BP Markowitz Urges Mayor and City Council Not To Cut Parks Funds At a press conference at City Hall last

Tuesday, Borough President Markowitz and New Yorkers for Parks, a Citywide parks advocacy group, called on the Mayor and City Council to keep parks from falling into further disrepair because of budget cuts.

The mayor's Preliminary Budget proposal released in February proposes a 13% reduction in parks spending, which comes to approximately $20 million. The Department of Parks and Recreation already is operating with what is essentially a skeleton staff , having absorbed a 60% reduction in staffing since 1972.
In Brooklyn, the full-time Parks Department staff is already overwhelmed. There are:

• 157 park workers, or one for every 20.6 acres;
• Three recreational directors, or one for nearly 198,000 children;
• 4 pruners for hundreds of thousands of street and park trees;
• 20 Park Enforcement Patrol Officers, or one for every 162 acres;
• Six plumbers to maintain 363 bathrooms and 772 drinking fountains;
• Only one gardener for 3,240 acres of parkland.

    This means that at any given time, half of the water fountains in Brooklyn's parks don't work and more than half of the bathrooms are out of service. (In 1963, there were 840 bathroom attendants citywide. Now there are none.)
    While over 50,000 New Yorkers volunteer their time to help maintain our parks, volunteers cannot be expected to fix broken plumbing or re-pave cracked asphalt. The basic maintenance of parks is the City's responsibility.
    BP Markowitz and New Yorkers for Parks are urging enactment of law that will mandate a minimum level of park maintenance and services. Just as Emergency Medical Service calls must be responded to within seven minutes and Sanitation must pick up garbage at least once a week, New Yorkers should know that if a park water fountain is broken, it will be fixed within a certain amount of time. They also are urging enactment of legislation to allow the Parks Department to retain the tens of millions of dollars in funding it generates at park properties, instead of putting it into the City's General Fund. Finally, they are calling on the administration to restore as much Parks funding as possible to the Fiscal Year 2003 budget, to ensure adequate basic maintenance.
    BP Markowitz said that good parks are a necessity for many Brooklynites: "Most people can't summer in the Hamptons or the mountains. They rely on our parks." He also called on the corporate sector to step up their support of the park system.

BP Markowitz Jumps Into the Ring
    As soon as the UniverSoul Circus came to Brooklyn for its annual run, Borough President Markowitz got ready to join in the fun. UniverSoul - the only African-American owned, produced and performed circus in the nation - is oriented toward urban families, combining a mix of soul, hip-hop, jazz and blues with acrobatics, contortionists and African dance sequences.

Last Wednesday, Borough President Markowitz was honored to serve as Guest Ringmaster alongside Ringmaster "Casual Cal" Dupree and his sidekick Zeke. UniverSoul will perform in Prospect Park until April 21.

"Lighten Up, Brooklyn" Gearing Up
    Borough President Markowitz's goal of getting Brooklyn to lose 2.5 million pounds - one for each resident - has been getting a lot of attention: locally, nationally and internationally. Last week he appeared on NBC Nightly News hosted by Tom Brokaw, spoke to the BBC, chatted with Brian Lehrer on WNYC and granted interviews to many other radio stations.
    The "Lighten Up Brooklyn" campaign will kick off in mid-April and continue for eight weeks. There will be weigh-in stations at hospitals, Y's, health clinics, and government offices all over Brooklyn, including at Borough Hall, where residents can register for the program and have their weight recorded. There will also be numerous workshops offered to the public regarding nutrition and exercise, a hotline to call at Borough Hall, and special healthy-choices offered on the menus of various restaurants. Borough President Markowitz, understanding the fierce loyalty Brooklynites feel for their neighborhoods, has decided to make this a contest among communities: who can lose more weight per capita: Flatbush or Bensonhurst, East New York or Red Hook? Stay tuned.

We Have E-Mail!
    Borough Hall staff finally have their own e-mail addresses. So far, members of the Executive Staff can be e-mailed at the following addresses @brooklynbp.org. Additional staff will become e-mailable soon.

• Marty Markowitz: marty
• Yvonne Graham, Deputy Borough President: ygraham
• Michael Burke Chief-of-Staff: mburke
• Jon Benguiat, Director of Planning & Development: jbenguait
• Philip Bornstein, Director of Administration: pbornstein
• Scott Cotten, Director of Management Information Systems: scotten
• Seth Cummins, General Counsel: scummins
• Carolyn Greer, Director of Special Events: cgreer
• Iris Mule, Director of City Services: imule
• Erik Paulino; Director of Constituent Services: epaulino
• George Synefakis, Borough Engineer: gsynefakis
• Glenn von Nostitz, Director of Communications: gvn

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BP's Daily News op-ed today by BP Markowitz tells why borough president's Board of Ed
appointment power should be retained:

Monday, March 25, 2002