New York City Council Committee on Parks & Recreation

Monday, March 23, 2026

Oversight Hearing – FY27 Preliminary Budget Hearing for NYC Parks

Adam Ganser, Executive Director

My name is Adam Ganser, I am the Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P), a 100-year-old independent not for profit research and advocacy organization focusing solely on New York City’s parks and open space system. We started the Play Fair for Parks Coalition, which includes over 400 organizations across the city, all demanding more investment in our parks.

At NY4P, we have grand ambitions for New York City’s green spaces. Parks are an essential part of an affordability agenda – they are free, they are democratic, and they are critical to quality of life in this city. New York City should have the best parks system in the country.

But New York is missing the mark. Our parks system continues to slide down the ranking of urban parks systems nationally and there is a dramatic inequity in access to well maintained parks. Our city’s leaders are entirely to blame for that inequity – and the mayor has the power to change this trajectory.

The first step is to invest in parks workers – the men and women who clean and maintain our city’s parks.

The mayor’s preliminary budget does not do that, nor does it move the needle on the mayor’s promise to dedicate 1% of the city budget to Parks.

Instead, the preliminary budget leaves nearly 300 existing one-shot (one year contract) parks jobs in limbo. These are critical parks positions: Parks Enforcement Patrol, Urban Park Rangers, Forestry, and more. By not baselining these positions, the mayor has opted to continue the budget dance that toys with the livelihood of working New Yorkers and perpetuates basic maintenance challenges that have come to define our parks system.

The mayor’s budget also does nothing to address the significant staffing losses, some 600 staffing lines, that the agency has lost since 2023 due to PEG cuts and the hiring freeze. The loss of these full-time baselined positions has had a negative impact on every division of the agency.

In addition, while the administration has signaled its intent to lift the hiring freeze, terms require that the parks department eliminate some 100 vacant positions. Again, these are full time baselined staffing lines that will disappear.

This hearing is the first step in the budget process and we remain extremely concerned, while also optimistic that this administration and the city council will change course. We look to the city council to hold the mayor accountable to his commitments, and to commit itself to funding our city’s parks system.