City Council members pressed administration officials over the declining budget of the Department of Parks and Recreation at a hearing Monday, questioning the agency about its contracts and its efforts to recruit for key positions like lifeguards. 

Out of Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed $106.7 billion budget plan for the coming fiscal year, the parks department funding makes up $610.4 million — an increase of about $27.7 million from Adams’ first budget proposal in January, but still down about $37 million from spending on parks in the current fiscal year.

Councilman Shekar Krishnan, who chairs the council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation, said that the budgeted amount was far less than the 1% of the city’s budget that Adams had committed to allocating for the parks department during his mayoral campaign. 

“We have seen reduction after reduction,” Krishnan said. “Now, we are regressing, and stepping backwards.”

The council’s formal response to Adams’ first spending plan included a request for the administration to add 1,000 additional entry level positions in the parks department on top its current 4,600 headcount, at an estimated cost of $46 million. The current plan added back 112 positions. 

Parks Commissioner Sue Donahue said that the agency has cut its budget primarily by eliminating unfilled positions, such as lifeguards and tree pruners — two positions that she said the city is struggling to find candidates for. The cuts were required as part of Adams’ Program to Eliminate the Gap, or PEG, which calls for 4% operating cost cuts across all city agencies. 

“We have seen a significant challenge that is not unique to New York at all,” she said of hiring lifeguards. 

With the summer swim season getting underway next week, the agency has hired about 500 lifeguards, Donahue said. She said she expects to be able to hire about as many lifeguards as the city had last year, around 800, although fully staffing beaches and pools would require more than 1,400 lifeguards. 

The shortage in 2022 led to canceled lap swim hours and swim education programs. This summer, Donahue said, the department is bringing Learn to Swim classes back to a “small subset” of city pools “in a limited capacity.”

Donahue said that reducing the department’s vacant positions “doesn’t directly impact” efforts to keep parks clean and well-maintained. 

Yet council members noted that the administration’s own reporting showed that the parks department pruned 73% fewer trees from July to October of 2022 compared with the same period in 2021, due to delays in registering pruning contracts with vendors. 

They also questioned why the department renewed its contract with Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping, even though the firm pleaded guilty in October to evading more than $1.2 million in insurance premiums while repairing city roads and sidewalks. 

“This is not a contractor that the parks department should be working with,” Krishnan said. He added that the firm had mistakenly cut down a healthy tree in his own district in Queens, frustrating residents.

Donohue responded, saying the department is “constantly monitoring our contractors.”

“A tree coming down accidentally is obviously something that's devastating for us,” she said. “I can assure you that we are taking this incident very seriously, and will take action to hold the responsible party accountable.”