks. We have to provide a decent quality park everywhere and then people will respect what's being done in our parks.

Virginia Fields: That goes to the heart of what we've been talking about all evening. When we invest, we're able to have staff in the park that is able to monitor the different areas. I have to believe that with the appropriate staff, seeing broken benches, cracked sidewalks and other repairs that must be done, we will take care of it. But we lack those resources, so as a result, we see much neglect. That's why I, too, support using the $50 million generated from concessions to reinvest in the upkeep of those parks and giving the mayor the flexibility to be able to use those dollars in areas of greatest need.

OPEN AIR WI-FI

Erik Engquist: Cities across the country are starting to provide free wireless service in parks and other gathering places. Should the city provide wireless Internet access so people can surf the Internet while sitting in our parks?

Thomas Ognibene: It sounds like a wonderful idea if we could do it, but there are a lot more problems in our parks that deserve the money. I don't know if we're ready yet to commit to putting wireless Internet in parks. I think the people go there, hopefully, to get away from wireless Internet.

Gifford Miller: Well I think that expanding access to wi-fi is a good idea. I certainly would be happy to look at whatever proposal there is, but I think the focus on our park system ought to be the parks and not as a means to expand the Internet.

Erik Engquist: I think the idea is, if you have more people in the parks, sitting on those benches, it's less likely that a vandal would come and destroy the bench.

Gifford Miller: Vandalism is not the biggest problems in parks. The biggest problem in parks maintenance is that people use the grass, and it gets beat up, and nobody fixes it, ever. The biggest problem in the parks is that after years and years and years, the water fountain breaks and there's like three plumbers in the entire City of New York. The biggest problem in parks is that the bathrooms are not open. The problem is not vandalism; the problem is the lack of adequate maintenance in our parks.

GIVING UP PARKLAND

Dave Evans: As you know, they're building a water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. The mayor promises that, in return, $200 million will go to the Bronx parks over the next decade. People are concerned that parkland can be bartered or traded in the future and that this sets a dangerous precedent. Do you agree?

Virginia Fields: There are some issues that all of us must be concerned about as we look to how we have lost park land and how park land has been used for purposes other than recreation and parks. I would advocate a much more public process before any parkland is taken over for use other than its intended use. This is public land and the public should have an opportunity to discuss it, to review it, and the relevant elected body should have an opportunity to vote upon it. That would alleviate the fear that many people have about the possibility of more parkland being taken.

Fernando Ferrer: I was for filtration avoidance. I thought that the city and the state should've taken aggressive steps for land acquisition and dealing with the Westchester town's raw sewage issue and sewage disposal issues. My position was not to be.

There are a lot of other egregious uses of our parks: city employee parking in Borough Hall Park in the Bronx, use of parks for non-park issues like storage and vehicles, storage of equipment. That's got to come to an end. Parks are for people. Parks are for families and their children. Parks are for the enjoyment of this city.

AFTER THE OLYMPICS BID

Errol Louis: Although New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics failed, it focused attention on the role of parks as sports facilities. Excluding the West Side, what specific parks and sports facilities would you continue to pursue as the mayor?

Gifford Miller: The Olympics bid was a great and important thing for our city. It's a shame that the mayor crippled the bid by tying it all to the West Side Stadium.

There's a variety of overhauls of public facilities in our parks that would've been a positive aspect of getting the Olympics. We have to continue to try to find the funding to do those.

In the end, the Olympics never were going to be the silver bullet to create a brand new future for our city. The Olympics were going to come and were going to leave. It was never a real economic development plan. It was never a substitute for a real plan for our parks. We now have to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out how we are going to afford to do what's necessary with our park's facilities without the Olympics.

Fernando Ferrer: Apparently this mayor confused the Olympics with a real economic development plan and physical development plan for the city. He similarly confused park creation with landscaping for multi-million dollar condos.

We know the parks that need, desperately need, infrastructure renewal that only the city, the state, and the federal government can come together to accomplish.

COMMUNITY GARDENS

Erik Engquist: Community gardens were placed in dilapidated, forgotten empty lots. Then, when property values went up, developers came back and said, "OK, your job is done here, now I'm going to build". Is that fair?

Thomas Ognibene: I like community gardens. I think you can have a balance with community gardens, but you can't give up valuable real estate. There is a place for some community gardens but obviously there comes a time when we have to develop a certain amount of housing.

Gifford Miller: Community gardens play an incredibly important role in communities. Community gardens can provide for better housing, stronger housing, stronger communities and we have to have a realistic plan that says, OK, these are the gardens that we're going to keep and we've made that commitment, but we also have to have enough support for insurance and all that for the long run.

Virginia Fields: I'm a strong supporter of community gardens, and I'm very pleased at how many of them have served to beautify areas and to create open space in areas which otherwise would just simply be concrete. I believe that the city should pay the premiums for the insurance for community gardens.


New York City's first community garden was founded in 1973.

Fernando Ferrer: You're looking at the guy who created the most of them in one place in this city with the help of the New York botanical garden and substantial capital funding from my office [as Bronx borough president]. Most still exist, and they are extraordinary places. We brought communities out to participate in them, to play in them, to enjoy them and to knit them into the fabric of their neighborhood.

IF YOU WERE MAYOR...

Dave Evans: Now, for the closing question. In the first 100 days of your term as mayor, what specific steps would you take to further parks in general

Fernando Ferrer: Let me go back to the three specific points that I made in my opening statement. First, ensure that every dime from concession funds we make in our parks gets re-circulated into park maintenance and good repair. Second, minimum staffing and maintenance standards for every one of our parks. They have to be clean and in good repair. Third, a completely clear, transparent and publicly accessible way for the people in every community to judge the effectiveness of this city's administration with respect to the good repair and maintenance and safety of their parks. That means crime statistics, that means repair statistics and that also means pictures of their parks.

For too many years, too many families have had to deal with dust bowls in the middle of what should be parks. It would be lovely to have wi-fi access. That means to be able to sit down on a bench. The benches and the slabs would have been replaced and painted from time to time. Working water fountains, working comfort stations, pavement that isn't cracked and destroyed beyond repair, swings, tennis courts, basketball courts, those are the things that people want in their parks and those are the things that this city has to provide. It doesn't take much more than a commitment to understand that parks really are an integral part of living in this city.

Virginia Fields: First, it is absolutely essential for us to be able to do the things that we have talked about -- make sure that our parks are safe, make sure they are accessible, make sure that they are well maintained. In order to do that, we need the adequate resources. So funding would be a priority. I would make sure that dollars are there in order to ensure that we increase our money for expenses, as well as capital.

I am proud to have signed the 1 percent pledge. Why did I sign that? I think it establishes something to work toward -- a goal, a commitment and with that in mind, I would work immediately on the funding.

Secondly, I would work on promoting the parks. I think that the parks should be very much involved with overall planning and toward that end, I would establish a special unit, directing our parks to work directly with our planning agencies -- the City Planning Commission, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Economic Development -- so that as decisions are made for development, Parks is at the table That will allow us to better address a lot of the issues that we have talked about here today.

