Audit Report on the Maintenance and Repairs of the City’s Playgrounds by the Department of Parks and Recreation

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) maintains a municipal parks system of more than 29,000 acres throughout the City, including more than 1,700 parks, 2,500 Greenstreet sites, and over 1,000 playgrounds. One of DPR’s principal missions is to manage and care for all playgrounds and playground fixtures in the City.

To provide local parks services, a Borough Commissioner is appointed for each of the City’s five boroughs. Each Borough commissioner oversees the management and operations of agency programs and is responsible for the administrative management of parks and green spaces within the borough, including the maintenance and repair of City parks and playgrounds. A Chief of Operations in each borough oversees the daily operations of all DPR facilities within the borough and ensures that playgrounds are properly maintained.

Audit Findings and Conclusion

The Queens Borough Commissioner’s office routinely cleans and maintains borough playgrounds. It completed 87 percent of its work orders issued during the audit’s scope period. However, the Queens Borough office does not complete remedial work in a timely manner. Specifically, only 64 percent of the work orders issued and completed were completed within 30 days. The remaining 36 percent of work orders were completed beyond 30 days. Furthermore, of the 527 “Immediate Attention” (IA) conditions reported to the Borough Office, 58 IAs (11 percent) were not resolved within the required 30 days. In fact, some took from 72 days to 152 days. We also found that Queens Borough district offices lack guidelines that specify the timeframes for the repair of non-IA conditions.

Based on work order descriptions provided by DPR, we found that 55 work orders may have been classified as requiring IA if the conditions had been identified by Parks Inspection Program (PIP) inspectors. These items were not resolved in a timely manner. Additionally, the District offices are not effectively monitoring the status of open work orders and the information in the Asset Management Property System (AMPS)¹ is often not correct.

The timeliness of DPR’s resolution of IA repairs will be affected in the near term by the impact of Hurricane Sandy, resulting in the increased importance of prioritizing those items that represent IAs or hazardous conditions.

Audit Recommendations

This report makes a total of nine recommendations, including that DPR should:

• Implement standards to ensure that supervisory inspections adhere to PIP standards for remediating IA conditions.
• Remediate all work orders with hazardous conditions within 30 days.
• Ensure that IAs are resolved within 30 days.
• Categorize work order repair types and assign specific timeframes for remediating repairs in each category. Categorize conditions identified by District Supervisors using the same criteria used by the PIP inspectors.
• Monitor open work orders that are identified as hazardous and resolve them promptly.
• Regularly monitor the status of open work orders and update them in AMPS.
• Follow up on work requests to ensure they have been processed.
• Create work orders before the repairs are completed.

Agency Response

In their response, DPR officials contended that the work orders were prioritized and completed in a timely manner and disagreed with “several findings in the reports regarding how Parks manages its maintenance program and its work orders.” However, DPR officials agreed that the reports “raised some important issues regarding the maintenance and repair of the City’s playgrounds which we appreciate” and “… We agree that a formal review process for all open work orders would ensure that all requests are managed appropriately.”

The agency also said, “In addition, upon careful review of Parks operations and the recommendations in the report, we believe that current and action underway already address the issues raised.”