Please don’t cut funding to our city parks and park maintenance staff in the CITY OF TREES

“The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. ”― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

My husband and I moved to Sacramento so that I could become an employee of the State after leaving Los Angeles on the heels of the writer-actors strike in Hollywood, which caused my husband to lose his job (again). He ended up working in the City of Sacramento’s Youth, Parks and Community Enrichment Department, first within the Landscape and Learning Program and now as a Park Maintenance Worker.

We have only been in Sacramento less than two years but my husband has made valuable friendships with colleagues in the Department and learned a lot about the value of civic services and helping jobs.

As Angelenos, we moved to Sacramento, the Capitol City of California because we love being Californians, we love this city and we figured where better to contribute than the state capitol! California feels like a refuge as we watch our country crumble and our values deteriorate across the country - watching the Federal government destroy public institutions and outsource public services, giving general funds to the managers of corporations and slash the gains made by working class people since the Great Depression.

Laying off large numbers of city workers mean less money circulating into our city as their salaries are slashed and their retirement funds and unvested benefits disappear. Our park workers are folks on the frontlines, interacting with the widest range of the city’s constituency on a daily basis: the unhoused, elderly, children, everyone. Everyone uses and enjoys parks, and it is essential to public health. (See attachments.) Cities with the highest ParkScore rankings are healthier places to live. In the top 25 ParkScore cities, people are on average 9 percent less likely to suffer from poor mental health, and 21 percent less likely to be physically inactive than those in lowerranked cities. These patterns hold even after controlling for race/ethnicity, income, age, and population density.

Slashing park workers indiscriminately, worries me as a newer citizen member of this city for a number of reasons. As a mother, parks are essential to our socialization, health, community and the primary source of activity. As a person, I worry about the integrity of the City to which we transplanted. I’m always talking the City up to friends and family across the country and the state: City of Trees, Capitol of California, Farm-to-Fork leader. But what is going on that our new home cannot sustain the most meager of services that provide some of the most essential elements of any metropolis? It’s concerning to say the least.

While I worry for our family, we worry more for new comrades and friends that will be let go: some are moments away from retirement, some just about to have their benefits vested, some lifelong PMWs. Slashing jobs indiscriminately, without a careful accounting of who and how the cuts are being implemented is short-sighted. Outsourcing funds to private companies that will coordinate a fraction of the work for a fraction of the cost will only yield disappointing results. And the blight and impact on the most vulnerable will be irreversible. It’s shameful for any progressive government to consider these responsible measures in balancing a budget.

Sincerely,
Natasha Roland, Esq.
95817

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