Again, parks should be the great equalizer in every community and every neighborhood, so no matter what your social or economic level is, you too can enjoy our parks.

Gifford Miller: I've laid out a very specific plan for what I would do with parks. First of all, we need to reclaim the bottom 50 percent of our neighborhood parks and in my first 100 days, I would make a commitment to expanding the maintenance budget by $10 million and $25 million dollars capital commitment to reclaim those parks which are falling apart.

Second, I would enforce that current rule to clean the parks every day.

Third, I would make sure that we make parks safer by enacting Parkstat legislation, which would, like Compstat with the police department, make available statistics about how many crimes are occurring in every park in the city, so that we make sure we are putting our resources to the parks that are having spikes in violent incidents and crimes. The only park that they do that right now in is Central Park.

I would expand public/private partnerships beyond just Manhattan and into the outer boroughs.

I think that you can have some insurance that I would do those important things, not just because I say that I'm going to do them, but if you look at my record as speaker of the City Council, I've already provided leadership in all of those areas.

Thomas Ognibene: I enjoyed going to the parks for recreation and just to relax. And when I did become councilman, I went around to all the various community organizations. I didn't listen to what the parks department told me as a councilman, because it wasn't what the people wanted.

The most important thing you can do is to meet with the people -- those people who are near the park, those people who have organized to protect the parks -- and find out what they want, what they think is necessary so that the park can come to be a real amenity, a real service to the people that live in that community. If you sit down with them, and give them the opportunity to interact with your parks commissioner, and let them plan and then you go out and fund it, and build it according to their desires and their hopes and their wishes, then you're really performing service to the community. I did that in my park in the 30th council district and there's no reason that it can't be done on a scale as big as the City of New York.

Parks bring us close to our community, make us comfortable in our community and give us the quality of life that we deserve.

 

Mayoral Issue Grid: Parks



Mayoral Issue Grid

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation oversees more than 27,000 acres of parks, playgrounds, beaches and other recreational areas, giving New York the largest city park system in the country.

But the figures can be misleading. While the number includes masterpieces such as Central Park and Prospect Park, it also includes areas so decrepit that Park Commissioner Adrian Benepe said they should essentially be abandoned. Even counting those wastelands, New York City has fewer acres of green space per person than any other major American city.

THE ONE PERCENT PLEDGE

Advocates blame many of the parks' problems on a lack of resources. In response, many want the city to devote one percent of its budget - or about $500 million - to park expenses, almost twice what it spends now. They have asked candidates to pledge that they will work toward this goal.

EARMARK FEES

The parks department licenses about 600 businesses that pay to operate concessions, such as skating rinks, golf courses and restaurants, on park property. In 2003, this generated about $60 million. But instead of being spent on parks, the money goes into the city's general budget. Many parks advocates would like to change this and see the money go for parks – assuming, of course, that the city would not reduce its appropriation to the parks department as a result.

VAN CORTLANDT FILTRATION PLANT

Faced with a federal court order that the city filter some of its drinking water, Mayor Michael Bloomberg authorized construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. To offset the loss of parkland - and to mollify Bronx residents angered by the decision - Bloomberg will spend an extra $240 million on Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks. This has not satisfied many parks advocates, who argue that using parkland for anything other than its intended use sets a dangerous precedent.

GREAT LAWN PROTESTS

For years, the Great Lawn in Central Park was the scene of massive rallies, large concerts and other huge gatherings. But in 1997, the city spent $18.2 million to restore the 13-acre Great Lawn and now the city says it is too delicate to support the trampling of hundreds of thousands of feet. The Bloomberg administration has limited large gatherings on the lawn to six events per year, at no more than 50,000 people at one time. And four of those would be for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, sharply curtailing the opportunities for political expression.

The administration argues that that's not the point – protecting the lawn is. But civil liberties advocates note the issue arose when demonstrators wanted to use the Great Lawn for a massive protest against the Republican convention last summer. The Bloomberg administration denied the request, citing the need to protect the lawn.

CAR-FREE PARKS

<p,>Parks advocates would like the roadways of Central Park and Prospect Park to be closed to automobile traffic 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Ferrer

While he says he would like to take the one percent pledge, Ferrer says he cannot do so, given the budget deficits the city faces in the next several years.

The former Bronx borough president said that using the money from concessions for parks is one of three things that any mayor serious about parks would have to do. (The other two are providing minimum staffing levels at all parks and offering a completely transparent and ongoing review of parks operations.)

Ferrer said he would use some of the money from the fees to hire staff to supervise play after school and "make parks a welcoming place again. Not in some of our parks, all of our parks."

At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.

At the parks forum, Ferrer said he supported steps that would have avoided the need for the plant. He expressed concern about parkland being used for other purposes, such as parking cars and storage. "That's got to come to an end," he said. "Parks are for people."

While saying he treasured the Great Lawn, Ferrer opposes the policy limiting gatherings on it. "Blades of grass are replaceable. The first amendment is not," he has said.

Ferrer said the United for Peace and Justice, which had sought a permit for the convention protest, had offered to put up a bond to protect the city from damage to the lawn.

The former Bronx borough president told the parks forum, "I lean very heavily in favor of car-free parks...There are alternate means to getting around the city.

Fields

The Manhattan borough president says that providing funding to ensure safe, accessible and well-maintained parks would be a top priority for her. As part of that, she says she has signed the one percent pledge because "it establishes something to work toward."

As borough president, Fields says, she allocated significant parts of her capital budgets for the rehabilitation, planning and construction of parks.

Fields says she sees parks not as a luxury but as essential "equalizers" in a city where many people cannot afford to leave town on weekends. As a result, she says, she supports using money from concessions for parks. "Until recognition of the importance of parks is embodied in policy, it is important that they have the benefit of their efforts toward self support," she said in a response to a League of Conservation Voters questionnaire. She says she would use the money partly "to reinvest in the upkeep of the parks."

The Manhattan borough president opposed putting the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in 1999 and, at a Bronx forum this year, said she is still opposed – but, she says, the facility is probably a done deal. "In all fairness and candor," Fields told the audience, "unless you have a different way of approaching [the plant], I don't think as mayor I could stop it, as it has been started."

At the parks meeting, she called for more public discussion anytime parkland is to be used for something else. "This is public land and the public should have an opportunity to discuss it, to review it, and the relevant elected body should have an opportunity to vote upon it," she said.

At a hearing in May, Fields spoke out strongly against the administration plan to limit large gatherings in Central Park. "This proposal is an erosion of a free society," she said. "Has our city gone so far as to say: 'Grass -- Yes. Free Speech -- No.'?"

The Manhattan borough president has said she would continue to try to balance transportation and the use of parks. She said this has been successful in Central Park and that she would prefer that to an outright ban on cars.

Miller

The City Council speaker says having $500 million to spend on parks "would be great" but he says he does not think the city will be able to afford to this in four or even eight years.

