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For Stephanie FitzGerald, proposed changes to the city’s Parks Department are a win for the parks, and the result of committed advocacy. 

A New Haven resident for over four decades, FitzGerald is a dedicated volunteer leader for Friends of Edgewood Park, a neighborhood organization linked with the Urban Resources Initiative that helps maintain the public park a block from her home. In the fall of 2022, FitzGerald and ParksFriends, a revived collective of park volunteers from around the city, began speaking with government officials about how the city could strengthen its Parks Department, a subsection of the Parks and Public Works department. One idea that emerged from these meetings was to separate the Parks Department from Public Works — a proposal included in Mayor Justin Elicker’s recently released budget.

“We had a talk with the mayor about what was important to us and basically, we were saying that particularly parks maintenance really needed support,” FitzGerald recalled from ParksFriends’ first Zoom meeting with Elicker. “I think that kind of changed the trajectory of his thinking.”

Elicker unveiled his city budget proposal for the 2024-25 fiscal year at a press conference last week. The budget will be discussed in a series of public hearings and workshops hosted by the Board of Alders’ Finance Committee throughout March, April and May before it is finalized and passed by the Board of Alders in June.

The mayor’s proposal would restructure the Parks Department with a focus on specialization and split it from the Public Works Department, with which it has been merged since 2020.

“The re-envisioned Parks Department is structured to improve community connection, cleanliness, infrastructure and field performance,” the mayor wrote in the budget. “Aligning operations both regionally and by the department, Parks will be able to focus on performance improvement from both the planning and operations lenses rather than crisis management that has dictated operations in recent years.”

A history of engagement

David Belowski, the chair of the Parks Commission who has served as a commissioner since 1993, said that the mayor’s decision to merge the Parks and Public Works departments in 2020 was motivated by a desire to “save taxpayers some money.”

Several Connecticut municipalities do have a merged Parks and Public Works Department, which could cut down on costs by having the two divisions share equipment and leadership, FitzGerald said.

“Sometimes it works, like in the town of Woodbridge, a town of 20,000 people,” Belowski said.  “Versus in the City of New Haven, it really didn’t work out.”

Belowski believes that the merged department encountered difficulties in combining employees belonging to two different union bargaining units. Parks Department employees are represented by UPSEU Local 424’s Parks and Blue Collar bargaining unit, while Public Works Department employees are represented by Local 424’s Public Works Laborers unit.

The different duties laid out by the two union contracts, Belowski said, kept the department’s responsibilities divided.

“If Public Works goes into parks to pick up trash, that’s against union rules,” Belowski said, as an example. “Parks employees are supposed to do that.”

FitzGerald did not see a drastic change in the Parks Department’s efficiency once the two departments were merged. Additionally, the merger did not help the chronic maintenance issues that the parks faced.

“Things certainly didn’t get better,” FitzGerald said. “To tell you the truth, to me, things were not good before because they’ve been underfunded for so long.”

From years of volunteering in New Haven parks, FitzGerald observed that the city has an incredible amount of greenspace, yet insufficient investment in maintaining it.

ParkScore, a park-rating index used by the Trust for Public Land to analyze a city’s park system, gave New Haven a score of 60.4 out of 100 in September 2021. ParkScore’s report notes that 96 percent of New Haven residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park — a major strength. However, New Haven’s park amenities and acreage rank “among the middle of the pack,” indicating that there is room to improve what residents enjoy once they get to the parks.

The report, which was produced one year after the merger and one year before ParksFriends’ meeting with Elicker, suggests that the biggest opportunity to improve New Haven’s park system is to increase the total investment in park and recreation facilities. It further notes that New Haven ranks among the lowest third of the country’s most populated cities in terms of spending per resident on Parks.

Both Belowski and FitzGerald described decades of gradual cuts to the Parks Department’s staff. When Belowski joined the commission, the separate Parks Department had over 110 employees. The current Parks staff amounts to 56, just over half of that number.

As concerns about maintenance grew, FitzGerald leaned into her network of Friends of Edgewood Park and volunteer groups at other New Haven parks — collectively, an email list community called ParksFriends — to begin advocating for the City to allocate more resources to parks.

