On a cloudy Saturday morning, Cindy Barrera and her dog, Venom, stopped near the corner of East Mosholu Parkway North and 206th Street in Bedford Park and glared at the Heineken beer bottle caps, greasy granola bar wrappers, and spent coffee cups tangled up in a nearby patch of grass.

 

Barrera, a 30-year-old registered nurse, is fed up with the amount of trash dumped along the parkway. It’s a problem that has plagued the area, also known as Mosholu Parkland, for years. “It really [expletive] me off because we have such a beautiful park,” said Barrera. “To see trash laying around is disgusting.”

 

At the Bedford Mosholu Community Association (BMCA) meeting, held on Wednesday, Oct. 6, some residents echoed a frustration not unlike Barrera’s, but theirs was aimed at the New York City (NYC) Department of Parks and Recreation, the city agency responsible for maintaining the parkland.

 

Bedford Park residents say trash is often left on the parkland for days while nearby trash receptacles overflow, and that when garbage is collected, it’s gathered up in black bags that get piled up on the sidewalks, becoming an all-you-can-eat buffet for flies, rats, and raccoons.

 

In theory, the bags are meant to be collected by park employees and then dropped off at a nearby litter corral for removal from the parkland. However, some Bedford Park residents said it’s not unusual for the bags to be left to rot on the sidewalk for weeks.

 

Parks and the NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) share responsibility for maintaining the parkland and surrounding roadways. Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for DSNY, told Norwood News in an email, “[DSNY’s] responsibilities in this area are limited to sweeping and snow removal on the service roads [East Mosholu and West Mosholu Parkway].”

 

Meanwhile, a Parks’ department official told Norwood News, via email, that Parks employees work collaboratively with DSNY to keep the parks, greenspaces, and sidewalks clean.

Norwood News also reached out to the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) to ask if this agency is responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of the parkway roadway. We did not receive an immediate response.

 

Elizabeth Quaranta, acting executive director of Friends of Mosholu Parkland (FOMP) and long-time environmentalist, said at BMCA’s October meeting that the problem isn’t that the trash doesn’t get picked up by Parks’ staff but that it’s done so inconsistently.

 

Quaranta said residents should know the Parks’ department schedule for cleaning the parkway. “The problem [we’re] talking about is that there is no logistics to the actual pick-up,” said Quaranta. “Do they work in the area in the morning? Do they work in the afternoon?”

 

Norwood News raised Quaranta’s questions with the Parks’ department. In response, Dan Kastanis, Park’s press officer, said the department takes “great pride” in the City’s parks, and that the Parks’ team collects trash on the parkland daily, seven days a week. He added that when there is a lapse in service, it’s typically because a piece of essential equipment used to collect trash from the sidewalks is out of order.

 

The Parks’ team was supported by Bedford Park resident, Sirio Guerino, who said at the BMCA Oct. 6 meeting, that it was remarkable to him to hear people saying that Parks’ staff were not doing their job. “I see them every… out there every freakin’ morning, gathering up bags and bags of garbage. Maybe it takes them a long time, but they are working very hard to organize some kind of continuity,” he said.

 

Norwood News has long reported on the community’s frustration with garbage on Mosholu Parkland and elsewhere in the neighborhood, especially around the Fourth of July holiday when the area becomes a hot spot for illegal barbecues, after which people do not always clean up after themselves.

 

The community has also taken aim in the past at the Parks’ department, and for a week or two, the situation improves only for the garbage to return later and the cycle to start all over again. It’s a pattern, Adam Ganser, the executive director for New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy organization, said the community shouldn’t be expected to fix. Instead, he said, it’s a problem that needs dedicated attention and funding from the government.

“The Parks’ department has been woefully underfunded for decades and is often operating on a skeleton staff,” Ganser told Norwood News in a phone interview. “They do a valiant job with the funding that they’re given, but it’s not enough.”

 

According to Ganser, for the last 50 years, the budget allocated to the Parks’ department has been around 0.5 percent of the City’s overall budget, and in July 2021, the city adopted a $98.7 billion budget for the 2022 fiscal year. According to the Mayor’s Office, just $620 million or 0.6 percent has been earmarked for the Parks’ department, which manages over 2,000 parks, equaling roughly 30,000 acres of City parkland.

 

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to New Yorkers for Parks, the City cut $84 million from the Park’s 2021 fiscal year budget, in addition to mandating a hiring freeze across all city agencies. They said these austerity measures were introduced at the same time as social distancing and mask requirements went into effect, making City parks in every borough both essential public spaces for recreation, as well as the safest places for family and friends to gather.

 

“Given what we’ve experienced over the last 18 months, now coming up on two years, it’s critical that these spaces are well maintained,” said Ganser. “We’re not out of the pandemic and these spaces are really the only spaces where life feels normal.”

Recently, in a win for the Parks’ department, New Yorkers for Parks was able to get $80 million restored to the Parks’ department’s 2022 fiscal budget. However, Ganser said the bump in resources is a temporary fix, given that it was made possible by a surplus of federal dollars given to New York State due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Ultimately, Ganser said he believes instituting long-term change that has the power to “flip the script” will only come when communities start looking for a different outcome and become too loud for politicians to ignore.

 

“I don’t mean to imply that communities shouldn’t be in the ear of the Parks’ department because the more they are, the more likely they will see direct action,” said Ganser. “As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”