"We can't afford 1 percent because that's more than doubling our Parks Department's budget," Miller said in a recent debate.

Miller says that, as council speaker, he has fought for more funding for parks and worked to restore programs the mayor wanted to cut.

While he support exploring "such innovative options" as earmarking concession fees, Miller has said that dedicating the funds could require state authorization or an amendment to the City Charter.

While he says that perhaps more could have been done to protect the upstate watershed and so avoid the need for the filtration plant, Miller said at a meeting in the Bronx in May that he had voted to use the park for the plant.

The speaker said City Council has introduced legislation to try to overturn the policy limiting gatherings on the Great Lawn and said that he would revoke the policy if elected mayor. While saying the grass is important, he said groups holding protests could post bond to insure the city would be reimbursed for any damage to the lawn.

"As important as the Dave Matthews Band [which appeared in a city sponsored concert on the lawn} is to a lot of people," Miller told the parks forum, "I don't see how it's more important than the right of the people who wanted to protest the views that were being espoused in Madison Square Garden during the Republic convention."

Miller says he would be more inclined to not allow cars in parks than to allow them. He has called for more studies of traffic patterns and says he expects that those studies would indicate that closing the parks to auto traffic would not have the dire effects on traffic that some anticipate, although he would keep roadways like the Central Parks transverse open to cars. "My guess is that New Yorkers will find another way and that life will go on and our parks will be safer and people will be able to better enjoy our parks," he said.

Weiner

According to the Parks1 campaign, Weiner has said he would work toward committing one percent of the budget to parks expenses. "While the country's 50 largest cities dedicate $88 per resident toward their parks, New York City provides only $45," Weiner said in response to a questionnaire from the League of Conservation Voters. "Park funding has declined for decades, and the parks and greenery of the city have suffered because of it.

To address this, Weiner has said he would focus on reducing waste and inefficiencies to increase parks funding.

However, in a recent debate, Weiner would NOT commit to 1 percent of the budget for parks. "You don't draw line items in the budget here in the context of the campaign," he said.

In response to a questionnaire from the Parks1 campaign, Weiner said he would work toward earmarking fees from concessions. He did not directly answer the question when it was presented in a League of Conservation Voters survey.

As a member of Congress, Weiner says he secured more than $34 million in federal funding for the revitalization of Gateway National Recreation Area in the city.

At the Ben Franklin Democratic Reform Democratic Club's town hall forum in the Bronx in May, Weiner was the only Democratic challenger who unequivocally opposed the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. Decrying the mayor's top-down management style, Weiner said, "There's no better example of that than the ...water treatment plant in a park that has now led to the destruction of hundreds of trees and a horrible, horrible precedent."

Bloomberg

During his four years in office, the mayor has kept funding for parks fairly constant at around $260 million - or, for this year, at only a bit more than one half of one percent of the city budget. The administration says it has tried to use partnerships with private groups and federal and state money to maintain and operate the parks.

Bloomberg says he advocated earmarking concession fees during the 2001 campaign, but that this plan was derailed by the city budget crisis. He says he has instituted a program that allows concession fees above a baseline amount to go to the parks department. This, he said has result in $14 million for the department since 2002.

Bloomberg's department of Environmental Protection chose the Van Cortlandt Park site as the preferred location for the filtration plant and Bloomberg negotiated the deal with Bronx politician to provide the additional funding for Bronx parks in return and so win their support for the project.

The Bloomberg administration has aggressively sought to limit use of the Great Lawn, with the mayor telling protestors they can go elsewhere to express their political views.

The administration has extended the hours that cars cannot use the parks but has not banned auto traffic completely.

 

 

Campaign 2005: The Mayoral Candidates' Views On Air and Water Quality, Solid Waste, and Sustainability


From an environmental perspective, 2005 is shaping up to be a good year here in New York City. Nearly a half-dozen laws designed to curb vehicle emissions and improve local air quality have sailed through the New York City Council and earned the mayor's signature. A similar accord on energy-efficient "green buildings" is in the works. And despite a much publicized battle over waste reduction and marine transfer station siting, the city's solid waste management plan appears to be on its most solid footing in years.

It seems strange, then, that environmental issues have yet to find their way into the ongoing mayoral debate, apart from discussions of congestion-pricing and the proposed Brooklyn-to-New Jersey railroad tunnel. It doesn't help that the New York League of Conservation Voters, an organization that normally conducts an exhaustive endorsement process (and that endorsed Michael Bloomberg's opponent Mark Green in the 2001 campaign), has decided to issue no endorsement at all for the Democratic mayoral primary race, and instead come out early in support of Michael Bloomberg's re-election. ("Four years ago, Michael Bloomberg had a lot of interesting ideas but he had no track record," says Marcia Bystryn, the league's executive director. "We feel the mayor has taken a strong leadership role on a range of issues...")

Voters thus have been cheated out of a chance to review and compare some impressive resumes. More importantly, they've missed a frank discussion of priorities when it comes to city-level environmental policy. After all, in a city of 8 million people, only a few issues can command top billing and as the last few years have shown, such issues have a way of pitting one environmental concern against another -- clean drinking water vs. parkland preservation, just to cite one notable example.

With this in mind, a review of the top candidates' environmental agendas show four main areas where differences in opinion or variations in enthusiasm stand to shape mayoral priorities over the next four years.

WATER QUALITY

Since 1998, New York City has been obligated by a federal court order to filter at least 10 percent of the drinking water coming out of the Croton Valley watershed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to end more than a decade's worth of city footdragging and authorize the construction of a $1.3 billion filtration plant was one of the decisions that earned him the eventual endorsement of the New York League of Conservation Voters.

In pushing through a plan to site the plant within the boundaries of Van Cortlandt Park, however, the mayor has quite possibly earned the ever-lasting enmity of park advocates. The mayor has since balanced the loss of green space with $240 million in new funds for Van Cortlandt and other Bronx parks, but from the park advocates' perspective, the exploitation of city owned green space sets a dangerous precedent which other mayors will be tempted to exploit.

When the Ben Franklin Democratic Reform Democratic Club played host to a town hall forum in the Bronx in May, Democratic challengers were hard pressed to deliver an outright condemnation of the mayor's decision-making. Only Anthony Weiner, a Queens congressman with a solid record for channeling federal money to city parks, seemed unequivocal on the matter. Weiner blasted the "closed loop" nature of the negotiation process and the precedent-setting use of park land for industrial purposes. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, an opponent of the Van Cortlandt siting in the late 1990s said she remained opposed but doubted such opposition could have an effect if elected. " In all fairness and candor," Fields told the audience., "Unless you have a different way of approaching [the plant], I don't think as mayor I could stop it, as it has been started."

City Council Speaker Gifford Miller admitted that he had voted for the use of the park while adding that more could have been done to acquire watershed land upstate to head off development and protect water quality. Former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's comments were conspicuously absent in a summary of the forum filed by the RiverdaleReview.com, although the candidate is on the record opposing the Van Cortlandt filtration plant as far back as 1999.

