Philadelphia’s playgrounds and recreation centers get much less funding than those in many other big cities, and parks advocacy groups are calling for a budget bump to help narrow that gap and improve lackluster maintenance and staffing.
Mayor Cherelle Parker often touts a vision of a “cleaner and greener” city, and administration officials say they do want to increase parks funding — although, three weeks after they released their proposed budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, it’s still not entirely clear whether they’re doing so.
Officially, the administration is asking City Council to approve a $77.8 million budget for the Department of Parks & Recreation. That’s about $1.7 million less than the current year’s allocation.
“I want to hear why we’re flat,” Council President Kenyatta Johnson said during a budget hearing last Wednesday. “Because we’re cleaning and greening, [creating] economic opportunity for everybody… During the pandemic, we really utilized Parks & Rec 24 hours a day, from a programming standpoint, to keep our young people occupied.”
The proposed parks budget is also much less than the department’s actual spending this year, which is projected to reach $86.3 million through the end of June. It’s common for city agencies to spend more than initially budgeted over the course of the year as unexpected expenses come up.
However, Parks & Rec officials said this week they expect that the city’s overall spending on parks will actually grow somewhat in the new fiscal year that starts in July. They say that’s not reflected in the department’s budget because some of its responsibilities are being shifted elsewhere, and because they will have unspent money left over to use in the coming year.
In addition, several councilmembers agree on the need to boost Parks & Rec and are likely to ask Johnson to prioritize it when he enters final budget negotiations with the administration in June, Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said.
“If we’re talking clean, green and safe, our parks or recreation centers have to be a part of that vision, and have to be seen as a core strategy for reducing violence, particularly among young people,” Gauthier told Billy Penn. “Since there seems to be some level of agreement among the administration and council about parks and recreation facilities as a key priority, I’m hoping that that budget number can get pushed up.”
Frustration at untapped potential
Philadelphia has been putting more money into extensively renovating parks, playgrounds, rec centers and libraries in the last few years through Rebuild, a program funded by the city’s tax on sweetened beverages.
But residents, advocacy groups and elected officials say that operating funds for day-to-day maintenance of facilities, and to hire park rangers, rec center leaders, and other staff remain well below needed levels.
Councilmembers’ frustration at the poor conditions and untapped potential of park facilities surfaced repeatedly during the Wednesday hearing. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada told Parks & Rec Commissioner Susan Slawson that some rec centers in her district were “disgusting.”
“I just want to be very honest with you. I want to know what we can do to improve the cleanliness of our recreation centers, if we are going to start encouraging our young people to use them,” she said. “I don’t think that we should be spending extra money to do deep cleaning, but a lot of my centers really deserve a deep cleaning, and then maintenance.”
Slawson said her department was working on a plan to institute regular cleaning of centers around the city. “It’s our responsibility to step up and make the changes,” she said. “It’s already in motion for us to make the changes.”
Gauthier noted Philadelphia’s consistently poor showing in the Trust for Public Land’s ranking of urban park systems. The city government spends $56 per resident on parks and recreation, according to the 2023 ranking, far less than in cities like Pittsburgh ($104) and Baltimore ($132).
“As much as we all love Rebuild, I will argue that Rebuild was hundreds of millions of dollars for deferred maintenance as a result of our budgeting decisions over the years,” she said during the hearing. “So what is the administration doing to do more proactive maintenance work so that 20 years from now, we don’t need a Rebuild, because we’re taking care of our assets?”
Slawson responded that the city had streamlined its process for doing major projects by creating a new Office of Capital Projects, which includes Rebuild, and would work to focus funding on the neediest sites.
But she also acknowledged that more money was needed to create the “wonderful” recreation centers and programming that residents deserve.
“If there was an opportunity to get additional funding, we would love to be along the line of Baltimore and New York, and have that type of funding to do the work in our facilities,” she said.
Calls for a big budget boost
Many park supporters, including Parker herself, have called for a substantial boost in Parks & Rec’s budget.
When she was running for mayor, she told an advocacy group she “would like to at least double our investment” in the department by the end of her first term. “This mayor cares, deeply so, about Parks and Recreation…and our FY2025 budget will reflect that,” mayoral spokesman Joe Grace told WHYY News last month.
The Park & Rec Heroes Fund, a coalition of groups formerly called the Philadelphia Parks Alliance, has asked for a $13.2 million departmental budget increase from the current year — $4.4 million more for maintenance and $8.8 million for recreation staffing. That would bring the budget to $92.6 million.
The administration has so far proposed about $77.8 million, but notes some special circumstances that it argues make the figure seem artificially low.
One is that the current year’s operating budget appears relatively high due in part to a pair of one-time items. One is a $2.5 million payment that was subsequently moved into a different capital fund, and the other was a $3 million payment for youth sports.
A Parks Department spokesperson declined to further explain the payments, but it appears from Slawson’s written budget testimony that the $2.5 million is going toward a $10 million renovation project at Simons Recreation Center that Parker pushed for as a councilmember.
Another $1.75 million worth of Parks & Rec staff and supplies is being transferred to the Office of Capital Projects, but will still be used for parks projects.
In addition, Parks & Rec has unspent dollars it can use in the coming year, some for programs and some for staffing, in part because the city has struggled to fill vacant positions, officials said. It’s proposing to budget for 930 full-time positions next year, but as of December only 657 of those positions were filled.
“We received, over the last couple of years, a lot of money from Council, and we’re still trying to spend down those funds,” said Marissa Washington, the department’s deputy commissioner for administration, during the hearing. “We will be fine with the budget that we have for FY25 and being able to provide the services that we need, as long as we can fill our positions.”
“Parks remain a high priority”
With the various budget transfers and unspent monies, councilmembers and other observers said they still aren’t clear on whether the administration is proposing a true cut or increase in spending on parks and recreation.
But some parks advocates said they are so far encouraged by the mayor’s stance on the department’s funding.
“As we understand it, the Parks & Rec budget has not, in fact, been cut, but part of their budget has been moved to different line items,” a Fairmount Parks Conservancy spokesperson said. “Given the wide variety of priorities of this administration, we are pleased that Philadelphia’s parks remain a high priority.”
Consolidating infrastructure spending for various departments in the Office of Capital Projects could bode well for parks, said Ruffian Tittmann, executive director of the Friends of Wissahickon.
“Aparna Palatino, who’s leading the office, is very capable and a great leader for capital projects within parks, so I expect that will continue,” Tittmann said. “It’s one of those new things that you don’t know how it’s going to end up until it’s kind of had a chance to work.”
The Parks & Rec spokesperson said it was important not to look at the department’s budget in isolation but to consider the mayor’s broader agenda, including her creation of a new Office of Clean and Green Initiatives that is working to improve trash collection and street cleaning.
Tittmann concurred, saying that the mayor has committed to “eliminating a big trash problem throughout the city, which is a huge problem on our parkland, and making investments in the budget that support that.”
“There’s a lot of things in the budget that are good for parks,” she said, “though, of course, all of us in the park world would like to see the Parks summary budget line continue to increase.”
