The Plight of the Parks

The Globe covers the plight of Boston's parks as the community tries to fill in for declining city support. Since 2002, the parks maintenance staff has declined from 173 to 152. A parks budget that had increased by a third between 1999 and 2003, was slashed 9 percent the following year.

When Menino announced this year he would give away $250,000 in money left over from the Democratic National Convention for small grants to parks groups this year, 169 applications requesting $475,000 arrived in a matter of weeks.
''That just reflects the fact that there is such an unmet need for capital repairs," said Betsy Johnson, a board member of the Boston GreenSpace Alliance.
Johnson said that even if public funds are short, Menino should use the power of the bully pulpit to solicit large contributions from big donors.
''When he wanted to make sure he defeated the elected school committee, he had no trouble raising over $100,000. When he wanted to have the DNC here, he had no trouble raising from the private sector the $1 million he's now giving away."
Johnson, Boyden, and other park advocates praised the parks department, and its commissioner, Antonia Pollak, for regularly meeting with park groups, helping them apply for grants and responding to their concerns as quickly as they could.

A telling quote comes from Christine Poff, the director of the Franklin Park Coalition:

''It can't all be done by volunteers," she said. ''We don't have a water truck, and we can't drive one. We can't use heavy power equipment. Last year our teenagers moved piles of woodchips that had been sitting there for years -- it took them three six-hour days, with 10 to 12 kids. With equipment, you could come in and do it in an hour, and that's a huge difference. We've experienced the limits of manual labor."

(Betsy Johnson, by the way, is my mom, not the designer.)