Mayor Adams’ budget cuts prompted the Sanitation and Parks Departments to scale back cleanliness initiatives last year, causing some public spaces in the city to get dirtier, according to City Hall’s latest management report.
The cleanliness updates were included in the mayor’s preliminary management report, which was released Thursday and provides snapshots of how city agencies performed on a slew of critical issues between July and October 2024.
Adams — who has listed public cleanliness as one of his top mayoral priorities — has since proposed reversing some of the cuts, speaking to the issue in his recent State of the City address. Other cuts, however, remain and are likely to be among focuses of this spring’s budget negotiations with the City Council.
The Sanitation Department, responsible for picking up the city’s trash and cleaning most of its public spaces, saw perhaps the most drastic service reductions as a result of Adams’ cuts, which he enacted to offset heavy spending on the local migrant crisis.
According to the 458-page management report, Sanitation cleaned just 26 vacant lots and 3,995 “targeted neighborhood taskforce locations” — sites, mostly in underserved communities, that are extra prone to become dirty — in the most recent reporting window.
That compares to 335 vacant lots and 6,771 taskforce locations that the department scrubbed between July and October 2023, the report shows.
In the report, Sanitation officials wrote that the decrease in public scrubbings was the result of “prior budget cuts, despite partial restoration” of them.
Meantime, 92% of city parks were categorized as “acceptable for cleanliness” in the July-October 2024 span, down from 94% in the same stretch in 2023. A data point ranking parks on being “acceptable for overall condition” also slumped, dropping to 85% from 88% in the prior year span.
Besides cleanliness, Parks also reported planting 4,569 trees in the July-October 2024 window, down from the 5,356 the agency planted in the 2023 period.
Like their counterparts at Sanitation, Parks officials blamed the service decreases on “recent city budget reductions” implemented by City Hall. The cuts to the Parks budget, the officials wrote, resulted in the department losing its so-called “second shift” cleaning staff at 100 heavily used locations.
In his State of the City address on Jan. 9, Adams announced his budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year, which starts July 1, will include $12.4 million in new funding to restore second shift cleanings at those 100 hot spots. Still, Parks saw a cut of about $20 million in funding in the 2025 fiscal year budget, meaning there’s still a $7.6 million hole in the department’s coffers.
Adams spokeswoman Liz Garcia didn’t immediately say Friday whether the cleanliness issues showcased in the management report will prompt the mayor to seek additional funding for either Parks or Sanitation.
But Garcia noted that some other performance indicators on cleanliness trended in the right direction.
That includes the Department of Environmental Protection cleaning 15% more catch basins in the most recent period as compared to 2023, while rat violations at properties in the city trended downward, a development Garcia attributed to the Adams administration’s investments in proactive rodent inspections citywide.
The city also closed 80% more graffiti removal requests in the latest period as compared to the last one.
Brooklyn Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, a progressive Democrat who used to chair the Council’s Sanitation Committee until she took over its Criminal justice Committee last year, found the drop in vacant lot cleanings concerning.
“Uncleaned, vacant lots present safety concerns for local residents,” Nurse said. “Besides being an eyesore, they become places for encampments and drug use. The mayor should be allocating resources to keep these lots clean and maintained, while also creating stronger accountability for absentee landlords who do not maintain their vacant lots.”
Rafael Punnett-Moure, the district manager of the Bronx’s Community Board 6, said he often hears from local residents about the Parks Department taking too long to respond to requests for cleanings.
“Parks is really where it’s the worst,” he said, noting that weeks can pass by before cleanliness complaints get taken care of in his district, which includes Belmont and East Tremont.
The management report, which provides data from nearly 50 municipal agencies and organizations that report to Adams — including the NYPD, FDNY, Department of Sanitation, Department of Correction and even Parks and Recreation — is released twice a year and gives a snapshot of how City Hall is doing compared to its goals.
Other key findings included homelessness being at a record high in New York City with shelter occupancy growing even as the migrant population is decreasing. The report also showed that major felony crime fell by 2% overall, with robberies, burglaries and grand larceny down, but murders and felony assaults up.
“Our administration is focused on making New York City the best place to raise a family. Whether it is driving down crime, connecting more people to SNAP and low-cost child care, winning the war on rats, or building housing at record levels, we are delivering on that mission and making our city safer and more affordable for working-class New Yorkers,” Adams said in a statement released with the report.