“We were advocating mostly for more support for parks in last year’s budget, and secondarily, for separating Parks from Public Works,” FitzGerald recalled. “But our primary advocacy was really for more positions to maintain the parks better.”

Although FitzGerald did not personally view unmerging as a perfect solution, she described that many ParksFriends volunteers and parks commissioners were in favor of a separate department from the outset.

Budget revamps Parks, encourages specialization

The budget proposes 10 new positions to be created to run the department, and 56 positions to be transferred from existing departments — primarily the present Parks and Public Works Department. An Executive Director will be supported by two deputies — one focused on operations and the second on planning. The department will also hire an Administration and Finance manager.

When the Parks and Public Works Departments were merged in 2020, the City created the Youth and Recreation Department to house the former Parks Department’s recreation division. According to Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Rebecca Bombero, who oversees the Parks and Public Works Department and served as the director of the independent Parks Department from 2013 to 2020, the proposal for the Parks Department will not restore the old department’s full recreation division but does bring back its Outdoor Recreation component — activities that serve residents of all ages, not only youth.

For FitzGerald, the choice to keep parts of the Recreation Department with the Youth Department complicates the plan to unmerge.

“Now that’s a little sticky,” she said, of Recreation. “Who’s going where, when it becomes Parks again?”

According to the budget proposal, several recreation-related positions will be transferred from the Youth and Recreation Department to the new Parks Department, such as the outdoor adventure coordinator and rangers, whom the coordinator oversees.

The rangers will now be supported by three park district managers who will each oversee one of the city’s three Parks “districts” and act as a point-person for their district’s residents. The district manager model is similar to the city’s current organizational structure for the New Haven Police Department, which has four district managers overseeing ten districts, and the Livable Communities Initiative, which has nine neighborhood specialists. 

The existing Parks Maintenance division will be split into three specialty areas to “help build the workforce capacity and improve focus,” according to the budget. The Parks Grounds division will focus on trash, cleaning and grass maintenance and will identify infrastructure needs. The Facilities and Projects division, in charge of building maintenance, will focus on maintaining aging infrastructure. Lastly, the Athletics and Fields division, responsible for sports-related maintenance, will further specialize by creating four new roles: an assistant superintendent will oversee scheduling and planning for the Board of Education Athletics, Recreation and Leagues, a field foreperson will take the lead on field maintenance and two new field technicians will “excel in field preparations.”

The budget proposes that the new Parks Department’s total cost will be $6,923,024. An additional $291,065 will be allocated to the department in special funds, which are federal grants the city anticipates receiving but have not yet secured.

The newly separate public works agency was allocated a budget of $16,835,820. The budget proposes two new positions and 111 transferred from the current merged department.

Parks people prepare for budget process

Before unveiling the budget, the Mayor’s office held meetings with residents engaged with the Parks department beginning in December 2023, Belowski said.

“It’s really the public that really is pushing this through,” Belowski said. “It’s very nice of the mayor to listen to these meetings and what they came up with and put it into fruition.”

Belowski expects that the Board of Alders will support the proposal.

Earlier this week, two alders on the Finance Committee told the News they would need to closely examine the proposed staffing increases, though Alder Adam Marchand also praised Elicker for focusing on Parks. Last year, the Board rejected 25 of the 34 positions Elicker created, including four of the seven positions that would fall under a Parks Department.

Bombero told the News that she will help deliver the Parks presentation at upcoming budget hearings because the department does not currently have a director. She echoed Belowski’s belief that the public reaction will be favorable.

“As the inspiration for many of these changes came from the outreach and engagement process stewarded by URI, I anticipate that feedback will be positive,” she wrote.

FitzGerald also plans to attend the budget hearings, something she does every year.

Although members of ParksFriends plan to testify, the group has not yet decided whether they will present a collective objective, or have members speak individually about their own specific concerns.

“We have to get our act together and go over there and, and advocate for what’s important to us,” FitzGerald said.

The first of three public hearings on the budget will take place on Thursday, March 14.