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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Joe Puleo, President of DC37 Local 983, on Parks Department Staffing
4:46:57
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162 sec
Joe Puleo, President of DC37 Local 983, testifies about the critical need for increased staffing and funding in various roles within the NYC Parks Department. He emphasizes the importance of urban park rangers, PEP officers, and associate park service workers, highlighting the challenges faced due to understaffing and budget constraints.
- Urban park rangers have decreased from hundreds to under 100, and need to be baselined to prevent layoffs and ensure consistent services.
- PEP officers are understaffed, leading to safety concerns and inability to cover all necessary areas, especially during summer months.
- Associate park service workers (CDL drivers) are difficult to recruit due to non-competitive salaries compared to the market rate.
Joe Puleo
4:46:57
All right.
4:46:57
Thank you.
4:46:58
Thank you for having me.
4:46:59
Thank you, chair.
4:47:00
Thank you, city council people.
4:47:02
My name is Joe Puglio.
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For those of you who don't know me, I am the president of Local nine eighty three.
4:47:07
I represent all the city seasonal aids, the urban park rangers, the pep officers, and the associate park service workers.
4:47:17
Okay.
4:47:17
I'd like to begin by thanking those who have helped us throughout the years, including this particular session.
4:47:23
But we are far from being where we should be.
4:47:26
Our rangers are constantly, constantly, because they are not redlined or baselined as we as we say, they are in jeopardy.
4:47:36
And in in one particular year, they were actually laid off.
4:47:41
Okay?
4:47:42
These rangers, which used to be in the hundreds, are now under a hundred.
4:47:46
We need the restoration.
4:47:48
We need to keep them baseline.
4:47:50
We need additions to what we have.
4:47:52
They provide services.
4:47:55
They provide what's known as preventive maintenance in the sense that they teach our children about parks and how they are important and rather to destroy a aid in the ability for them to get actively involved and actually support support our parks in the future.
4:48:15
Our pep officers are are difficult to hire.
4:48:21
We need they cannot do the demands and needs that the city has for them.
4:48:28
A lot of these PEP officers are now riding by themselves.
4:48:31
And once the summer month comes comes they they come in, they are unable to even cover our parks.
4:48:38
They are dedicated to the beaches, to the pools, including recreation centers.
4:48:45
They cannot perform the job that they are out there simply because there aren't enough of them.
4:48:51
And as for associate park service workers, the CDL drivers, they are equivalent to, the sanitation force in in the city streets.
4:49:01
They provide a service for our parks.
4:49:04
We need more of them too as well.
4:49:07
And they are another title that is difficult to recruit because of what's happening in the outside market.
4:49:13
CDL drivers are high in demand.
4:49:15
The salary that these individuals get does not meet the market rate.
4:49:20
I can go on and on, but I'll end it at that note.
4:49:22
Again, we need more.
4:49:26
You know, this has been the worst that I've seen in twenty seven years where our numbers have dropped dramatically.
4:49:32
So I look forward in the near future for us to see see that this take gets taken care of.