By Scott Brinton
Wantagh Park is a 111-acre county facility, with picnic areas, ball fields, playgrounds and the pier. It's just south of Merrick Road and east of the Bellmore-Wantagh border, and is squeezed onto a spit of land between homes and the Wantagh State Parkway.
Piel pulls the van over when he spots a hole. It isn't a large one, only a minor rupture in the earth that Nassau County workers recently filled in with coarse, gray gravel and dirt.
Piel continues his search for a big hole.
After stopping to inspect three or four smaller ones, he finds what he was seeking by the fishing pier -- a sinkhole more than two feet wide and two feet deep.
Piel, of Wantagh, explains that the hole, if not plugged, will continue to deepen. The dock's aging bulkhead, he says, is unsound after years of neglect by the county. Dirt seeps through its pilings and into Flat Creek, causing the sinkholes. If it isn't repaired, a hole could cause a collapse in the bulkhead.
According to Piel, the battle to keep the holes stopped up is a constant one for county park workers, whose ranks have diminished significantly over the past decade and a half.
The Wantagh Park dock is one example among many that Piel cites when he describes Nassau County parks' dilapidated condition.
Speaking for the 185,000-member PARC, which comprises park-user groups from throughout the county, Piel says, "Our concern is that the parks have been falling apart since 1992."
During the late 1970s and into the early to mid-'80s, the parks were at their peak, with a full range of services, top-notch facilities and programs, and a large number of county workers to keep them up, according to Piel. Then, in the late '80s, park services started to drop off, he says. With the county facing a long string of budget crises, the ranks of maintenance workers were cut several times, from more than 1,400 to 800, then to 400, and finally to today's crew of 279.
County parks encompass more than 6,000 acres of golf courses, playgrounds, ball fields, museums, beaches, campgrounds and nature preserves.
Under County Executive Thomas Gulotta, the parks system crumbled, in part because annual maintenance of facilities ranging from Wantagh Park's dock to tennis courts was overlooked, and because facilities were often vandalized but never repaired, Piel says.
He and other park advocates had hoped to see a turnabout in the parks' fortunes when County Executive Thomas Suozzi assumed office last year. Piel served on Suozzi's transition team and offered a host of suggestions on ways to improve the parks.
But Piel says the new county parks commissioner, Doreen Banks, a former North Hempstead town councilwoman, has largely ignored his ideas.
Piel, a retired police officer, believes the parks have shown little to no improvement under the Suozzi administration and, in certain instances, have continued to deteriorate. Banks and elected leaders such as county Legis. David Denenberg (D-Merrick), however, insist that the condition of the parks has improved and that it will only get better over time. Moreover, they say the Suozzi administration inherited the decayed parks, and so it isn't responsible for the mess. It must, however, clean them up.
Banks says her department, which has a $58 million annual budget, is "doing more with less" in the face of continued county cuts that hamper efforts to revitalize the parks.
Privatization debate
The commissioner also says that initiatives to privatize certain facilities would add recreational opportunities for county residents, even during economic hard times. Nassau is staring down a host of budget woes, and so it hasn't the money to invest in the parks' infrastructure, she says. Facilities that could be privatized include tennis courts, golf courses and possibly the Wantagh Park boat pier, according to Banks.
Denenberg has suggested leasing the tennis courts at Wantagh Park to a private company, which could erect a dome over the now mostly unusable courts, rent them and offer paid lessons to residents.
For years before Suozzi's arrival, the legislator says, the county neglected to seal the courts' surfaces each year to protect them from the elements. As a result, they cracked in numerous places. Now the courts need to be replaced, according to Denenberg. "Once that surface is destroyed, there is no annual maintenance that can restore it," he says.
The only trouble is that Nassau doesn't have the money to replace the Wantagh Park tennis courts, its basketball courts, which are also falling apart, or just about any other courts in the county, Denenberg says.
Nassau also doesn't have the money to fix the Wantagh Park dock that anchors the county's 180 boat slips, which residents can enter an annual lottery for and rent. The bulkhead, Denenberg believes, must be replaced, which could cost more than $1 million.
Denenberg thought that U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-Brooklyn) had secured federal funding to repair the bulkhead in the winter of 2001, but those funds never materialized. So the legislator sees another opportunity to privatize a county facility. A developer could lease the county's only marina, repair it and rent the slips.
"If there's no way to repair it in the county budget, then look at privatizing," Denenberg says.
Banks says the county is considering leasing numerous waterfront properties to marina developers across the South Shore, including lands at Cow Meadow Park in Freeport and Inwood Park. The developers would build new marinas on the leased properties and rent boat slips.
Leases on the properties could generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for the county, according to Banks. At the same time, residents would have additional marinas open to them. Now, Banks says, there's a severe shortage of boat slips throughout the county, which drives up rental prices.
