Under the Randalls Island Sports Foundation’s “New Deal,” local public schools would have priority access to 20 ball fields from 3 to 6 pm. What this actually means is that the majority of children in East Harlem and the South Bronx would have to skip their school lessons or their dinner in order to play ball during daytime hours throughout the school year.
More precisely, the contract would mostly benefit students from out-of-district private institutions during those crucial after-school hours. Yet the names of those private schools remain a mystery to folks uptown since the Foundation has repeatedly failed to provide a list of the schools in writing during meetings in East Harlem.
One can’t help but wonder: How many of those private schools, which the Foundation describes as “responsible user groups,” have representatives serving on the Board of Trustees of the Randalls Island Sports Foundation. Or, rather, how many members of the board have a human, monetary or professional interest in these institutions.
Even without those details, it’s obvious that the residents of East Harlem have been working on a separate and unequal playing field with regards to the planning of this New Deal. But, just because something has always been done a certain way does not necessarily mean that it is just. This was true during the civil rights movement and it remains true today.
Since at least the latter part of the 20th Century, every citizen – of every age and income – could enjoy free and public access to city parks. Today, hundreds – if not thousands – of acres of parkland are being systematically turned over to private developers and institutions and, in many cases, permanently removed from free and open public use. It would appear that we are moving backward.
This is especially troublesome considering the fact that public funding for parks remains at an all time low at just .04 percent of the city budget even though we enjoy a $3.9 billion surplus.
East Harlem Preservation opposes the alienation of city parkland without due process and the recent moves by this administration to restrict the rights of other elected officials to review private concessions involving city properties.
We support the call for a more thorough annual accounting of private funding of city parks, including oversight hearings on park concessions and greater transparency in public-private partnerships.
Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC project purports to design a city in which all citizens will be able to access a park within a 10 minutes walking distance. The question is: will this parkland be free – or will we have to pay to play, as is now the trend?
For most East Harlem residents – under whose jurisdiction Randalls Island lies – this “New Deal” (and the Parks Department’s “New Math”) is clearly a return to customs we’ve fought too hard to revisit.
Testimony Presented By East Harlem Preservation During the NYC Council Committee on Parks & Recreation’s Oversight Hearing on Status of the Possible Exclusive Use of the Athletic Fields on Randall’s Island by NYC Private Schools, January 31, 2007.
