Annual Report on Park Maintenance Fiscal Year 2019 City of New York Parks & Recreation Bill de Blasio, Mayor Mitchell J. Silver, FAICP, Commissioner Annual Report on Park Maintenance Fiscal Year 2019 Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 Understanding Park Maintenance Needs ............................................................................... 1 How Parks are Maintained ...................................................................................................... 2 About the Data Used in this Report ....................................................................................... 3 Data Caveats .......................................................................................................................... 5 Report Column Definitions and Calculations ........................................................................... 5 Tables ...................................................................................................................................... Table 1 – Park-Level Services ............................................................................................ 8 Table 2 – Sector-Level Services ........................................................................................98 Table 3 – Borough and Citywide Work Orders ...................................................................99 Table 4 – Borough and Citywide-Level Services Not Captured in Work Orders ............... 100 Table 5 – Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) Staffing ........................................................ 101 Appendices .............................................................................................................................. Appendix A: Fixed Post Calculation ................................................................................. 102 Appendix B: Park Cleaning Crews Calculations ............................................................... 102 Appendix C: Sector-Level Costs ...................................................................................... 104 Appendix D: Specialized Maintenance Costs .................................................................. 106 Appendix E: Borough and Citywide-Level Services ......................................................... 107 Cover Photo: High Bridge Park, Manhattan Photo Credit: Malcolm Pinckney/NYC Parks Introduction NYC Parks is the steward of more than 30,000 acres of land, or 14% of the City. We are responsible for the construction, maintenance, and programming of public parks under our jurisdiction. In order to fulfill our mandate, we employ landscape architects, architects, and engineers who design parks and recreational amenities; forestry staff who plant and care for trees both in parks and on sidewalks; gardeners who grow and plant flowers and shrubs; recreation professionals who organize programming to help New Yorkers keep fit and have fun; park rangers and enforcement officers who teach the public about the natural world and uphold park rules; events professionals who bring cultural and sporting events to our parks; and outreach staff who engage volunteers and non-profit partners in improving their parks. This report does not include all of the work above, but focuses on our efforts to keep our parks clean and safe. This fundamental maintenance work is completed by park workers and supervisors who are responsible for day-to-day park cleaning, and specialized crews and tradespeople who maintain and repair park infrastructure. Release of this maintenance report accompanies a larger effort to provide the public a better understanding of how their parks are run, and to engage with them on improving how NYC Parks operates. Indeed, increased transparency has already yielded significant benefits for both New Yorkers and their parks. In 2014, Parks launched an online tracker for park capital improvement projects, allowing anyone to chart project progress from initial design through construction completion. In 2016, Parks released the data from our decennial tree census and collaborated with volunteers from New York City’s civic technology and tree stewardship communities to use this data to better manage the urban forest, in what was Parks’ first open data hackathon – the TreesCount! Data Jam. In 2017, we led the City’s first “Open Data for All” Workshops, teaching members of the public how to access, interact with and analyze our data; and began an internal effort to define, document, and publish all Parks data sets online. We continue to increase the volume and quality of our datasets, and we hope this report and data release can be another means of engaging with New Yorkers about their parks and improve public understanding of park maintenance. Understanding Park Maintenance Needs It is important to understand that this report provides a summary of maintenance labor inputs, and not any measure of the result or outcome of this labor. Some parks receive far more cleaning time than others, while some have many more work orders written for repairs. This is by design, and a result of the unique characteristics, amenities, and usage in each park. Although parks of similar size and amenities will generally have comparable costs of service, these costs can also vary considerably, even among superficially comparable parks. A lawn that is a frequent host of barbecues will require different care from lawns that are used for concerts, picnics, or meditation. The maintenance demands of an acre of softball fields are very different from an acre of basketball courts, or soccer fields, or hiking trails. A park near the water will probably require more frequent painting. Playgrounds near a busy elementary school will require more frequent repair, and those repairs will likely be with more expensive, sturdier parts. These examples are just a few of the many factors that will affect the amount of hours and dollars spent cleaning and maintaining a site. With these distinctions in mind, we do not aim for identical inputs of time and money, but equitable outcomes: clean, safe, and welcoming parks for all New Yorkers to enjoy. The amount of cleaning and maintenance a park receives is historically based on the on-the-ground knowledge of our staff, which represents decades of experience informed by daily observations made while parks are inspected, cleaned, and repaired. We also supplement this institutional knowledge with quantitative data-driven models. Parks is piloting efforts to better understand the relationship between usage and amenities, and exploring ways to passively measure park usage using infrared sensors and 1 mobile device GPS counts. In aggregate, these efforts represent Parks’ commitment to leverage data to better understand our maintenance needs and to improve how we care for public spaces. How Parks are Maintained An individual park will receive a variety of maintenance services from a variety of Parks staff. Parks are grouped together within park districts, which generally align with community boards. One or more park districts are combined into sectors that share resources for daily maintenance. Some of the largest parks, such as Van Cortlandt Park and Flushing Meadows Corona Park, constitute sectors by themselves. In December of 2017, NYC Parks added the regional designation to its management structure. Regions are made up of one or more sectors, and regional managers provide high-level, strategic planning and support for Parks managers, including maximizing resources between Districts and Sectors. When regions were established, some sectors were reorganized to include a different set of park districts while others remained the same. As a result of sector reorganization, year-to-year costs for sectors from Fiscal Year 2018 and on will not necessarily be comparable on a one-to-one basis with Fiscal Year 2017 and prior fiscal years. Daily Park Maintenance Sector staff perform daily maintenance, as well as garbage collection, snow plowing, and basic repairs and upkeep. These staff are tasked with cleaning a park for as long and as often as it takes to make it clean and safe for the public. We have codified standards of cleanliness and safety, as well as expectations of cleaning frequency. To ensure these standards are met, every park receives at least two random audit inspections per year by highly-trained inspectors from the Parks Inspection Program (PIP), as well as monthly inspections by the sector’s supervisors. We measure our daily park maintenance by looking at outcomes as captured in the inspection ratings. Our priority is to ensure that a park is clean and safe, whether it took one hour or four hours to achieve that result. This report provides a summary of those inputs. For cleaning service, a park is considered “mobile” or “fixed post.” Mobile crew staff visit multiple parks throughout a sector, following a specific route. Fixed post staff are assigned to a single park or, most commonly, to a group of nearby parks (sometimes known as “split post”), which are generally high-use, high-priority locations such as playgrounds, or out-of-the-way sites that are not feasible to service by mobile crew. In order to host fixed post staff, a park must have a facility with storage space, a bathroom, and heat (generally a comfort station). A fixed post-eligible site may also be cleaned by a mobile crew, and the type of crew deployed at a site depends on seasonal needs, daily