“Friends” To City: Bring Back Parks Dept.

A new group of citywide parks advocates is calling on Mayor Justin Elicker to up his administration’s care for open spaces — including by reinstating a stand-alone department for parks and trees.

That group is called ParksFriends. 

The ParksFriends group has over 70 members representing 30 different parks from across the city, according to ParksFriends ad-hoc steering committee member and Friends of Edgewood Park leader Stephanie FitzGerald. Urban Resources Initiative and the Elm City Parks Conservancy are also part of the group.

The group was formed last fall ​“to advocate for better funding for parks, especially for maintenance, and to ask for a return of a separate Parks Department,” she said.

Over the past few months, the ParksFriends group has hosted an online meeting with the mayor, kicked off an email and letter-writing campaign, turned out to City Hall to testify before the Charter Revision Commission, and Zoomed in to Wednesday’s latest monthly Parks Commission meeting — all to voice concerns about the current state of New Haven’s parks, and to press the mayor and other city leaders to prioritize taking care of public open spaces that they fear are falling into disarray.

This new parks-focused campaign comes roughly three years after the mayor proposed and the alders signed off on merging one part of the former Parks, Recreation & Trees department with the Department of Public Works, creating a new Parks & Public Works department overseen by the city’s longtime public works director, Jeff Pescosolido. That same plan, which went into effect in July 2020, also saw the merger of the other part of the parks department with the Youth Services Department, to form a new Youth and Recreation Department overseen by former youth services deputy Gwendolyn Busch-Williams

“The City has decided to implement a departmental realignment. Parks & Public works will come together to create operational efficiencies and improve customer service. This will help improve the impact of service, and better coordinate efforts citywide” the mayor’s March 2020 budget proposal stated.

These three years later, ParksFriends members say that merger with public works has left parks out to dry. They argue that city maintenance and management and planning for public parks need to be put back into a separate department. They’re also calling for a boost in funding for city green spaces. 

“Our community needs more support from the City of New Haven, and we the leadership of the WEB CMT are calling for a return to a dedicated Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees to care for our city’s parks,” Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills Community Management Team Chair Rebecca Cramer wrote to the mayor, the parks-public works director, and a handful of west side alders on Feb. 5.

During testimony before the Charter Revision Commission at City Hall last Thursday night, Fair Haven Heights resident and Elm City Parks Conservancy founding president Chris Ozyck agreed.

“Parks are our great democratic spaces within the City of New Haven. It’s where people rub elbows, meet people, have conversations. They should be a top priority, not just shoved down to the bottom.” Parks, he continued, are ​“where our kids learn to become good citizens.”

The current setup of having the city’s parks department nested within the public works department ​“really gives a short end of the stick for parks,” Ozyck said. He added that there’s ​“nobody with vision, nobody thinking about how parks should be” currently in place in City Hall.

In a Feb. 3 update sent to the several dozen members of the budding parks support group, ParksFriends ad hoc steering committee members Frank Cochran, Nadine Horton, and Stephanie FitzGerald celebrated the fact that the city recently hired Stephen Hladun as the new deputy director of parks in the Department of Parks & Public Works.

That same update urged members to submit testimony to the Charter Revision Commission calling for the three parks commission roles that are currently lifetime appointments to be term-limited in some way.

Cochran, Horton and FitzGerald urged the parks group members to contact the mayor and his staff ​“about adequate funding for parks” and to encourage their neighborhood community management teams to send letters to the same effect.

“Your CMT letter can be brief — that New Haven Parks need to be funded well enough so the parks can be maintained adequately. (Currently, they are not — think of how many volunteer hours are spent on litter clean up, de-vining, trail maintenance, garden bed maintenance, tree planting, watering, etc.),” the steering team members wrote. ​“We are also advocating for a stand-alone Parks Department, rather than having parks functions divided into two departments Parks & Public Works and Youth & Recreation.”

In an email comment provided to the Independent for this article, Mayor Elicker did not say whether or not he plans to reinstate a parks department separate from public works.

In regards to the structure of city departments, he said, ​“I think what’s most important is that the work gets done and we’re committed to doing that in the very best way we can with the resources we have — and we’re thankful for the partnership and assistance of our parks associations and volunteers that give of themselves and their time to help keep our parks great places for residents to use and enjoy.” 

He also touted his administration’s investment of $8.3 million in local and state American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grant money towards helping ​“build or repair playgrounds, splashpads, ballfields, courts, trails, and other features and structures in parks across the city. We’re also renovating and reactivating formerly underutilized parks buildings with our new Youth and Community Centers that are coming online in Edgewood Park, East Rock Park, East Shore Park, Goffe Street Park, West River Memorial Park, and other locations.”

(See the bottom of this article for Elicker’s statement in full.)

Restore Parks To "Department Status"

Two parks-focused letters have already made their way to the mayor in the weeks before he is set to introduce next fiscal year’s proposed budget on March 1. One was written at the end of last year by the ParksFriends steering committee, the other was written earlier this month by the heard of the WEB community management team. 