"We have a lot of waterfront property," says Banks. "We could have tremendous marinas if we had the infrastructure. We think there should be far more marina capacity for the residents of Nassau County.
"If we've got waterfront property," she says, "why not create an opportunity for people to do recreational boating?"
Banks adds that the county is seeking to lease land to a private developer who would build a nine-hole golf course at Cedar Creek Park, a 259-acre county facility in south Wantagh.
Piel recognizes that the county faces troubling budget choices, but he says that privatizing the parks isn't the way to restore them. Privatization, he believes, would take control of the parks out of Nassau County's hands and put it into those of private developers, whose primary concern would be earning a profit.
There would also be fees on currently free facilities, such as tennis courts, and rental charges at facilities such as the Wantagh boat pier would inevitably go up, Piel says. In the end, he believes, privatization would limit park use to those who could afford the fees.
Denenberg, however, says that Nassau County and the Town of Hempstead have successful privatization track records. The indoor ice rinks at Newbridge Town Park in Bellmore and Cantiague County Park in Hicksville are leased to private companies, which maintain the facilities and run them. Both rinks, Denenberg says, are popular among residents.
Privatization would also relieve an enormous workload for the county, which often struggles to keep up high-maintenance facilities such as the Wantagh dock, Nassau officials say.
Redistributing the work
The wide-reaching privatization efforts that Banks speaks of are planned for the future. Right now, the commissioner says, the county is redistributing maintenance crews to better care for the parks. In the past, whole crews were assigned to a region of county parks and preserves, she says. The same crew that looked out for "active" parks such as Wantagh and Cedar Creek was responsible for "inactive" nature preserves such as that in Massapequa, where only hiking and bicycling are allowed.
Banks says the county will assign a crew to cover a set number of well-used parks such as Wantagh and Cedar Creek, which require continual upkeep.
Two workers will look out for all the preserves on the South Shore, and two will do the same on the North Shore. The county has no preserves in central Nassau. Banks believes four workers will be able to stop at every county preserve every day. Before, she says, maintenance crews often overlooked the sparsely attended preserves because they were so busy tending to the high-traffic parks.
Continued investment
Denenberg also says that the county will continue to invest in the parks, despite Nassau's financial crunch. The county, he says, recently replaced the playground at Cedar Creek Park at a cost of $600,000. The project got under way in the fall of 2001 and wound down last June.
The county plans to invest $2 million over the next two years to repair cabanas at Nickerson County Beach, formerly Nassau Beach. The county rents the cabanas to residents, who line up every year to enter the lottery for a shot at one.
Nassau is also spending $7 million (of which $2 million is federal and state Environmental Bond Act money) to repair bulkheads at five county ponds, including Mill Pond on the Bellmore-Wantagh border.
"The county is picking and choosing where to invest or reinvest in the parks," Denenberg says.
But parks advocates like Piel and Richard and Lisa Schary, both retired teachers of North Bellmore, say the county should do more, and it could if it earmarked all of the $18 million it collects in park fees each year for repair and upgrade projects. Currently, only a portion of fee revenues is returned to the parks. Much of the money goes into Nassau's general fund and is used to help balance the county's budget of more than $2 billion.
Lisa Schary, who with her husband, Richard, founded the volunteer Friends of the Massapequa Preserve, believes that all revenues should go back to the parks. "My feeling is that we need to have a dedicated fund that is separate from any other fund or any other department that feeds back into the parks," she says.
Schary also wants an elected, volunteer commission set up to oversee parks spending. An elected commission, she believes, would be beholden only to the voters, not the county executive, and would ensure that fee revenues were returned to the parks.
In that case, she believes, privatization would be unnecessary to revamp the parks.
Denenberg, however, doesn't believe that a commission would do a better job of maintaining the parks than the county is now. He also isn't sure whether such a commission would be allowed under the law. At the very least, he says, it would require approval by two successive state Legislatures.
Denenberg, though, agrees that fee revenues should go back to the parks. "It's something that I've advocated to both Gulotta's and Suozzi's administration," he says. "Parks should not be looked at as revenue makers."
He also notes that the Suozzi administration has dedicated a line on residents' property tax bills to showing precisely what portion of their county taxes goes to the parks -- about 10 percent, or $100 annually, for the average homeowner. Gulotta originally instituted the practice, but did away with it, Denenberg says.
Finally, he says, parks advocates and the public should give the Suozzi administration and Commissioner Banks a chance to restore the parks before lashing out with heavy criticism. "I don't think in Suozzi's first year of his administration the parks are going to be redone overnight," Denenberg says.
"There is no way our parks system could be as good as it was 10 years ago, [before] we lost three out of every four employees," says Richard Schary.
He says, however, that vigilance is required to save the system from further deterioration. "The direction our parks go," Schary says, "is the direction our county will go."
