(photo: @PTNY)
What do Manhattan's Riverbank State Park track, the playgrounds of P.S. 40, 100, 140, and 192, Clay Pit Ponds State Park, the Rockaway and Coney Island Boardwalks, and Battery Park all have in common?
All were established or built through funding from the national Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Nearly all New Yorkers have benefitted in some way from the LWCF's innovative conservation projects.
For over 50 years, the LWCF has protected, renovated, updated, and improved New York's parks and greenspaces for the benefit of New Yorkers. This conservation fund is much more than a rural land purchasing program. The LWCF has funded approximately $44 million worth of projects in New York City alone over the past half century.
Despite the undeniable success of the LWCF, the fund will expire on September 30 if Congress does not pass legislation to reauthorize it. Over its entire history, the LWCF has never once lapsed in authorization. The 114th Congress should not allow a lapse in the LWCF to be a part of its legacy.
Established under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the LWCF began as an innovative way to acquire or develop recreational resources for a growing American population. Upon signing the bill (the same day he signed the Wilderness Act into law), President Johnson called the LWCF a responsible way to "acquire on a pay-as-you-go basis the outdoor recreation lands that tomorrow's Americans will require."
The LWCF has given New Yorkers city and school playgrounds, pools, park roads and restrooms, ballfields, and bandstands in all five boroughs. The LWCF's redevelopment of park and playground facilities maintains recreation infrastructure to ensure it is safe for all of New York's children.
LWCF funding has also allowed for the acquisition of new greenspaces – a significant challenge in a city as dense as New York. LWCF moneys funded the purchase of land that is now Roberto Clemente State Park in the Bronx, as well as the small but important floodplains of Udall's Cove and Ravine in Queens.
New parkland acquisitions like these ensure that New York City has green infrastructure that improves resiliency in the face of severe storms, floods, and rising sea levels.
The LWCF is rightly characterized as America's most important conservation program. The LWCF is unique in its flexibility and results, but more important it is unique in structure and purpose: it uses no taxpayer funds, but rather is funded through a small percentage of revenue from oil and gas leases that allow drilling of publicly-owned resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. The LWCF is a grand bargain between resource extraction and resource protection, struck on behalf of the American people, and one that they overwhelmingly support.
Reauthorizing the LWCF is a no-brainer for New Yorkers, since it costs them nothing. Continuing to fund the LWCF is a bipartisan issue that all New Yorkers can get behind. We can continue to fund our playgrounds, ballfields, and green infrastructure without reinventing the wheel legislatively. Congress simply needs to reauthorize the LWCF and allow it to begin a new half century of conservation success.
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by Robin Dropkin, Executive Director, Parks & Trails New York. On Twitter @PTNY.
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