”As far as I know, Mr. Weiner is the only candidate solidly opposed to the plant," says Marian Rose, president of the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition, a group which does not endorse candidates.

In their answers to the League of Conservation Voters questionnaire (which they have not posted on their Web site, and may never), every Democratic candidate said yes to the question of whether they would direct city agencies to establish a goal of shielding 50 percent of the land surrounding the city's other main water source, the Catskill/Delaware watershed land, by 2015. In his own answer to the question, the mayor did not offer a yes or no response but noted that, under his administration, the city increased its share of watershed control and would continue pursuing acquisitions via the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

"Because the city cannot force or require landowners to sell their land, and because the city is not permitted to purchase land for a price above fair market value, the administration has decided against setting a ten-year goal for watershed protection," the mayor's response reads.

In the case of local waterways, the mayor and the Democratic challengers have expressed a uniform commitment to the reduction of pollutants and nitrogen in the East River and Long Island Sound. In the questionnaire, however, most, including the mayor, felt that current programs, most notably the Department of Environmental Protection's EPA-mandated elimination of combined rainwater and sewage systems, would elicit the desired improvements over time. In terms of creative remedies, Ferrer proposed artificial wetlands, seaweed farms, and other "low cost, simple solutions" above and beyond the existing work by the city department.

SOLID WASTE

New York City's mammoth solid waste output is a case study in conflicting environmental agendas. In seeking to move the city away from its current truck-dependent waste export model back to a barge-based plan involving reactivated marine transfer stations, the mayor has chosen to stress two environmental benefits -- reduced diesel exhaust and fuel consumption -- above all others.

In City Council Speaker Gifford Miller's spring challenge to the mayor's sanitation plan, he spoke up for those long troubled by the lack of waste reduction incentives in the city's current waste management strategy. The new solid waste management plan, passed this summer, makes room for more ambitious recycling than in the past, but advocates say the program's goal of 25 percent of garbage being recycled is too low.

The mayor headed off an 11th hour challenge by Gifford and his council allies. Still, the Democratic candidates say that waste reduction and waste transport efficiency remain signature challenges for the city.

"There is no lack of ideas in the environmental community for materials recovery," argues Fields, who says the city can use its power as a large contract consumer to pressure manufacturers to reduce packaging and offer more support in the repair or reclamation of aging products. Together with Weiner, Fields is a hearty endorser of "pay as you throw" incentive programs which would give homeowners and building-owners who put less garbage on the curb a rebate on their property taxes.

"Conscientious New Yorkers should get a signal of support from the city, rather than having to pay for the waste of their neighbors," says Weiner.

Bottle Bill

Both Weiner and Fields have joined Ferrer as backers of the Better Bottle Bill, a recently-passed state bill which would expand bottle deposits to non-carbonated beverages and which would return unclaimed deposits to local governments to use in their own internal waste management and recycling programs. According to Laura Haight, an Albany lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a signature by Governor George Pataki or his successor could mean up to $100 million in annual proceeds for New York City alone.

"We need the next mayor to step up to the plate and fight in Albany with us to get our nickels back," says Haight, whose non-partisan group does not endorse any candidates.

The mayor, who has come out in favor of a straight five cent-per-bottle tax over an expansion of the existing deposit law, emphasizes private sector efficiency over government incentives. The reactivation of marine transfer stations authorized by the solid waste management plan will make it easier to ship recyclables in bulk to the coming Hugo Neu facility on Brooklyn's Sunset Park waterfront. This should free up the company to invest in technologies which speed sorting, improve recovery, and possibly encourage expansion into other portions of the city waste stream. For similar reasons, the Bloomberg administration has focused its transportation efforts on reviving the rail link between Visy Paper's Staten Island paper recycling facility and the Howland Hook Marine Terminal.

SUSTAINABILITY

In its 2005 Mayoral Scorecard grading the Bloomberg administration's first term performance, the New York League of Conservation Voters reserved its lowest score ("average") for the mayor's efforts in the realm of sustainability and sustainable development. Although Bloomberg established his Task Force on Sustainability to examine the city's own internal policies, concerns about clean water, clean air and Sanitation have taken precedence over the last four years.

Expect that to change. The city council is considering Intro 324, a bill which, if enacted, would require building projects greater than $2 million in scope to meet national energy efficiency and other "green" standards set out by the U.S. Green Building Council. Similar bills to encourage the use of heat-reducing "green roof" materials and to press the city to incorporate green building standards into its own buildings and facilities are also in the works. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg administration is backing the potential offering of water and energy rebates to private sector companies via a separate bill, Intro 478.

This is the one issue where City Council Speaker Miller stands out, as a sponsor or supporter of these green bills. "We need to support more innovative legislation," says Miller in response to the League of Conservation Voters questionnaire. "As mayor, I plan to focus on the same issues I have as speaker -- reducing the city's use of materials and emissions, encouraging green building practices by developers, and protecting quality of life by working for parks and expanding and improving mass transit."

Some candidates, however, would like to see even more creativity when it comes to giving residents and workers a stake in city resource conservation. According to Weiner, the city shouldn't just aim for monitoring the energy demand within its own departments -- already a Bloomberg administration aim -- it should give departments that demonstrate improving efficiency a cut of the cost savings. Meanwhile, Fields sees the everyday consumer as a true swing vote in the attempt to force industry-wide change. She holds up the city's large scale buying power as an effective stick but also sees incentives such as the low-flow toilet rebate as a model for how the city should reward consumers who install heat deflecting roofs or reduce their energy demand

"My preference is reward positive behavior rather than punish negative behavior," says Fields.

AIR QUALITY

Although the city earned a failing grade for air quality in four of its five boroughs in April, the resulting media coverage has facilitated the passage of recent laws seeking to increase the number of hybrid taxicabs and low sulfur diesel buses on city streets.

Where things go from here, however, is up in the air. Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city joined Attorney General Eliott Spitzer and other regional attorneys general in their successful effort to force out-of-state energy companies to clean up their coal-burning power plants, a major source of air pollution here in the northeast. Some of the Democratic mayoral candidates, however, think the city could be even more audacious in this strategy. Former Bronx Borough President Ferrer has suggesed emulating the attorney general's equally successful campaign against truck and bus idling and "create a city-wide zero idling rule on school buses with increased fines and eventual suspensions of any driver who continually puts our children's health at risk." Manhattan Borough President Fields, again, feels that incentives for "good corporate citizens" are the better route.

Congressman Weiner, meanwhile, is the one candidate who sees ferry service as the missing piece in the city's current air quality puzzle. "An expanded network of ferries would shorten commute times and develop a healthier means of transit," Weiner told the New York League of Conservation Voters.