On Dec. 23, six members of the ​“ParksFriends Ad Hoc Steering Committee” — Tracy Blanford, Kate Bradley, Frank Cochran, Stephanie FitzGerald, Nadine Horton, and Tyler Whitmer — sent Elicker a letter, following up on a Dec. 5 online meeting the group convened with the mayor.

In that letter, the parks advocates thank the mayor for meeting with them, express their concerns about the city’s ongoing challenges recruiting and retaining staff, and call on the administration to reinstate a free-standing, separate parks department.

“New Haven has a proud heritage in developing 50 parks in over 2,200 acres of land, much higher numbers than in other cities,” the group wrote in that Dec. 23 letter. ​“One comparison we found a couple of years ago: Chicago has 4 times the parks’ acreage of New Haven and 25 times the number of people. Parks are open 365 days a year; ​‘hours of service’ cannot be cut. As we saw during the 2020 – 2022 Covid crisis, people were drawn to parks in record numbers. These are among the reasons we would like to see ​‘Parks, Recreation and Trees’ restored to Department status. In recent years, as parks’ staff declined, Parksfriends volunteers groups have taken on as much small scale park maintenance and trash pickup as we can. Parks & Public Works does the big stuff. Even then, the parks are not maintained the way they should be. The parks deserve more.”

The group concluded its letter by promising to work with the public works and Youth and Rec directors as well as with alders and parks commissioners ​“to address our concerns but hope that, by getting back to you as well, we will not be playing ​“catch-up” when it comes to the usual time for budget hearings.”

Then, in a Feb. 5 email sent to the mayor, Department of Parks & Public Works Director Jeff Pescosolido, and a handful of westside alders, Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) Community Management Team Chair Rebecca Cramer threw her neighborhood group’s support behind increasing funding for city parks and reinstating the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees.

“Parks play an important role in our community. The WEB is home to some of the city’s largest and most used parks,” Cramer wrote. 

She wrote that parks like Edgewood, Goffe, and Beaver Ponds ​“serve as gathering places for festivals and community events, they are places that youth in our community participate in sports and activities, they are where we go to connect with nature and get physical activity, they are home to native plants and animal species, and they are where residents come together with researchers to address questions facing our urban ecosystem.”

“All of this happens in great part due to the dedication of our parks’ friend groups, but they cannot·do it alone,” Cramer continued. ​“The trash and maintenance issues facing our parks are much bigger than anything our friend groups can tackle on their own. Both city officials and parks’ friend groups should have the bandwidth to create, but right now we cannot even keep up with maintaining our parks. We want to partner with the city to develop programming and improvements to our parks that will benefit all residents. We have an exciting opportunity to do so with the current influx of ARPA funds in New Haven, but having dedicated parks leadership and staff is essential both to envision possibilities for the future and to mitigate the current challenges facing our parks.”

She concluded the letter by urging the city leaders ​“consider this important request to invest in the future of our city-from our natural resources to our residents’ health and wellbeing-by investing in reinstating the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees.”

And at Wednesday night’s latest monthly meeting of the parks commission, which was held online via Zoom, FitzGerald and Horton made their group’s case again for the reinstatement of a separate parks department and for increased city funding to maintain green open spaces.

“We want to advocate for more funding to support New Haven parks, and we support the idea of a separate parks department,” FitzGerald said. ​“We’d like the commission to take an active role in advocating for more funding for city parks. … Our parks are too valuable to the people of New Haven to not maintain them properly.”

Horton agreed. ​“We strongly advocate for a separation of the parks from public works,” she said. ​“We would would like to see a separate department of parks and trees.”

What did the mayor say again about why the city combined parks and public works? Parks Commission Chair David Belowsky asked Wednesday. ​“I think he thought it would save money?”

“I think he thought it would save money,” FitzGerald replied. ​“In terms of management and organization and making things work, I think it’s a very difficult model” having parks and public works combined.

“It’s very confusing,” Belowsky agreed, especially since, before the city hired Hladun as the new parks director within the parks and public works department, ​“we were without a director for 18 months,” and Pescosolido had to handle all public works and parks matters himself.

Make Parks A Priority, Drop Lifetime Appointments

During Thursday night’s Charter Revision Commission public hearing on the second floor of City Hall, parks advocates spoke up in support of cutting back on the current number of life-time appointments to the city’s Board of Park Commissioners. They also made their case for why the city’s open public greenspaces deserve to be a top priority, and not an afterthought, for City Hall.

Chris Ozyck, a Fair Haven Heights resident and founding president of the Elm City Parks Conservancy, urged the commissioners to recommend reducing the number of lifetime appointments to the city’s parks commission from three to one. He said that the commissioner who gets to have a lifetime appointment should be voted on by his or her fellow commissioners. ​“There’s a wisdom in that long duration, institutional knowledge,” he said. He then said that the two other current lifetime appointments to the parks commission should each be reduced to 10-year terms. 

