New York’s Chronically Underfunded Parks Department Is Losing the Fight Against Invasive Species, Disrepair and Climate Change

NEW YORK—On a warm Wednesday morning in June, half a dozen volunteers slip on waders and gloves provided by the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, a small nonprofit dedicated to preserving and supporting the Bronx park. They are preparing to go to war with the water chestnut, an aquatic invasive species that has spread a dense canopy across a large portion of the park’s large main pond. 

Noel Hefele, a volunteer coordinator with the alliance, leads everyone to the shore. Soon enough, volunteers and three alliance employees are trudging through the pond as far as their waders will allow, using rakes to collect the water chestnuts and bring them to the bank. 

“The smell is really getting to me today,” said Gina Lauria, 24, a trail technician with the alliance. As the team moves through the water, bubbles of gas float to the surface all around, and the pungent smell of rotten eggs fills the air. Over time, water chestnut plants sink to the bottom of the pond, where they decay, trapping gases there. 

On the shore of what had formerly been Van Cortlandt Lake, now Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond, other employees fill a wheelbarrow with the water chestnuts, periodically bringing batches to a dump site elsewhere in the park to prevent the plant from re-entering the water. It’s an arduous three-hour process. When they stop, only a small section of the pond has been cleared. The stretch of water chestnuts continues, as far as the eye can see. 

“It creates this dense canopy so no light can get through—the water plants that need the light, they die,” said Guy Bennevat Haninovich, 23, another trail technician. “Everything in here is kind of dead besides the water chestnut.”

In addition to outcompeting native plants, the water chestnut causes a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, which can kill certain species of fish. 

The large water chestnut canopy usually forms around springtime, in May or June, and is gone in the early fall months, so the so-called “water chestnut Wednesday” is only a seasonal volunteer event. According to Hefele, who became a coordinator in 2020, the canopy spreads a little more each year. 

“When I first started here, this lower section of the lake was clear for the most part,” said Hefele. “We would be able to row the canoes all the way up to the northern section through a clear channel.”

Today, it is nearly impossible to row up the pond due to the thickness of the water chestnut canopy. Neither the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, nor the New York City Parks Department, have anywhere near the funding or staffing necessary to fix that. 

In 2019, New Yorkers for Parks, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and District 37, the city’s largest municipal employees union, came together to co-found the Play Fair Coalition, an advocacy group with over 400 members that works to increase the city’s budget allocation for the Parks Department to 1 percent of the total. 

Currently, though 14 percent of the city’s land is parks or green spaces, only around 0.6 percent of the city’s budget goes to the Parks Department. For context, the city dedicated 1.3 percent of its budget to the department in the 1970s during a fiscal crisis, according to an impact report by New Yorkers for Parks. The decades of chronic underfunding have created a dire situation, forcing many volunteer groups and park conservancies across the city to take on duties that would otherwise be reserved for Parks staff. 

In addition to consistent underfunding, New York Mayor Eric Adams has been instituting cuts in departments across the city as part of his effort to eliminate budget shortfalls. His proposed budget plan for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, further reduces funding to the Parks Department. 

According to a City Council report, the plan would cut the Parks budget by $54.5 million and, coupled with the current hiring freeze, would eliminate over 600 jobs. 

“It would really make it hard for the city to ensure that New York City parks are clean, safe, and resilient,” said Alia Soomro, the deputy director for New York City policy at the New York League of Conservation Voters. “It really makes it hard for Parks workers, for their morale, when the agency is strapped.”

The mayoral administration is currently still negotiating the budget with the city council. These cuts come despite the mayor’s support for the “1 percent for parks” movement during his campaign in 2021.

“There really isn’t an area of the agency that hasn’t already been impacted and wouldn’t be impacted more by these budget cuts,” said Adam Ganser, executive director for New Yorkers for Parks. “The city has really been operating the Parks Department on an austerity budget for 40 years.”

Indeed, small park conservation groups say they have already been feeling the impacts of recent cuts. In Van Cortlandt Park, Hefele said the staff numbers are lower because a couple of Parks employees joined a training program to move up within the department. They cannot be replaced, even temporarily, due to the hiring freeze.