Cross-Harbor Rail Link

Where the mayor and the Democrats most notably part ways, however, is on the proposed Cross-Harbor rail link, a $700 million project which would link New Jersey to Brooklyn, reducing the number of current trans-Hudson truck trips by 11 percent according to project supporters. Then again, the same project would dramatically increase the number of short haul truck trips ending in Maspeth, Queens, the link's easternmost terminus. Citing the increased air pollution burden on Queens residents, Mayor Bloomberg has opposed the plan. Every Democratic challenger, meanwhile, supports the cross harbor link.

 

 

 

 

Mayoral Issue Grid: Environment



Mayoral Issue Grid

ENVIRONMENT
-Mayor's Waste Plan?
-Bronx Water Filtration

Garbage is a critical issue for New York City. Since the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill in 2001, the city has paid high prices to ship its waste out of state. And 80 percent of the waste is currently handled by waste transfer stations in four, low-income neighborhoods

In October 2004, the Bloomberg administration issued a new solid waste plan, which would move most of the 50,000 tons of trash the city produces each day by rail or barge, instead of by truck. To do this, the city proposes reopening four marine transfer stations, piers where trucks can dump trash onto barges, to handle the city's residential waste. Critics say the plan does not address many issues like commercial waste or recycling. And it does not solve the problem of where the garbage ends up and how much the city must pay other states to dispose of it.

Safe, clean drinking water is also a critical issue for New York City and a state court ruled that the city must filter water that comes from the Croton Reservior. A water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was first proposed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the late 1990's and generated heated political debate. Some environmentalists argued that the water does not need to be filtered; parks advocates said it should not be built in limited green space; and residents of the north Bronx fear years of construction, noise, and dust. The plan was abandoned in 2001 because it lacked support of elected officials.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg revived the plan by offering two concessions. The city committed $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx and the city's Department of Environmental Protection agreed to do an environmental impact study.

Fernando Ferrer

At a 1999 hearing on the filtration plant, Ferrer, then the Bronx borough president said, "I'm here to personally convey that the Bronx is unanimous in its unequivocal opposition to the Croton water filtration plant." This, though, was before the Bronx was promised the money for parks - and Ferrer has not been on record as being so unequivocal this year.

C. Virginia Fields

C. Virginia Fields supports the solid waste management plan, but she wants to improve the waste reduction, reuse, and recycling aspects of the plan.

Fields says she opposes the water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, but at a recent forum, she said she would not stop it. "In all fairness and candor, unless you have a different way of approaching it, I don't think as mayor I could stop it as it has been started and I recognize everything that went into ultimately making that decision," she said.

A. Gifford Miller

Gifford Miller says he supports many of the principles in the solid waste management plan, but as head of the City Council is working to improve the plan to focus on increased recycling, waste reduction and long-term solutions to solid waste problems. He also opposed the creation of a marine transfer station on East 91st Street in his district.

Miller voted in favor of the filtration plant in the City Council, calling it the best option for bringing clean water to the whole city.

Anthony Weiner

Anthony Weiner supports the principles of the solid waste management plan, but says that he will make reducing waste the top priority.

In a questionnaire for the New York League of Conservation Voters, he wrote: “As mayor, I would develop incentives for New Yorkers to reduce the garbage they generate – providing a property tax deduction for businesses and households that demonstrate significant reductions. Conscientious New Yorkers should get a signal of support from the city, rather than having to pay for the waste of their neighbors.”

Weiner opposes the filtration plant in the Bronx and has criticized Mayor Bloomberg and Gifford Miller for approving it.

Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg proposed the solid waste management plan that uses marine transfer stations rather than trucks.

Bloomberg was responsible for reviving the filtration plant project in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. He won the support of many local officials by offering $240 million for building and improving parkland in the Bronx.

Real Estate Developers Should Help Pay for Parkland


Density, in many ways, is what makes New York City great. But New York is getting ever denser; between 1990 and 2000, it grew by 685,000 people -- the entire population of Austin, or twice the population of St. Louis.

Crowded indoor living needs to be balanced with open space. For every new apartment tower built, brownstone rehabbed or single-family home subdivided, we need a small parcel of compensating parkland for our outdoor well-being -- for recreation, health, social connections, views, appreciation of nature and trees, environmental improvement. Elsewhere, residents have yards; New Yorkers have parks. With more New Yorkers, there is a need for more parks.

In an ideal world, government would bear the full responsibility of providing and maintaining parks. But in today's real world of unfunded federal mandates and local-level anti-tax pressure, a patchwork quilt of public-private partnerships has grown up. If developers are making money building housing for new residents, it seems reasonable to ask them to provide some new parkland, too.

Many communities around the country require developers to donate land or pay in-lieu fees to help governments acquire parkland. Known as "developer exactions" or "developer impact fees," the concept is generally thought of as suburban – setting aside parcels for playing fields or stream-valley trails among the new tract houses. But it's also the law in Atlanta, Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles and in very densely populated Chicago, Miami and Long Beach, California.

Miami charges developers $157 for every 1,000 square feet of downtown residential construction and $104 for every 1,000 square feet of downtown commercial construction. The money must be spent in the general vicinity of the new building, it must be spent within six years, and it can only be spent for capital purposes (buying land or constructing a park facility), not ongoing maintenance.

Chicago's Open Space Impact Fee is similar, though somewhat steeper -- about $313 for a small apartment and up to $1,253 for a large one. Affordable (below-market) housing units are assessed a flat fee of $100. The city has seven years to spend the money or it must return it to the developer. In case of larger planned developments, the city prefers to receive not money but a comparable gift of land.

Long Beach, California, which charges up to $2,680 per dwelling unit, hopes to produce precisely 38.72 square feet of new parkland for every new resident – about the size of a double-bed.

Maybe it's time for New York to create a developer exaction program, too. New York has an informal system of bargaining with developers for street-level plazas in return for allowing more building height, but this is not an exaction program - and it doesn't do much for the outer boroughs where the population growth is taking place.

If New York had had an exaction law from 1990 to 2000, housing the 685,000 new residents could have yielded something like $360 million for park acquisition - perhaps more than 300 acres of relatively desirable land around the city. This is not a panacea, but it's not insignificant, either. That's one park the size of Riverside Park, or 35 of them the size of Bryant Park.

Do these programs really result in more parkland? To determine this, the Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, where I am the director, undertook a study of the experience of 12 cities. Results were mixed. In six of the communities for which records were kept, a total of 1,329 acres of new parkland was acquired through developer fees. However, this was only about 60 percent of what we calculated should have been acquired. Still, 60 percent is better than zero percent, where New York is right now.

Developer exactions can be controversial. Most developers feel that they are already doing enough, after all, by providing housing. They also argue that paying for parkland will raise the cost of apartments even higher than they already are. That may be true, but doing so might also help keep taxes a bit lower. (Also, with parkland,the apartments will be worth more.) And, ultimately, city living has to be more than a clenched-teeth trip through urban canyons between an apartment and a job. New York has already experienced parkless tenement life, back in the 19th century, and no one wants to return to that.

By every measurement, New York City has one of the most fabulous park systems in the nation. Much of it was created by our forebears beginning in 1859. While we continue to upgrade and steward this priceless legacy, it is important that we also leave more parkland to our children. Instituting a developer exaction program would be one way to do so.

