The city has an average of just 44 Parks Department staffers per borough caring for New York’s trees, and just 62 workers managing the park system’s forests, wetlands and other natural areas, numbers that the City Council and parks advocates called woefully inadequate.
The Department of Parks and Recreation revealed the numbers at a City Council committee hearing Thursday, following a Crain’s report that the Adams administration had quietly cut staff caring for city forests last year.
“If we want to protect our trees and our forests from the wildfires that we have seen happen across our city, then we need to invest in our parks workers and the areas of the budget that care for these things,” said Queens City Council member Shekar Krishnan, who chairs the Council’s parks and recreation committee, during a Thursday Council budget hearing.
The greenery mitigates the effects of climate change and allows New Yorkers to access nature, council members said. Last fall was an unusually intense fire season for the city, with a record 271 brush fires in a single two-week period, FDNY data shows.
For Fiscal Year 2026, the Adams administration has proposed a budget of $640.4 million for the Department of Parks and Recreation. The figure is a $22.3 million increase to the agency’s budget compared to the one adopted for the previous fiscal year.
But the additional cash does not restore recent cuts, such as the loss of $2.5 million in Fiscal Year 2025 for roughly 50 positions to manage the city’s forests. Agency-wide budget cuts last year also nixed plans to hire 50 staffers for the city’s Tree Risk Management program for the care of trees on streets and in parks. There are 220 workers currently caring for city trees in the agency’s forestry division.
“We certainly don’t have the personnel to care for our trees — nobody can doubt that,” said Queens council member Robert Holden, who also runs a conservancy in his district to raise funds and help maintain Juniper Valley Park. “What happens when storms hit and there aren’t enough workers to clear dangerous fallen trees?” added Holden.
Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue said that the agency works with volunteer-driven park conservancies and other entities, such as public-private partnerships, to help fill gaps.
“There is no doubt, as a commissioner, we always welcome more resources to do our work, certainly,” she said. “And that’s where we rely so heavily on volunteers and partners and other entities we’ve worked really closely with to ensure more assistance and more help for our tree care.”
Mayoral spokeswoman Liz Garcia said the Adams administration is investing in the city’s park system to make it cleaner and safer for New Yorkers, including with a $18 million investment to expand cleaning at 64 parks. Related to trees, Garcia said the city has also kicked in $924,000 to hire 12 additional staff to visit and clean up tree beds per year to help reduce the city’s rat population and to help address maintenance requests from the public. “We remain dedicated to making meaningful investments to make sure our parks remain our city’s greatest backyards,” said Garcia.
The Adams administration’s budget proposal for the Parks Department is a record high dollar amount to run the city’s 30,000 acres of parkland, but represents about 0.60% of the city’s $115 billion preliminary budget — well short of the 1% of the city’s budget that the mayor pledged as a candidate.
Mayoral administrations, for decades, have generally shrunk the share of the city’s budget that funds the Parks Department. The last time the agency’s budget neared 1% of the city’s budget was in 1977, when the Parks Department’s funds represented 0.98% of the city’s budget under then-mayor Abraham Beame, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. Former Mayor Ed Koch dropped the agency’s budget to 0.71% due to a city financial crisis at the time. By 1990, David Dinkins’ administration decreased parks funding to 0.65% of the budget, and in 2000 it had slumped to 0.52% under Rudy Guiliani’s leadership, IBO data shows.
Other major cities, meanwhile, have increased their spending on parks. Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago — cities with significantly less parks than New York — allocate between 1.5% to 4.0% of their budgets to park operations and maintenance, according to research from New Yorkers for Parks, a research and advocacy organization dedicated to city green space.
Park advocacy organizations, including the Natural Areas Conservancy and The Nature Conservancy, are calling on the Adams administration to kick in recurring funding to hire and maintain additional parks workers to care for the city’s trees.
“Disappointingly, the level of funding allocated to our forests in the Fiscal Year 2026 preliminary budget makes clear that City Hall is not meeting the moment with the urgency and investment it requires,” said Emily Walker, the senior manager of external affairs at the Natural Areas Conservancy, “despite the immeasurable benefits they provide.”
