Maintenance of NYC’s Natural Areas to be Further Challenged by Budget Cuts
Recent budget cuts to the city’s Fiscal Year 2025 “threaten maintenance work that ensures the city’s trees stay healthy in the years ahead;” and since city funding to support positions for natural areas tend to be approved each year, “it puts the roles in limbo from year-to-year, hindering the ability to plan ahead and retain staff. According to a recent press release, “some $2.5 million in funding that supported 51 positions” in the Natural Resources Group parks division that is historically an underfunded team of parks workers who care for the “city’s 10,000 acres of natural areas, more than a third of the city’s parkland” has been cut from the budget adopted in July. Although the city is exploring grant funding to fund some, or all, of the positions in question, a decline in the health of natural areas due to deferred maintenance can be “very hard, if not impossible to reverse” according to reported statements by Sarah Charlton-Powers, executive director of environmental nonprofit the Natural Areas Conservancy. It was further pointed out by the deputy director of the Van Cortland Park Alliance, a nonprofit group the helps care for the more than 600 acres of natural areas throughout the park located in the Bronx, that due to an increased frequency of intense storms, the man hours required to clear fallen debris and ensure trials are safe has increased.