Thomas Breen photo
Acting Director Rebecca Bombero: Consultant-led process "could lead to a reconfiguration" of parks-public works.
The Elicker administration is moving towards a potential un-merging of the parks and public works departments — or an entirely different parks-service setup altogether — by seeking a consultant to host community conversations around how City Hall should tend its public greenspaces.
Acting Director of Parks & Public Works Rebecca Bombero delivered that news Wednesday night during the latest monthly meeting of the Board of Park Commissioners, which was held in-person at 720 Edgewood Ave.
Bombero concluded her director’s report to the commission by noting that, this upcoming weekend, the mayor’s office will be putting out a request for proposals (RFP) for a consultant “to help think about the structure of the parks and public works departments and make a decision with community input,” and guidance from the parks commission, “so that we can chart a path forward.”
At Wednesday's parks commission meeting.
Can you elaborate on that? Parks Commissioner Harvey Feinberg asked.
“The consultant will be tasked with a community engagement process to figure out the best structure of the parks and public works departments,” Bombero replied.
So, Feinberg continued, “to translate what you said, is [Mayor Justin Elicker] considering splitting” the two departments?
Yes, Bombero responded to Feinberg and to a similar question asked by fellow Parks Commissioner Kenya Adams-Martin. She said the coming consultant-led community engagement process “could lead to a reconfiguration that could be splitting, staying the same, going back to the way it used to be.”
Parks Commissioners Carl Babb and Harvey Feinberg.
What Bombero, Feinberg, and Adams Martin were all referring to was Mayor Elicker’s proposal and the Board of Alders’ approval more than three years ago to merge 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 then-longtime public works director, Jeff Pescosolido (who has subsequently retired and been replaced in an acting capacity by Bombero, who is also the city’s deputy chief administrative officer).
That same parks-public workers merger 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 and current department director Gwendolyn Busch-Williams.
That merger has sparked sustained pushback from parks friends groups and advocates across the city for depriving New Haven’s public greenspaces of the dedicated and focused City Hall departmental attention they deserve. Throughout this year’s mayoral race, challengers to Elicker, a two-term incumbent and former community garden nonprofit leader, have repeatedly criticized the mayor for the merger — and have joined parks groups in calling for the two merged departments to be re-split.
At a pre-Democratic mayoral primary debate earlier this month, both Elicker and intra-primary challenger Liam Brennan both said “Yes” when asked if the city should undo the parks-public works merger. Elicker has also said publicly that he now believes the merger of parks and public works was a mistake.
Commissioner Kenya Adams-Martin and Chair David Belowsky.
On Wednesday, Adams Martin, fellow parks commissioners, and attendees at the monthly parks board meeting applauded Bombero’s remarks that the consultant-hired community engagement process could lead to the re-splitting of parks and public works.
Bombero said that RFPs are generally posted for two weeks; depending on the number of respondents and reviews and interviews, a consultant could be hired to begin that work by late fall or early winter. Asked by Feinberg if the whole consultant-led process should take months to complete, or a year or more, Bombero replied, “I don’t think it would be a yearlong process.”
Adams Martin then pressed Bombero on why exactly a consultant is needed to undo the merge.
“Was a consultant hired to make this merge?” Adams Martin asked.
“I think it was a decision by the mayor,” Parks Commission Chair David Belowsky said.
“If no consultant was hired to make it, why we got to hire a consultant to unmake it?” Adams Martin asked.
“Because the mayor has an ego,” Belowsky answered with a smile, to laughs and a spirited response from the room. He then agreed with Adams Martin’s line of critique: “It makes no sense.”
Adams Martin turned back to Bombero to elaborate on that line of thinking. She said she likes to keep things simple. “You either have it, or you don’t. You either get it, or you can’t.”
“You either make the putt, or you miss it,” Belowsky added.
Belowsky: "We feel that it should be separate."
Belowsky concluded that part of the meeting by telling Bombero a message to relay to the mayor on this front.
“We feel that it should be separate,” he said about the parks and public works departments. “It hurt the morale of the parks department to put it togeher, and it probably will improve the morale if it’s separate. That’s our opinion, and you can bring it to the mayor.”
Mayor Elicker: "We want to do this in a thoughtful way."
Asked on Thursday morning to elaborate on this plan to bring on a consultant to rethink the parks and public works department, Elicker said, “the goal here is to get community feedback and feedback from city staff and other stakeholders as to what opportunities may exist if we do some restructuring.”
“It’s important for us not just to focus on, ‘We need to do back to the way it was before,’ with parks and public works separate,” Elicker continued. This is instead an opportunity to “think about: Are there other opportunities here for us to improve services to our parks in the city.”
Are there city positions that should be changed or created? “We want to do this in a thoughtful way. I think there’s an opportunity for a facilitator to help us with that process.”
Asked to respond to Adams Martin’s critique that the merger was made without a consultant, so there’s no need for a consultant to un-merge, Elicker repeated, “This is an opportunity for us to do this thoughtfully and see if there’s more opportunities come out with something even better.”
As for Belowsky’s comment about his ego, the mayor said, “Let’s not call names. We all have the same goal.”
The merging of these two departments never made any sense.... the services the public gets from both of these departments has diminished since the 'marriage'....
But that's what you get using 'bean-counter management theory' --
Everything always looks great on paper, we will always be told how great the future is going to be!!!!