Peter Harnik is the director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land.

 

Recreation for Youth In Short Supply


On a Friday afternoon in Prospect Park, a Little League team looking to practice finds that all the diamonds are full. In the South Bronx, a principal says her students go home after school and stay indoors because there’s no safe place to play outside. Parents wait on line for hours to sign up their children for private swim classes, if they can afford them, unless they live in one of the few neighborhoods with a public pool.

Ask parents about sports and recreation in New York City, and they are likely to say, "There’s not enough." Whether in minority neighborhoods that have disproportionately fewer parks and sports fields or in affluent areas with a growing demand for the kind of sports programs found in the suburbs, there are not enough facilities and programs to meet the needs of the city’s 1.5 million school age children.

Addressing these needs has become increasingly important as a growing body of research demonstrates that exercise and organized recreation can promote the healthy physical, social, and emotional development of children.

A 1996 report by the U.S. Surgeon General found multiple health benefits from engaging in regular physical activity, including weight loss and a reduced risk of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. A study by the Department of Education found that 43 percent of New York City students from kindergarten through fifth grade are either overweight or obese. Obesity rates were highest in central Brooklyn, East and Central Harlem, and the South Bronx, low-income areas with few parks and recreational facilities.

Sports and organized recreational activities can also have a positive impact on social and emotional development as well as educational achievement. Teens who participate in organized recreational activities are less likely to drink alcohol, take drugs, or get pregnant. In several cities, the availability of recreation for youths has been found to lower crime rates. In Fort Worth, Texas, for example, crime fell 28 percent within a one-mile radius of community centers offering midnight basketball, but rose an average of 39 percent around five other centers that did not have the program. Studies have also shown that students who participate in physical activity on a regular basis do better in school.

The Decline Of Recreation in New York City

Parks have traditionally played a major role in providing sports and other recreation to city dwellers, especially youth. Under the City Charter, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has the "power and duty" to build and operate recreational facilities and offer programs, as well as to review and coordinate recreational activities conducted by other city agencies and to make agreements with government or private organizations for that purpose.

Advocates say that the department has been hampered in this goal by inadequate funding and by the low priority that the city placed on recreation for many years.

For decades, New York City let its recreational infrastructure crumble, both in the parks and in the schools. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the city all but eliminated funding for school sports and lowered the priority of physical education and fitness in the schools. Until recently, most high school teams and coaches have had to fend for themselves on bumpy, litter-strewn fields, buying their own uniforms and equipment and scraping up cash for transportation.

New York City’s schools once produced a steady crop of athletes for the major leagues, but by the 1990s the city had the lowest percentage of students participating in team sports of all the nation’s big cities, according to a 1999 New York Times series, Dropping the Ball (in pdf format) .

During that time, funding to maintain the city’s parks, courts, and fields also declined, reaching a low after the fiscal problems of the early 1990s, when the city shuttered recreation centers and let baseball and soccer fields wear down to dirt and rocks. The city built almost no new recreational facilities between the 1970s and the 1990s. Data compiled by the Center for Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land show that New York City has fewer recreation centers, pools, and tennis courts per capita than nearly every large city in the country.

Although things have improved tremendously over the last decade, there are still fields and courts that are not in good condition, especially in the smaller parks in the outer boroughs. The 2005 Report Card on Parks, an annual survey of neighborhood parks conducted by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, graded 29 percent of athletic fields and 33 percent of courts unacceptable for maintenance work.

Sports on the Rebound

In recent years, the city has increased capital funding for building and restoring sports fields and other facilities. The private sector has also been pinch-hitting for the government, providing the energy, expertise, and funding to fill gaps in the city’s recreation network, particularly in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

The parks department has fixed up soccer, baseball, and football fields all over the city. On more than 40 fields, it has replaced grass (or what was left of it) with more durable artificial turf, and plans to convert 35 more. "As fast as we can build them," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, "they fill up, like building highways."

In April, the department inaugurated a $42 million track-and-field stadium on Randall’s Island, with half of the cost raised privately by the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, including a $10 million naming sponsorship by financier Carl Icahn.

More new recreation centers have been opened or are in the works since the late 1960s or early 1970s, said Commissioner Benepe, who ticked off a list including the reopening of the Chelsea center after three decades; the near completion of another center in Flushing, Queens; the new nature center in the Staten Island Greenbelt; and the construction of a senior center in Marine Park.

If the city succeeds in its bid to play host to the 2012 Olympics, dozens of new facilities will be built or renovated, although there is debate about whether, when the Olympics are over, there will be enough demand for, and the city will be willing to maintain, such specialized venues as a shooting center, a whitewater course, and an enclosed bike track.

To meet some of the most pressing recreational needs of the city’s youth, a number of nonprofit groups have stepped up to the plate:

  • Take the Field , founded in 2000 by three businessmen and philanthropists in response to the New York Times series about the decline of school sports, has rebuilt decrepit fields at 43 city high schools. The five-year effort, with $35 raised by Take the Field matched by $99 million from the Department of Education, is about to conclude after reaching the goal of fixing all the fields the group identified as in need of repair.
  • In neighborhoods with the greatest need for parkland, the New York City Spaces program of the Trust for Public Land is taking the asphalt yards of elementary and middle school yards (some formerly used as parking lots) and turning them into multiple use parks. The yards, which have space for active sports, quiet activities and greenery, are open to the community outside of school hours. The organization has built 12 parks so far and recently entered into a $25 million agreement with the Department of Education to build 25 more, providing a quarter of the funding and overseeing the design and construction.
  • New York Restoration Project, founded by Bette Midler to restore parks in disadvantaged neighborhoods, led the effort to transform a polluted site into a park at Swindler Cove on the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan. It also raised funds to build a floating boathouse anchored off the park, the first new community boathouse in the city in nearly 100 years. Rowing programs run by the group are introducing the Olympic sport to inner-city youths. The boathouse also provides a home for dozens of rowing teams from schools all over the city.

A Patchwork of Programs

The parks department has focused mainly on building and maintaining the infrastructure for sports, either directly or through concessions. Commissioner Benepe said, "The primary way we provide recreation is by creating facilities — clean, safe and well-run —that allow other groups to program them."

In the absence of a coordinated citywide recreation program, possibly hundreds of different organizations have developed programs to fill the gap, including volunteer sports leagues, neighborhood-based organizations, school and after-school programs, private non-profit groups, and profit-making recreational centers.

Per capita and as a percentage of its total budget, the New York City parks department spends less on programming (including sports, nature, art and other recreational activities) than most other major U.S. cities, according to data compiled by the Center for Park Excellence. According to the Independent Budget Office, in 2004 parks department recreation spending totaled just $16 million, out of an operating budget of approximately $260 million. Of that amount, about $9 million came from the state and federal governments and other city agencies and private sources. This does not include privately run recreation programs whose funding is not channeled through the parks department.

