Public Employee Press

Local 375 tells Parks
Contract IN, $ave millions

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Local 375 has launched a campaign to cut the use of overpaid consultants in the Parks Dept. and let civil service professionals do better work for less money.

A report the local presented to the City Council April 28 charges that the agency wastes millions of dollars on outside consultants while its own union Architects, Landscape Architects, Engineers and Construction Project Managers could save money and improve the quality of important capital construction projects.

“Over the years, Parks has allowed the ranks of its professional and technical staff to dwindle as it has increased the management fat and relied more on consultants,” Local 375 President Claude Fort said. “This misguided policy wastes taxpayers’ dollars and squanders the expertise of the department’s employees.”

“Unwise and unproven consultant designs can result in multiple change orders, which drive up costs dramatically,” says the report, which was presented to the City Council Waterfronts Committee at an April 28 hearing.

The report shows how civil servants have saved the department millions of dollars by changing consultants’ recommendations or offering better alternatives. Local 375 1st Vice President Jon Forster testified at the hearing along with Reza Mashayekhi, a Structural Engineer at Parks.

“Too often, management keeps pouring money into consultants’ plans, which ultimately end up costing far more than they should,” says the report. Consultant plans often prove unworkable, leaving city civil service professionals to resolve technical problems to salvage the project.

Forster said Parks Dept. staff has consistently turned out excellently designed projects, including City Hall Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Ocean Breeze fishing pier on Staten Island, and the Ederle Amphitheater in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

Engineering staff decimated
Despite the strong track record of its own employees, Forster said Parks has “decimated” its in-house engineering staff over the past 10 years as the agency has farmed out technical work to consultants at a much higher cost to taxpayers.

He called the policy misguided because the work of civil servants is often superior and almost always less expensive. Mashayekhi presented concrete examples of projects where city workers helped save millions of dollars by suggesting alternate plans to the recommendations of contractors.

• He personally helped the city save $4 million in repair work along Brooklyn’s Shore Parkway, where numerous sinkholes had appeared.
  A private contractor recommended covering the sinkholes with concrete slabs, but Mashayekhi showed that the slabs wouldn’t prevent further undermining by the sea below. The department ultimately adopted his plan, which uses layers of material below the surface to dissipate wave action and prevent further erosion.
  
  
• In another case, an in-house alternative plan for reconstructing a seawall along the Bronx River cost only $300,000 to implement, compared with a consultant’s design, which would have cost $1 million.
  
  
• But the Parks Dept. rejected an in-house design modification for rebuilding the East River Park Promenade within the $55 million budgeted and accepted a consultant’s plan, which ended up costing $72 million — a waste of $17 million.

In its report, Local 375 called for Parks to expand its in-house professional and technical staff, improve promotional opportunities, pursue non-discriminatory hiring and promotion policies, and assign the most challenging projects to civil servants rather than to more expensive consultants.

The local also urged the City Council to create an interagency committee to coordinate waterfront policies and to establish an oversight policy that would let civil servants report wasteful or badly designed projects without fear of retaliation.