Parks Department Nearly Doubling Its Number Of Park Officers

The New York City Parks Department maintains more than 1,700 parks in the city, including 950 playgrounds, 700 playing fields, 550 tennis courts, 14 miles of beaches, 13 golf courses, seven nature centers, six ice skating rinks, four zoos, four botanical gardens and more across 28,000 acres. So naturally in the past few years the number of Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) officers has gone from low to almost nonexistent. Finally, though, that trend is ending. The city is getting ready to nearly double the number of PEP officers this year.

City Parks Commissioner Veronica White yesterday announced that the Parks Department would be hiring 81 PEP with the plan to hire an additional 24 officers for so-called "contract parks." In addition,

The City is also hiring 200 City Park Workers and 30 Climbers and Pruners for the severally understaffed agency. The Bloomberg administration has allowed the ranks of Climbers and Pruners to go down to less than 100 to care for the city's more than 2.5 million trees.

200 City Seasonal Aids (CSA's) are also being hired for Jamaica Bay as part of the joint National Park Service and city initiative. The City is reportedly receiving $ 11 million dollars as part of a $ 22 million Federal grant to clean the waterways.

The uptick in PEP officers is welcome news, as in the last decade the Parks Department has seen their ranks drop faster than a dead tree limb on a windy day. In the 1990s there were 450 PEP working the city but recently those numbers have dropped below 90. At a City Council hearing last year then Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe admitted the department had lost 42 percent of its officers since 2008!

So why the change of heart? You can reportedly thank PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Though Parks had been asking for for funding for additional officers, A Walk In The Park reports that the okay only came after the Bloomberg administration had the PriceWaterhouse gang come and take a look at department's "workforce model."

Still, better late than never? "These new officers will patrol parks in all of the five boroughs, and will almost double the number of city-funded officers that we have on patrol," a Parks Department spokesman said in a statement. "After training, we’re expecting to have all of these officers out in the parks by the middle of the summer."