“The Parks cuts have been rather devastating to the point that, for the first time ever, the [Van Cortlandt Park Alliance] has purchased toilet paper for the Parks Department restrooms,” said Hefele. “That’s not something we had done before.” 

The Riverside Park Conservancy, which has a team of 65 full-time employees, and a rolling number of volunteers whose ranks can swell to the thousands yearly, has also felt the effects of these consistent funding cuts. 

“We do a lot of things, like the ball fields, the dog runs, and some of the other things, that were not things that we traditionally did,” said Merritt Birnbaum, president of the Riverside Park Conservancy. “But the Parks Department staff has been so decimated in recent years with ongoing budget cuts that we now have about 25 percent of the workers that we had in the park 50 years ago.”

Conservancies like this one enter into a legal agreement with the Parks Department to be able to do extensive work in the area. Conservancy staff at Riverside Park takes on a variety of duties, from coordinating volunteer trash pickup and planting, to rebuilding entrances and steps, to creating new recreational uses in the park. Currently, the conservancy is collecting donations to plant 120 trees alongside Riverside Drive.  

Most neighborhood parks do not have conservancies, but many have small regular volunteer groups that partner with the Parks Department to help with trash pickup, weeding and planting. 

Every second Saturday of the month, Allison Lumumba-Jones, 55, heads a volunteer group in Morningside Park in Harlem. Though a small volunteer effort was always present in the park, Lumumba-Jones started this one during the pandemic when she noticed problems while out with her husband. 

“We were walking through the park and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much overgrown, there’s so much trash, I could clean this all up in a weekend,’” said Lumumba-Jones. “But I didn’t want to look like a crazy person, so I started the volunteer Fridays so I had other people and I didn’t look crazy.”

On a hot June morning, she greeted new and regular volunteers with an easy smile, handing them an orange vest and gloves. The task of the day was to spread mulch across the gardens that line one of the park’s many playgrounds. A dozen volunteers spent two hours sweating underneath the hot sun, wheeling mulch in, raking it across the soil, and later pulling thick weeds from small gardens and from between park steps. 

This volunteer group is part of an effort by Friends of Morningside Park. Unlike the Riverside Park Conservancy, it has only one part-time employee—everyone else, from the board to the regular helpers, are all volunteers. 

Small neighborhood parks can feel the impacts of the budget cuts more intensely, and not just through trash and weed overgrowth. Due to consistent cuts, the Parks Department cannot do routine maintenance on facilities, nor is it able to adequately limit the impacts of invasive species or heavy rainfall. 

According to Hefele, Van Cortlandt Park has suffered extensive damage from such rainfall. Since he began working there, he’s seen the pond overflow twice. 

“We had a particularly windy [storm] two months ago that took down a lot of large trees, and we still see gaping holes in the cross country course—I would say that is a direct impact of the Parks cuts because we’ve just been unable to repair them yet,” said Hefele. “It’s a shame because the cross country course is 100 years old and one of the premiere spots … to host meets.” 

Last year, the Riverside Park Conservancy rebuilt drainage infrastructure for one of the small playgrounds, stopping it from flooding during heavy rain. 

“It’s really reaching a breaking point for our park,” said Birnbaum. 

Her insight is particularly troubling as climate change intensifies. New York City parks are crucial for climate resilience. According to the city’s 2023 sustainability plan, parks improve public health by removing pollutants from the air, cooling streets and acting as stormwater retention systems. 

“If they aren’t able to maintain simple things like drainage—drains are being blocked and there’s heavy rain—that rain is going to flood elsewhere,” said Ganser. “What should be happening is that we should be looking at our parks as part of the solution to these issues. They should be acting like sponges.”

Without consistent investment from the city, he and other activists say, the ability of these parks to act as tools for climate resilience could be limited, as well as their ability to support wildlife and native plants, and increase residents’ quality of life. 

In Morningside Park, there is only one full-time Parks Department gardener tasked with caring for the entire 30 acres. Lumumba-Jones and Clyde Brogdon, 67, who volunteered on Saturday and currently sits on the board, think it’s not enough. 

“There’s always more to be done,” said Brogdon, “than what we can do with the volunteers.”