The public/private partnership is idea that is getting some play. I see two big advantages to this. The big one for me is that the agency would have community gardener representation on the board of directors — helping, but not guaranteeing, accountabiity to grassroots community gardeners. The other advantage is potentially more capacity to fundraise to support the city’s resource-strapped community garden program. There would still be a role for GreenThumb, the Department of Parks and Recreation agency charged with the city’s community garden program, especially for community gardens on land held by Parks.

The last big push for a city policy was in 2002, and it was actually a legislative approach. I uploaded a PDF of the legislation, which was docketed as Intro 206 in the City Council. This page on the Municipal Art Society site is an OK account of what went down. It’s interesting to note the parties responsible for drafting and promoting the legislation:

[...]a coalition of greening and planning organizations including the MAS, Green Guerillas, Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, New Yorkers for Parks and the New York League of Conservation Voters, among others [...]

Notice that community gardeners themselves aren’t included in the mix, even though the New York City Community Garden Coalition was around at the time, along with More Gardens! and several other local community garden coalitions. The drafting team’s approach to involving community gardeners was to host an after-the-fact “kick-off” meeting to introduce the final legislation to community gardeners and get them involved in calling their council people to support it. (Gee, thanks guys.)

At the time I was disgusted with the process and had grave concerns about the legislation itself. I found myself at odds with other activists, who I guess felt it was ‘the best we could get.’ In 2002, there was still a deep residue of trusting the consortium of paternalistic greening groups. I bit the bullet and went to the kick-off meeting, which was held at the Citizens Committee and facilitated by one of their staff people, who was clearly in on the fix. When I tried to speak the facilitator shot me down. Even activists who disagreed with me felt that I had been disrespectfully treated. I bring this up only to point out the hostility by the bills promoters to grassroots voices that attempted to raise questions and concerns.

And of course I wasn’t the only person with concerns. Others had them, too– mostly about the actual process for preserving community garden land. The bill’s primary mechanism was to transfer the land to a land trust through the ULURP process. ULURP is an unbelievably cumbersome and potentially expensive process. Don’t believe me? Try wrapping your brain around this. Even though the Municipal Art Society says the process would have bypassed ULURP and used UDAP instead, I don’t find that in the actual text of the proposal. This is the pertinent section of the legislation:

1. GreenThumb shall establish, with the approval of the City Planning Commission, a procedure through which registered Garden Groups shall have the opportunity to apply via the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), Section 197-c of the New York City Charter, for permanent garden status through transfer of title of such property to the GreenThumb Garden Trust, under the jurisdiction of the City Department of Parks and Recreation. [...]

The legislation never went anywhere. This article in the Village Voice does a good job of pointing out some of the grassroots concerns with the bill, while also doing an unfair hatchet job on Edie Stone, the then and current director of GreenThumb. Edie is somebody who deeply cares about community gardens and the people who grow them.

What ultimately killed the bill was a better deal for community gardeners. This deal was hammered out about between New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and the new Bloomberg administration. The idea was that the temporary agreement would give the city breathing room to come up with an equitable permanent community garden policy.

Well, the term of the agreement has passed, and the city still has no permanent policy in place. There seems to be a developing consensus for the partnership agency idea which is similar to the GreenThumb spin-off private/public agency idea in the 2002 legislation. Which is ironic. In pondering it, I keep coming back to three key differences between the 2002 legislation and the current idea:

• Inclusion of, and accountability to, community gardeners
• No evil garden-by-garden ULURP process
• A commitment to not privatizing public land

If this idea does gain traction, its success will rest on whether community gardeners really are meaningfully included in both the creation and direction of the new organization.

Dick-head Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, true to form, wrote an Op Ed for the New York Post (!) that completely misrepresented the issue. Times Up! responded brilliantly — couldn’t say it better myself. Their photos on Flickr of the hearing are pretty great, too.

Park Department Commissioner Adrian Benepe disagreed, saying that the rules were meant to protect gardens and the language could be tweaked to reflect the concerns. Still, the gardens can’t be made permanent, as they can sometimes cause complaints from neighbors and the city needs to hold open the option of other uses, he said.

“There is not a universal love of gardens,” said Benepe, who said no garden is currently on the chopping block. “There are no bulldozers being warmed up.”

