A Tense Time for Parks, Libraries and the Arts

By James Barron

June 24, 2024

Good morning. It’s Monday. The clock is ticking on the city’s budget negotiations. We’ll examine what’s at stake. We’ll also look at how Representative Jamaal Bowman turned to national star power going into the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

By law, the city must have a budget by July 1 — a week from today. Negotiations between City Hall and the City Council are centering on reversing Mayor Eric Adams’s proposed cuts, and the haggling appeared to go slowly last week.

So once again, with the clock ticking and the give-and-take continuing, the last days of June will be tense as supporters of agencies or programs rally their bases.

The mayor acknowledged as much last week when he said that “we should just hold on to old reels of these same conversations.” Switching metaphors, he said that “we’re going to land the plane,” meaning that a budget deal would be reached.

This budget is particularly significant for Adams, a Democrat whose first term will be over at the end of 2025. His first round of budget negotiations in 2022 was less acrimonious, but some City Council members were frustrated over cuts to school budgets and later pushed to restore them. Last year, the negotiations were unusually strained. Adrienne Adams, a Democrat who is the City Council speaker, called the agreement that restored funding for some but not all Council priorities “bittersweet.”

This time around, the Council has made early childhood education a priority. But other targets of cuts have sought to rally support. Arts institutions, from big to small, are worried. The City Council has asked for an additional $53 million; $35 million would come from City Council funds, and Adams’s administration would commit $18 million — roughly the price of a police helicopter, as Ginia Bellafante, The Times’s Big City columnist, pointed out.

Parks advocates also worry about shortchanging the city’s green spaces and the people who work in them. “Post-Covid, more people than ever are using the parks,” said Joseph Puleo, a former urban park ranger who is a vice president of DC 37, the huge public employees’ union that represents 1,800 parks department workers. “Maintenance can barely keep up.”

His point was echoed by Adam Ganser of the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, who noted that Adams often talked about public safety and cleanliness.

“Our parks occupy 14 percent of the city’s land,” Ganser told me last week. Without the workers to make them clean and safe, he said, the city suffers. He sees the budget negotiations as being about quality of life as much as they are about money.

Ganser has said that philanthropic money keeps “marquee parks” like Central Park, Prospect Park and the High Line in “fantastic condition.” The 1,700 other parks are entirely dependent on the city budget.

Libraries have also rallied supporters in an effort to fend off belt-tightening — including cuts of $25.5 million for the New York Public Library and its 92 branches and $32.8 million for the city’s other two library systems, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library. That effort reached far beyond New York last week when Whoopi Goldberg, a host of the morning talk show “The View,” talked about the consequences of closing libraries.

“It has never been more important to keep public libraries wide open and thriving,” she said. “If you close off libraries, you close off people’s ability to not just go and have access to books but to be able to get the internet, to be able to do all kinds of things a lot of us in the world take for granted.”

Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library, said that if the proposed cuts were not reversed, “it would mean moving many of our branches to five-day service, which is just unthinkable.”

He said there were other options, none of them good — such as buying fewer books or deferring maintenance. “Right now we’re facing a summer that looks like it’s going to have record heat,” he told me. “We are the places people come to cool down. We’re going to have air-conditioners breaking down. We’re going to have to close branches because of that.”

City Hall expects the negotiations to be wrapped up by the deadline.

Read the article online at The New York Times