Courtney Luciana Photo
Nan Bartow at the West River Greenway.
A trio of park stewards offered a budget revision pitch: undo the recent merger of the Parks and Public Works departments, and keep in the proposed new hires who’d care for the city’s greenspaces.
The trio spoke on behalf of “friends” — not the human kind, but the parks they’ve volunteered to maintain.
On Thursday, members of ParksFriends — a new coalition of parks volunteers from across the city — joined the first chorus of public feedback on the mayor’s proposed budget on Thursday evening.
Dozens filled the Board of Alders Chambers for a meeting of the alders’ Finance Committee, which included the first public hearing on the $662.7 million budget proposed by Mayor Justin Elicker’s administration for Fiscal Year 2023 – 24 (FY 24).
Elicker’s FY 24 budget proposal would add several new positions in the Department of Parks and Public Works: four caretakers, two parks rangers, and one parks foreperson. The Parks Friends spoke in strong support of including those new positions in the final budget.
Laura Glesby Photo
ParksFriends members Frank Cochran, Nan Bartow, and Kathleen Bradley wait to testify.
New Haven’s public parks are “seriously underfunded and drastically under-maintained,” argued Frank Cochran, who helps lead the ParksFriends group. The maintenance crew is understaffed, he said, and these new positions are needed.
Cochran and other ParksFriends members showed up to Thursday’s meeting not only to advocate for the new positions, but to call for a divorce of parks-related services from the recently-merged “Parks and Public Works Department.”
In 2020, Elicker and the Board of Alders split up the former “Parks, Recreation, and Trees” department, merging the “parks” and “trees” portion with the Department of Public Works, while combining the “recreation” portion with the Youth Department. Out of that shift came the Department of Parks and Public Works, led by the city’s longtime public works director, Jeff Pescosolido.
Now, ParksFriends — which represents the “Friends” groups that voluntarily clean, garden, and maintain parks across the city — is arguing that under that merger, parks services have declined.
“The parks department should be returned to a stand-alone department,” declared Nan Bartow of the Friends of Beaver Ponds Park.
Kathleen Bradley of the Friends of Beecher Park in Westville said that since the departments were merged, “the work has not gotten done.”
Parks Friends groups are volunteers, she added, and they effectively subsidize many of the city’s parks already. “We put a lot of our own money into parks.”
In addition to advocacy for a parks department restructuring, members of the public issued calls to fund the library at an amount equal to 1 percent of the city budget; to support more affordable housing, funded by increase financial contributions from Yale; and to cut some of the 36 proposed new city employees at a time the city is experiencing hundreds of vacancies.
The Finance Committee.