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Fewer invasive species will be culled, trails in natural areas will become overgrown and wetlands and natural forests across the city will go unmanaged, workers and open-space advocates have said after millions of dollars were cut from a dedicated Parks Department’s fund.
Natural areas make up a third of the city’s parklands — around 10,000 acres — and they’re maintained by workers in the Parks Department’s Natural Resources Group. This year, the city’s budget, finalized in July, cut $2.5 million in funding earmarked for 51 positions in the NRG. They included gardeners, forest maintainers, wetland restorers and volunteer coordinators.
The cuts are part and parcel for the Natural Resources Group, said Sarah Charlop-Powers, the executive director of the Natural Areas Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.
"It’s a real hit to an agency that has already been unfavorably taxed over the last couple years and a division within that agency that is chronically under-resourced,” she said in an interview this week. “We derive a lot of benefits that help us to mitigate the impacts of climate through our forests and wetlands and those are certainly jeopardized by lack of investment.”
‘It’s chaos’
Much of the NRG’s staff is employed on a year-by-year basis, with workers sometimes finding out whether they’ll have a job for the next fiscal year just hours before their term ends on June 30. That’s a disordered and unstable system that makes it difficult to recruit and maintain, former and current NRG personnel said.
"It's chaos from our perspective,” Calvin Heiman, a former stewardship volunteer associate in the NRG said. “It makes it impossible to plan for your future.”
Many NRG staffers search for other jobs in the weeks leading up to the end of each fiscal year in case their positions get eliminated. Heiman did just that this year, leaving the NRG job in May to join the Natural Areas Conservancy.
"People have been leaving and no one replaces them,” said Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, a trail maintainer who is one of the few workers holding a constantly funded, civil service position. “It doesn't really seem like there's a plan to replace people ever. We’re slowly whittling down to nothing."
The cuts mean that grasses aren’t being planted, trees aren’t being pruned and trails aren’t being maintained, creating access barriers to natural areas for New Yorkers.
“The sites we’re working in are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and we’re covering less ground,” Kirk-Davidoff said. “If you're trying to remove invasives and you just don’t go [to a site] for three years, all those invasives come back. You need that constant presence and if you don’t have that presence, all that work goes away"
This isn’t the first time that Kirk-Davidoff's work has been affected by cuts.
In 2023, $2.4 million, earmarked for 27 trail maintainers, was culled by Mayor Eric Adams’ program to eliminate the gap. Without those 27 positions, one of Kirk-Davidoff's coworkers recently quitting, and one other out sick, he has a lot of ground to cover, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Idlewild Park, just north of JFK Airport in Queens.
“Right now, it's me on the trails team, it's just me,” he said last week. “For 300 miles of trails."
Effects of less staffing
Charlop-Powers said parks officials told her that because of the cuts, the Parks Department will only be able to manage half of the natural lands this year than is typical. “Deferred maintenance in our natural areas can be hard to catch up with,” she said. “What you need is a consistent level of care that keeps the ecology intact."
A Parks Department spokesperson said the department has not yet made a projection for how many acres of natural areas the NRG will manage this fiscal year. NRG staff managed approximately 750 acres in FY 2024.
When asked last week about the cuts at his weekly press event, Adams deferred to his deputy mayor for operations, Meera Joshi, who said the NRG budget “changes and fluctuates often.”
“We are today using the staff we have available to meet the needs of our tree population,” she said. “We have a robust program of apprenticeships and interns that can supplement as well, because they will get that important training.”
Chris Viaggio, the recording secretary for District Council 37 Local 1507 — which represents some NRG gardeners — said that some of the staffing and funding issues are being resolved with the interns, apprentices, volunteers and grant funding that the Parks Department cultivates. Charlop-Powers also credited the department for finding alternative streams of funding and labor.
But both agreed that the way the NRG’s funding is set up makes it difficult to recruit and maintain talent and get necessary work done. “It’s very hard to retain employees,” Viaggio said.
"The Parks Department has been chronically underfunded." said Charlop-Powers. “Grant funding is not a replacement for [public] funding. The longer term goal of seeing an increase of funding for parks has not been realized."
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