City agency mismanages gardens designed to curb flooding, Stringer reports
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A photo of a Brooklyn rain garden taken during City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s audit. Photo courtesy of the Comptroller’s Office.
By Victoria Merlino
The city has failed to properly manage many of the new sidewalk rain gardens designed to curb flooding and reduce stormwater runoff, despite their $100 million price tag, according to a new report by City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
The city’s 2,511 rain gardens use specialized building techniques, soil and plants to soak up excess rainwater, in an attempt to stop polluted stormwater from surging into sewers and on to bodies of water around New York City, including Jamaica Bay, Flushing Bay and Flushing Creek. The gardens are also supposed to enhance the aesthetics of cityscape, while purifying the air.
The rain garden program also successfully manages millions of gallons of stormwater every year, keeping it out of the combined sewer system and improving the health of local waterways.
But auditors from Stringer’s office examined 102 gardens in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx that were maintained by DEP, and found that that the vast majority of the gardens were improperly maintained, impeding their effectiveness and their appearances.
“Our audit uncovered a dysfunctional maintenance program that wastes taxpayer dollars and puts critical infrastructure at risk,” Stringer said in a statement.
The Department of Environmental Protection was responsible for the maintenance of 805 of rain gardens as of April 2018, when the audits were conducted.
The comptroller’s office found trash, sparse plant coverage, areas in need of cleaning and sinking curbs and tree guards in gardens across the city. Auditors also determined that maintenance logs for the gardens were inaccurate or incomplete, and Stringer’s report called them an “ineffective” tool in managing the gardens’ care.
Only seven of the 102 audited gardens had no cosmetic issues or were well-maintained by DEP’s standards.
“DEP must step up to the plate and properly maintain these vital resources,” Stringer said. “We cannot win the battle to protect New Yorkers against the next superstorm and keep our waterways clean if we allow these vital resources to fall into disrepair due to neglect.”
The report recommended upholding DEP’s own maintenance standards, conducting more outreach and partnering with communities to have residents or businesses adopt rain gardens. Community members could use photographs to better document “before” and “after” garden maintenance, the report said.
DEP addressed the issues wrote in the report that the agency “agrees with, and has largely implemented most of the recommendations contained in the Report.”
DEP disagreed with the premise of the audit, however.
“Overall, the [audit] Report conflates surface appearance with functionality, which seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding by the auditors of how rain gardens are built to operate,” DEP said in response to the initial audit, included within the report.
Rain gardens operate by having water filter through the soil into lower soil and stone layers, and Stringer’s office misinterpreted the text in DEP’s maintenance manual for how gardens can properly function, the agency added.
Stringer’s office said that the response “minimizes” DEP’s maintenance responsibilities.
In a statement to the Eagle DEP called rain gardens “a critical component of protecting the environment,” adding that “in order to ensure the continued success of the program we instituted most of the recommendations prior to the Audit.”
The city recently announced that 200 new rain gardens would be coming to Cambria Heights and Queens Village, in an attempt to curb flooding in the area and draw runoff water from Jamaica Bay.