Funding for full-time recreation staff has fallen 69 percent since 1980, according to the parks advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, although some of the difference has been made up by seasonal and temporary employees, including the job-training program workers who now make up the majority of the parks department work force.

Funding, Places and People All In Short Supply

Every year at budget time, there is uncertainty about funding for the playground associates, who keep the playgrounds clean and safe and organize activities in the summer. Typically, the mayor’s proposed budget reduces the number of positions for these and other seasonal workers and the City Council eventually restores them. At present, there are 171 playground associates for the city’s 991 playgrounds, according to the parks department.

"There’s a short supply not only of places to play but of people to supervise," said Maura Lout, research director at New Yorkers for Parks. The difficulty of getting a complete picture of recreation in the city because there are so many different providers, Lout said, "speaks to the dilemma."

Although some wealthier parts of the city, as well as formerly industrial areas like Tribeca, lack recreational fields and programs, residents in these neighborhoods tend to have the time and money to sign their children up for private classes and for sports leagues outside the immediate neighborhood. Some families in affluent areas of Brooklyn, for example, don’t think twice about enrolling their kids in a hockey program at the for-profit Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

Targeting Poorer Neighborhoods

In large part because of the lack of facilities, the largest gaps in recreation programs are in the poorer neighborhoods with mostly minority or immigrant residents. In these areas, the cost, time and travel involved in getting to activities outside the immediate neighborhood are significant barriers to participation in many sports.

The parks department has made an effort to target its limited recreational resources to youth in these neighborhoods. Benepe noted that all of the department’s recreation programs for children, from swimming lessons to nature walks, are free.

The department organizes several athletic leagues and tournaments, often with support from corporate or non-profit partners. One innovative program directed toward underserved youth is the Star Track youth cycling and mentorship program in the newly renovated Kissena Velodrome in Queens. "Shape Up New York," a program run with the city health department, offers exercise for all ages at ten locations with high rates of high obesity and diabetes.

Free instruction in tennis, golf and track and field is also available at a number of parks from the City Parks Foundation, an independent non-profit that supports parks without access to private resources.

Working With The Schools

The parks department has also begun to coordinate its efforts with the Department of Education. "This is the first time in recent memory, maybe ever, that the parks and education departments are actually sitting down and talking to each other," said David Rivel, executive director of the City Parks Foundation.

Benepe said that with so many new schools being opened, the two departments have been discussing the use of park facilities during the day for physical education. They have also talked about expanding learn-to-swim programs using pools operated by both the schools and parks, as well as by colleges, non-profits and other organizations. "We could probably teach every kid how to swim if we put our minds to it," Benepe said. "If I could do one thing in the next four years it would be to teach every child, if not how to swim, at least to know what to do if you go in the water."

Under the leadership of Chancellor Joel Klein, there has been a new emphasis on fitness at the Department of Education. The department hired its first citywide director of fitness, Lori Benson; began providing professional development for physical education teachers; and instituted a new citywide physical education curriculum that emphasizes health-related fitness. With $1 million each from The Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation and the Snapple sponsorship, the department expanded a middle school sports and fitness program it piloted last year to 180 schools, many of which use parks for practice and games. "We are in the midst of a complete renaissance of the physical education program, which has not seen a lot of support over the last few decades," Benson said.

"There is a long way to go," said Rivel, "but things are clearly going in the right direction."

Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues. 

 

Recycling




Related:
Are New Yorkers Recyclers? A Survey of Habits and Attitudes

Listening to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Gifford Miller fight over garbage this month, the casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the mayor’s entire citywide plan for garbage centered on a single pier on the Upper East Side. The development of trash policy has recently gotten bogged down over the mayor’s call to use several such piers as places for garbage trucks to unload onto barges. The dispute reached a climax on June 22nd when Miller failed to block the opening of the so-called marine transfer station in his district.

But with this diversion out of the way, officials and environmental advocates are turning back to the central issues of a plan that is rich in details on how to move the city's trash around, but, critics say, short on everything else.

“It’s our hope that the controversy is over and we can get back to the overall business of this plan, which is how do we deal with the rest of this 50,000 tons per day of waste,” said Eddie Bautista of the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods.

In the past, the city has dealt with waste by burning it, or burying it. Now Bloomberg is focusing on shipping it away. But the City Council has published its own plan that lists recycling as its major priority, and criticizes the mayor’s plan for failing “to put forward any real programs or policies that would reduce waste and increase recycling.”

Councilmember Michael McMahon, head of the council’s sanitation committee, will soon begin negotiating with the mayor over the council’s concerns. His hope is that by September a compromise plan will be worked out -- and that it will prominently feature recycling.

ARE NEW YORKERS RECYCLERS?

In theory, increasing the amount of garbage that is recycled is a goal that everyone can agree on. But how to do so is not necessarily simple, and officials differ on how much recycling the city can reasonably expect.

Currently, about 20 percent of residential waste in New York is recycled. City life poses serious challenges for those planning ways to raise this rate. Most New Yorkers live in apartments where there is often little space to set up bins to separate garbage. And although residents are legally required to recycle, apartment-dwellers are relatively invulnerable to tough enforcement measures, because it’s hard to find out who in a large apartment building isn’t recycling in order to fine them.

Further, many New Yorkers are confused about what is recyclable. A recent survey conducted for Gotham Gazette by Baruch College's eTownPanel found that about 85 percent of city residents knew that newspapers are recyclable, but less than half knew that aerosol cans are, and only about 40 percent knew that wire hangers are. At the opposite end, about 40 percent knew that plastic deli containers are NOT recyclable, and a mere 20 percent knew that they cannot recycle shampoo and lotion bottles. (For details on the survey and to see charts, click here)

Some believe that a mixture of education and enforcement could significantly raise the rate of recycling in the city, but Mayor Bloomberg is skeptical that these will make much difference.

“The more you recycle the better off you are,” he told WABC-FM earlier this month. “But most [of the city’s waste] is going to get thrown out.”

THE MAYOR’S ATTITUDE: SKEPTICAL OF RECYCLING

The mayor’s attitude towards recycling has displeased recycling advocates in the past. Facing a daunting budget gap in 2002, the mayor decided recycling was a luxury the city could not afford. The city suspended its glass and plastic recycling programs.

It wasn’t the first time that the city had cut back on recycling efforts in tough times. When the environmental benefits of recycling are measured against its economic drawbacks, the economics generally win out.

“Whenever something bad happens, recycling gets pushed back,” said Carmen Cognetta, legal counsel to the City Council’s solid waste committee.

Recycling has always been vulnerable to budget cuts because historically it has been more expensive that dumping garbage in landfills. While taking trash to a landfill costs significantly more than it does to take it to a recycling plant, the higher cost of collecting recyclables more than offsets these savings.

Advocates have long hoped to develop a way to make recycling as cheap as waste disposal. If achieved, this goal of “cost parity” does work to protect recycling programs. The city didn’t consider eliminating paper recycling in 2002, for instance, because it was actually getting paid by private companies for the recyclable paper, rather than having to pay.

