Follow up information on Breese Stevens Field funding

Here’s the list of other parks that will also be affected by the Board of Estimates decision on Breese Stevens Field. My previous blog entry about why I don’t think it should happen here. And here’s the brief explanation:

The funds that we are talking about are the funds developers pay when they build their projects. That’s the $500,000 that is in the budget for 2007, project number 5 I think (Note: I know, we need to make this budget information easier to understand!) These funds are split into 11 different segments of the City and are supposed to be spent in those areas. The frustrating thing here is that Breese Stevens only has 100 soccer games played on it per year, and that is virtually the only time that it is open (its literally locked the rest of the year), and you typically have to pay to get in. What they are doing is taking the funds that should be spent on parks that we can actually use, and spending it on Breese because they miscalculated the costs and the architect made some better improvements. I support the necessary improvements, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of the other parks in the area. Currently, the fund for Tenney-Law area is at $447,073, if they take $340,692 for Breese (76% of available funds), that leaves $106,381 for the list of parks below and my partial list of issues to be addressed. That’s not acceptable. The money should not be coming from these dedicated funds at the expense of these parks.