The people appointed to the parks commission should ​“have qualifications” for those roles, Ozyck continued. ​“I would like to see someone who knows how to read plans,” someone with a background in landscape architecture. ​“I’d like somebody on there to actually have some sort of education related to parks and recreation,” to ​“know where parks are and where they should be going.”

Beyond the issue of appointment durations for the parks commission, Ozyck said, one of his bigger ​“pet peeves” in city government right now is that ​“there’s supposed to be a parks director.” And there’s not. ​“Jeff [Pescosolido] is a great guy,” Ozyck said about the longtime head of the public works department who is now the head of the merged public works-parks department. ​“But he doesn’t have a single focus on parks. He has a lot of things he’s thinking about.”

In written testimony pre-submitted to the Charter Revision Commission, Frank Cochran also spoke out in support of restoring the parks part of City Hall to its own department. ​“We need a section [of the charter] affirming that all parks and open spaces are one Department and not a part of any other Department.”

“As Covid and climate change have made clear,” Cochran continued, ​“very large numbers of people find city parks vital to health, education and recreation, and that New Haven had been blessed with a large and varied number of parks. Parks are open and extensively used everyday. Stewardship and maintenance are core responsibilities for all of us, individually and collectively. The Charter reflects none of that. The result is that during much of my 50+ years as a New Havener, Parks have been underfunded, poorly organized and often left unmanaged. Illegal dumping and homelessness mar our parks. The forest canopy, the most important component for us in responding to climate change, has suffered major loss from high winds. But through all of modern day stresses, more and more diverse subsets of people (and dogs, bicycles, birds etc) meet, greet and care for parks and their adjacent neighborhoods than did before. The Charter needs to contain a governance structure for Parks, Recreation and Trees that reflects these realities.”

In his written testimony, Cochran called for changing the charter’s provisions for the parks commission to make it a 9‑person board that includes representation from different neighborhoods and that has term limits. 

Fellow parks advocate and Edgewood Avenue resident Stephanie FitzGerald wrote in with similar recommendations in her own pre-submitted testimony to the Charter Revision Commission.

“According to the Charter last revised and approved in 2013, I understand there to be two distinct, independent, departments: Parks, Recreation and Trees, and Public Works,” she wrote. ​“Since then Mayor Elicker moved recreation out of Parks, Recreation and Trees to the Youth Services Department renaming it Youth and Recreation Department, and combined Parks and Trees with Public Works with the Director from Public Works, and the Deputy from Parks. I don’t know about the Mayor’s authority for doing this, but I support an independent Parks Department with equal standing to Public Works. Our parks are too important an asset to New Haven not to have their own department.”

FitzGerald also wrote that she supports time-limited appointments for all eight members of the parks commission. ​“Even the Pope and Supreme Court judges shouldn’t be in those positions for their lifetimes,” she wrote.

Also during Thursday’s Charter Revision Commission meeting, West Park Avenue resident and Friends of East Rock Park leader David Shimchick (pictured above) spoke out against lifetime appointments on the parks commission — urging the city to change the three current lifetime appointments to four-year terms each. 

“Even though 95 percent of New Haven residents have access to greenspace, the quality, the safety, the amenities in the spaces varies tremendously,” Shimchick said. That’s why the parks commission should have appointees who hail from different neighborhoods across the city, he said.

Mayor: "What's Most Important Is That The Work Gets Done"

Below is the full email comment provided by Mayor Justin Elicker to the Independent when asked for this article about the ParksFriends’ concerns and calls for a separate parks department.

Our parks are among our most treasured assets and New Haven is blessed with over 100 park locations that total over 2,200 acres and make up 17 percent of the city’s landscape. 

Ninety-six percent of New Haven residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, which far exceeds the national average of 55 percent. 

With the amount of park land we have, it’s also a lot of ground to cover and maintain, which is why we’re grateful for the partnership and assistance of so many parks associations and volunteers who help support our parks staff with clean-ups, upkeep and beatification projects. As someone who used to be very involved in the Friends of East Rock Park, I saw just how important that partnership is between community and the City to keep our parks clean and well maintained. 

During tough budget times in recent years, we’ve been able to protect and maintain the number of parks positions (49) in the city’s budget, which was not the case for all departments. We’ve also been able to make significant new investments and improvements in our parks due to the infusion of $8.3 million in local and state American Rescue Plan funding that have helped build or repair playgrounds, splashpads, ballfields, courts, trails, and other features and structures in parks across the city. We’re also renovating and reactivating formerly underutilized parks buildings with our new Youth and Community Centers that are coming online in Edgewood Park, East Rock Park, East Shore Park, Goffe Street Park, West River Memorial Park, and other locations. 

As for the structure of city departments, I think what’s most important is that the work gets done and we’re committed to doing that in the very best way we can with the resources we have — and we’re thankful for the partnership and assistance of our parks associations and volunteers that give of themselves and their time to help keep our parks great places for residents to use and enjoy.