THE MAYOR'S PLAN: MAKING RECYCLING PAY OFF

The mayor's overall garbage plan calls for the city to load its waste onto rail and barges and ship it out of the city, instead of relying as heavily on trucks as the city does now.

Environmentalists and activists from low- income neighborhoods have thrown their support behind the plan, because it decreases the city’s reliance on trucks, and spreads the burden of waste management throughout the city. The main criticism of the plan has been that it does not address where to send the trash, thus doing little to deal with the city’s fundamental trash related problem: its reliance on increasingly pricey landfills in distant places. (report in .pdf format)

For recyclables, however, Bloomberg’s plan does identify what it says is a good place to send waste. The city has forged a long-term relationship with recycling company Hugo Neu, in order to secure stable, favorable rates. As incentive to sign the 20-year contract, the city has agreed to invest $25 million to help Hugo Neu build a recycling facility in Sunset Park. Savings from the terms of the contract, the city believes, will more than offset the cost of the plant.

As the cost of recycling decreases, the cost of waste disposal will be increasing, thanks to the capital investment necessary to make the transition to new forms of transportation. This, some see as a good thing.

“This short-run increase in waste disposal costs, coupled with a new contract that lowers the fee paid for processing the city’s recyclables, alters the economics of waste management increasingly in favor of recycling as a cost-competitive alternative to disposal,” wrote Elisabeth Franklin and Preston Niblack of the Independent Budget Office in a recent analysis. (report in pdf format)

The analysis concludes that, all things being equal, the mayor’s plan will make the cost of recycling roughly equal to that of waste disposal.

While Bloomberg’s plan may end up creating a strong financial incentive to recycle, critics still deride its lack of a coherent recycling strategy.

"Exporting trash is one little piece of solid waste management. The city has a golden opportunity to commit in writing to innovative waste prevention, reuse, and recycling initiatives,” said Majorie Clarke, co-chair of the New York City Waste Prevention Coalition. “That's the guts that they're missing."

THE CITY COUNCIL’S ALTERNATIVE



Are New Yorkers Recyclers? Click here for details and charts

The City Council aims much higher than the mayor in terms of recycling. Bloomberg’s goal is to have 26 percent of residential waste be recycled by 2010 and a 33 percent residential recycling rate by 2024. The council plan is much more ambitious, calling for an increase in residential recycling from 20 to 25 percent by 2007, and by 2015 a combined residential and commercial recycling rate of 70 percent.

Increasing recycling rates not only has environmental benefits, it has economic advantages as well. The more residents can be taught what is recyclable -- and either encouraged or forced to do it -- the cheaper recycling becomes. Collecting garbage is less expensive than recycling because the same truck can gather more tons of garbage per route than it can of recyclables. This is partially due to the relatively low weight of recyclables – plastic weighs less than food waste. But the more recycling that ends up on each curb, the less it costs to collect each ton of it.

“If the city is successful in increasing recycling beyond recent levels, it may even become the cheaper alternative, creating a strong incentive to promote recycling as a way to hold down the total cost of waste management,” wrote Franklin of the Independent Budget Office. (report in pdf format)

The mayor’s plan brushes over this potential; there are few specific ideas for increasing recycling rates. By contrast, the council’s plan calls for establishing a division in every community board that will tailor recycling programs to the local level. A new city agency would oversee this, leaving the Sanitation Department – which proponents of the plan describe as insufficiently committed to recycling – out of all recycling education and outreach programs.

"[Recycling] is never going to flourish under Sanitation," said Cognetta.

But Benjamin Miller, former director (and current critic) of policy planning for the Sanitation Department and author of Fat of the Land, a history of the city’s garbage, doubts whether the council’s plan will be effective. Any recycling plan should set a single standard for the entire city, he says, rather than relying on individual efforts in each neighborhood. And the best way to have a citywide plan is to keep a single agency in charge of all waste issues.

“The plan proposes what I would argue are likely to be quite inefficient systems [that] reflect a flawed understanding of how a recycling system should be designed,” he said. “We have to keep it simple.” Miller believes the best way to increase recycling is to charge people for the amount of garbage they throw out, creating an incentive to reduce the amount of waste they produce by, for example, recycling more.

The council’s plan also calls for increasing commercial recycling rates, and attempts to establish ways to recycle or reuse materials that today tend to end up in landfills.

ZERO WASTE: BEYOND RECYCLING

Some of these strategies were discussed at a recent conference of recycling advocates held in downtown Manhattan. The conference’s focus was to formulate programs that go beyond recycling by increasing the scope of what can be recycled and reduce consumption in general in a comprehensive strategy.

Attendees noted the success of initiatives in California and Maine that reduced waste at the source. They suggested more aggressive citywide compost recycling and a surcharge on plastic bags. A similar “plastax” law in Ireland reduced plastic bag use there by 90 percent.

The city would need help in implementing some of these ideas. Any new tax, for instance, would need to be approved by Albany.

The council has embraced these principles as part of its plan. It is currently considering several actions, including a bill that would require manufacturers to take back and recycle, reuse or properly dispose of a percentage of the electronics they sell. Another resolution calls on the state to pass a bill that would expand the bottle deposit to more products.

Jordan Barowitz, a spokesperson for the mayor, told the New York Times that the administration is willing to consider substantive changes to its plan, and specifically cited adding measures to increase recycling. But council’s plan, he said, was “a gimmick. It doesn’t advance the negotiations at all.”

Garbage plans in New York are often written and rarely implemented, and there is no guarantee that the council and the mayor’s negotiations this summer will end up producing anything resembling either of their plans. But if the officials can navigate the ever-tricky politics of garbage, recycling advocates see the potential for an economic and environmental payoff in the ideas currently on the table.

 

Are New Yorkers Recyclers? A Survey of Habits and Attitudes


Eighty-two percent of New Yorkers say that they recycle “almost always” or “most of the time” at home, according to a survey conducted by Baruch College's eTownPanel for Gotham Gazette this month. Only five percent say that they never recycle. Fifty-six percent said they recycle more now than they did five years ago.

But they also express confusion about what they can and cannot recycle. While 83 percent of respondents knew they could recycle newspapers, only 40 percent knew that wire hangers were recyclable, and less than half knew that aerosol cans were recyclable. Only 62 percent said they were either “very familiar” or “familiar” with the city’s recycling program overall, and 15 percent said they were “not familiar at all.”

Respondents seemed to see their own confusion as a result of the city’s poor performance in educating its residents about the recycling regulations. Sixty-six percent said that the government’s performance in education the public was either “fair” or “poor”. They were also skeptical of the government’s commitment. Over half of respondents said that the city was only “somewhat committed” or “not committed at all” to recycling, while only 11 percent felt the city was “very committed”.

The survey was conducted betweeen June 7 and June 14, 2005 of 150 New Yorkers.

Return to Recycling by Sam Williams and Joshua Brustein

 



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