Van Cortlandt Park grapples with big messes

Holiday weekends bring thousands to Van Cortlandt Park. Visitors sprawl across the great lawn, fire up grills and pack picnic tables beneath the trees. But once the crowds disperse, a very different kind of rush begins.

Overflowing trash cans, scattered broken glass and torn pieces of popped balloons are some of the unwelcome remnants left behind during summer surges that push the park to its limits. And beneath the mounting litter lies a deeper problem: aging sanitation equipment and chronic understaffing, exacerbated by years of underfunding.

Van Cortlandt Park is the third-largest park in New York City, spanning more than 1,100 acres. Yet only 35 city parks workers are assigned to maintain it, a number the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance estimates is about half of what’s needed to care for the space. Those workers are responsible not just for trash collection but also for tasks like mowing fields, cleaning restrooms and responding to repairs.

“There’s not necessarily more garbage than there used to be,” Christina Taylor, the alliance’s deputy director, said. “There’s just more than our current staff can handle. They end up having to work a lot of overtime these holiday weekends.”

The strain was reflected in Community Board 8’s recent Fiscal Year 2026 Capital Budget Requests, which list new litter collection equipment in parks among the district’s top needs. The board called for a new garbage truck, two smaller sanitation compactor trucks called mini packers – and a permanent hiring increase to address a growing crisis throughout the 68 parks and open green spaces it covers.

And this issue isn’t unique to the Bronx.

Those requests come as the parks department is still recovering from previous city-wide funding losses. Last year, the agency was hit with a $20 million cut compared to the previous fiscal year, and a hiring freeze resulted in nearly 800 jobs remaining unfilled.

To help address the shortfall, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $12.4 million investment in the Second Shift program this spring, funding additional full-time sanitation crews for evening and weekend coverage in 64 high-traffic parks.

In its preliminary budget response, the City Council identified $65.7 million in urgent park programming and services, from updated maintenance equipment and tree care to full-time parks enforcement patrol staffing.

Yet only $11.7 million of that was included in the mayor’s final fiscal year 2026 budget adopted June 30.

Even after those additions, the parks department’s $667.3 million operating budget accounts for just 0.6 percent of the city’s total $115 billion in spending — well below the 1 percent target long championed by advocates like the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance.

“People, unfortunately, aren’t picking up after themselves, or they pick it up, but there are still piles of trash that then need to be picked up by a garbage truck,” Taylor said. “Glass bottles get broken. Bottle tops get embedded into the soil. Confetti is a pain to pick up.”

The outcome is a seemingly never-ending cycle — large gatherings leave behind waste; limited staff are on site to enforce park rules; and workers scramble to meet demand using outdated tools.

At Van Cortlandt, garbage trucks and mini packers, essential for hauling and compressing trash, frequently break down. Many are decades old. When equipment fails, staff has little choice but to improvise, loading waste by hand into small utility vehicles known as Gators, which are meant for landscaping rather than sanitation.

“Having new, reliable equipment would be a game changer,” Taylor said. “If our packer breaks, we borrow one from another district, but then they don’t get to use theirs. Or if theirs breaks, they borrow ours. It’s just challenging.”

She said even programs like Second Shift can only go so far because many parks jobs aren’t baselined, meaning their funding is not guaranteed beyond one fiscal year. Workers often find out just days before the new budget takes effect whether they’ll still have a job on July 1.

City Councilman Eric Dinowitz told The Press the problem can’t be solved overnight.

“We can’t keep relying on short-term funding to solve long-term problems,” Dinowitz said. “If the trash trucks are breaking down and there’s no backup, that’s not a personnel issue. That’s a failure to equip our workers to succeed.”

Dinowitz said his office routinely hears complaints about overflowing garbage bins, broken restrooms and illegal barbecues in neighborhood parks.

The lack of Parks Enforcement Patrol officers only compounds the problem. Just 300 officers are assigned citywide to patrol more than 30,000 acres of parkland.

Jodie Colón, a longtime parks advocate, environmental educator and lead of Friends of Spuyten Duyvil, said the problem extends beyond any single park or program.

“Maintenance isn’t sexy,” Colón said. “There’s no ribbon cutting for picking up trash, but it’s what keeps the whole park running. You can build the nicest park in the world, but if you don’t have the people, the equipment or the money to take care of it, it falls apart.”

The Van Cortlandt Park Alliance organizes volunteer cleanups after major holidays, most recently following the Fourth of July, but Taylor said turnout has declined since the pandemic. Meanwhile, demand has only grown.

“Our parks staff work incredibly hard,” she said. “But without the right tools and enough hands, they can only do so much. This isn’t about one weekend or one piece of equipment. It’s about giving parks the support they need.”