Merritt Birnbaum
6:33:07
My name is Mary Burnbaum.
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I'm the president and CEO of Riverside Park Conservancy.
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We are here to join with our play fair colleagues and demand the mayor fulfill his promise of 1% of the budget for parks.
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Our district at Riverside is responsible for six miles 150 acres of public green space.
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We work alongside our colleagues in the parks department to care for 5 parks.
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That are critical to the health and happiness of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers on the west side Harlem and Washington Heights.
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Our parks are in crisis.
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We see it every day.
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We see the bathrooms that are closed at 3 PM.
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We see the overflowing trash cans on a Sunday afternoon.
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We see it in the graffiti, in the acts of vandalism, and I wanna be clear that This is not because parks workers aren't doing their jobs above and beyond the call of duty.
6:34:00
It is because there are simply not enough of them.
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The vast majority of parks don't have conservancies to help them, so our situation only underscores how dire this really is.
6:34:13
What does it mean to cut the parts budget?
6:34:15
Well, this year, it means somewhere between 600 and 900 fewer workers as we've heard But as you know, we are suffering from year after year of neglect and underfunding.
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15 years ago in our district in River side, at this time of year, we had 79 CPWs working in our park.
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Right now, we have about 20.
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And we're still waiting to hear what the next couple of months will bring.
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As you know, they do everything in our park They do all of the things that no one in the city wants to do picking up trash, cleaning out overflowing toilets.
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They are the frontline of the parts department.
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And in our district alone, they fall into about 25% of what they were 15 years ago.
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It's a disgrace It's a disgrace that 5 decades ago.
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There were 7000 of these workers, and now there are 4000 of them despite the fact that we have 200 more parks than we did 5 decades ago.
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This mayor needs to fund parks.
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He needs to fund the staff that we need.
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If you dance for sanitation and safety.
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He needs to take care of the sanitation and safety of our green spaces.
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This is a rounding error as we've heard over and over again, but it means the world for the parks and the staff that we need to care for them.
