Advocates say care of parks is eroding

NEEDHAM -- Bobbi Demers loves Hemlock Gorge. The state park is just 10 minutes from her house in Needham, and she walks the semi-rugged trails of towering hemlock trees and traverses the famous Echo Bridge at least once a week. She also volunteers with a group that monitors the Charles River, which cuts through the hilly, wooded area.

The 23-acre park, set amid the suburbs of Newton, Needham, and Wellesley, is ``an anchor" to the towns' residents, who hike, fish, play with children, and have picnics there, said Demers. ``It's so close by. It's just sort of cozy."

But Demers, like many other advocates and users of state parks in Boston's western suburbs, is concerned the state Department of Conservation and Recreation isn't spending enough to maintain the preserves. They say that staff is spread too thinly to keep up routine services, such as picking up litter, mowing grass, and clearing trails.

A department spokeswoman acknowledges that in some places there are fewer staff on site, but said that overall the parks in Boston's western suburbs are being maintained. Vanessa Gulati , the agency's spokeswoman, noted that funding for the parks system has been rising. Spending for the current fiscal year is $19 million, she said, and Governor Mitt Romney has proposed $21 million, while the Legislature has recommended $20.3 million, for next fiscal year.

But a study by the Environmental League of Massachusetts showed that even the proposed levels are below what has been allocated in the past, such as in fiscal 2001, when state parks received $27.4 million. Another watchdog organization, the Trust for Public Land, argues the increases merely keep spending on pace with inflation, meaning funding remains essentially flat.

A league spokeswoman said that when the Department of Conservation and Recreation was formed in 2003 by the merger of the old parks management agency, the Metropolitan District Commission, and the Department of Environmental Management, staff was cut by 11 percent. While there is debate over what percentage of the cuts involved non administrative staff, park advocates contend the job losses, combined with less funding, have hampered the new department's functions.

``I do know for a fact that there are parks that do have less staff or no staff," said Megan Amundson, who is the league's legislative director and performed the analyses. ``It has happened all across the state. There has been an effect on the ground."

As a result, she said, the burden of park upkeep is falling increasingly on private groups.

These include the Sudbury Valley Trustees, a nonprofit group that owns 112 acres contiguous with Callahan State Park in Framingham. Laura Mattei, the trustees' director of stewardship, says many of Callahan's trails are overgrown or eroded. Meanwhile, people have blazed new trials, making the overall trail network confusing. Mattei said the trustees are now doing most of the maintenance work at the 820-acre preserve, while the state is doing little.

``Even in my mind, even with some minimal attention, things could be improved a lot," Mattei said. ``But right now there's virtually nothing being put toward it."

At Beaver Brook, a small state park in Waltham and Belmont, Marie Daly said she and others using the park last fall noted the trails were overgrown with vegetation . The group also noticed a wooden bridge was missing planks. ``We had to help people get across," Daly said.

Daly, a 58-year-old member of the Waltham Land Trust whose grandfather patrolled the preserve as a Metropolitan District Commission policeman, said she does not blame the rangers for the lack of attention being paid to Beaver Brook.

``The problem is they're not getting enough funds," said Daly. ``This administration has cut, cut, cut funds for the DCR."

The Department of Conservation and Recreation's response is that the groups' concerns could be a lack of understanding of the agency's reorganization stemming from the merger. One result is that district managers are responsible not only for parks, but also for the other facilities in their geographic area, including swimming pools, athletic fields, and parkways.

``It's complicated, it's involved, and it's not transparent to the general public," said Kevin Hollenbeck , a district manager whose area encompasses about a dozen parks, including Hemlock Gorge. ``They don't see what's happening with the agency. We all have the same mission."

Another change has been the creation of ``mobile maintenance units," which are teams of personnel that travel from park to park, replacing a system where maintenance employees were based at specific parks, said Gulati .

The agency also has promoted public-private partnerships, which Gulati called a ``great asset." Some friends groups say the agency is leaning on them too much to do routine work.

``There's really a limit to what we, a small grass-roots that's not been incorporated, can do," said Brian Yates, founder and president of Friends of Hemlock Gorge.

The Trust for Public Land has proposed increasing state funding by $10 million annually for the next four years to reverse the gradual degradation of the state's parks. The organization, founded last year, using information from the US Census Bureau for 2002, determined that in recent years Massachusetts has been second to last in the nation in per capita spending on parks and last in the country in spending on parks as a percentage of personal income.

``We think we can do a lot better than that," said Kathy Abbott , who was Department of Conservation and Recreation commissioner from October 2003 to February 2005 and directs the trust's conservation and recreation campaign.