This is a very irresponsible statement from a someone who is charged with protecting and sustaining the city’s open green space. What he’s trying to do is set up a good garden/bad garden dynamic, which is very paternalistic. Following his line of reasoning, if a garden gets complaints, the community loses the garden. As a long time community gardener, I know that many times complaints are unjustified, and reflect an unfortunate phobia against nature, or a petty clash of aesthetics — as if that doesn’t happen with “official” parks (hello, Washington Square). When a complaint is justified, GreenThumb has the ability to take corrective action, even leading to giving the license to another garden group. To go from complaint to development is harsh beyond measure, and reflects Benepe’s bias towards privatization and elite patrician sensibilities.

Here’s an excerpt from privitatizationwatch.org, that I found informative:

NY: The high cost of free parks Public-private partnerships are widely touted as the new model for cities to build and maintain parkland, but they’re old news in New York. The Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980, has inspired similar groups in cities from Atlanta to San Francisco. Yet even in a time of leaner government budgets, a cautionary tale can be found in New York’s 36-year experience of putting public parks into private hands. The city says private investment allows it to target limited taxpayer resources to the parks most in need, creating what parks commissioner Adrian Benepe has repeatedly hailed as a “Golden Age for Parks.” But others see a Gilded Age instead, an echo of Conkling’s era in the reign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with wide — and growing — disparities between lavish, showplace parks for the haves and cast-off parcels for the have-nots. For every Madison Square, Bryant Park or High Line, there are hundreds of parks that depend solely on the city, and many suffer from scandalous neglect. “New York has created a two-tier parks system,” complains Geoffrey Croft, president of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates. “One for the rich, the other for the poor.”

Community gardens, which are frequently the only open space resource that many poor communities have and are very much a combination of parkland, community centers, food pantries, and educational centers. Not only should we be demanding to make community gardens permanent, we should be demanding more resources for them, including funding for community organizing.

Question: Is Benepe being truthful when he says the patrician organizations that fund the lavish appointments of places like the Highline, Madison Square Park, and Central Park — and I would say Prospect Park — allow resources to be channeled to parks in low income communities. I suspect that they use a disproportionate share of Parks Dept. resources on top of what they raise. And I also suspect there’s never been any question that the money they raise be tithed to help support green space in low income communities. Anybody know?

Click to enlarge

The big political moment was when Christine Quinn spoke. She’s a shifty one. While I believe that, unlike Giuliani, she doesn’t have an idealogical bent against community gardens, her primary interest is in her career and appeasing her powerful supporters, including Bloomberg. In her speech, she talked not about making current gardens permanent, but about making the program permanent. She also plugged her office’s crappy rules. I have a video of it, but I need to learn how to convert from AVI to a format that WordPress likes.

Here are some more photos:

Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said that there were no plans to develop parks department gardens but noted that community gardens were always considered temporary.

“The gardens have really thrived over the last eight years, but the city has to maintain its options,” he said, adding, “There is a great deal of support that the city provides to the gardens and the gardeners, and we are going to continue that.”

I’m not a policy person. I’ve read the proposed rules and my eyes glaze over. It’s all in bureaucratic language that’s meant to obfuscate. My friends who have attended the briefing sessions with city officials say the officials try assure them the new proposed rules are as good, if not better, than the state attorney general’s settlement agreement that is about to expire (hence the dash to come up with new rules). However, the lawyers who’ve looked over the new rules say “you gotta be kidding.”

What does come through to me loud and clear is the fundamental disrespect that the city is demonstrating to us community gardeners who work our asses off picking up trash, growing nutritious produce in the infamous ‘food deserts’ of the outer boroughs, running cultural and educational programs, and doing the countless other tasks that go into maintaining a community garden.

Part of the reason I’ve kept silent is that the good people at both Times Up as well as the New York City Community Garden Coalition (NYCCGC) have been doing a superlative job turning up the volume. NYCCGC has spent several frustrating months negotiating with the city in good faith, only to be met with duplicity. Tomorrow they’re holding a press conference on the steps of City Hall and next week they’re turning out people to give testimony on the proposed rules.

Times Up has picked up the direct action baton that proved so successful 10 years ago. Last week they staged a Paul Revere ride to spread the word that the city’s bulldozers are coming. Then on Monday, they held an action at City Hall that included a tree sit civil disobedience.

Yes, the community garden movement is coming back strong.