If they do poorly, they re fired. Conservancy staffers are flexible enough to do more than one task, so they can be assigned to whatever job needs doing most urgently. Though the Parks Department has many fine people in Central Park, they work under a bureaucratic, seniority-based union system. Rigid union job descriptions can create a ready excuse for leaving work undone. Some of the Conservancy s gardeners took care of the problem while the city workers looked on.
Central Park deserves better.
And with money from Central Park s concessions and millions of privately raised dollars, the Conservancy can deliver it. They need help. But graffiti, broken equipment, and untended grass and trees still mar most city parks. By the Parks Department s own measure of overall condition, only 55 percent of its properties got a rating of acceptable in 1996. All of New York s parks would benefit from contracting and outsourcing, for these would bring competition and accountability, the discipline of the marketplace, to the management of the city s parks.