For city's green spots, less budgetary green

The holiday, from the vantage point of our 30-degree chill, shines before us, a beacon of spring. The runners will step off from Hopkinton at midday, the Sox will rise and shine early at the Fens, and Paul Revere will once again ride from the North End to spread the alarm.

But as Revere pulls into Charlestown's City Square Park for a brief stopover this Patriots Day, one detail may be amiss: The park's decorative fountain may be dry.

The reason, say the Friends of City Square Park, is that hard-pressed state workers may have improperly drained the fountain's pipes last fall.

And that's not all that may be different in the city's parkland this April. In the Southwest Corridor Park stretching nearly 5 miles from the South End to JP, says that greenway's conservancy group, volunteers will receive no deliveries of fertilizer this spring, no new plantings, not even the usual biodegradable bags to collect lawn and leaf waste.

Along both sides of the city's most famous waterway, the Charles River Conservancy -- which fields nearly 2,000 volunteers a year to help state workers do everything from picking up trash to trimming trees -- is having a hard time keeping up with basic maintenance, says Evan Moss, the conservancy's volunteer coordinator.

In all three cases, the problem is budget-slashing by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, contend urban park advocates. Interviews with about a dozen such advocates painted a picture of a state parks agency that is woefully underfunded and short-staffed.

''It's death by a thousand paper cuts," Moss said. ''They cut a little bit here and a little bit there. Next thing you know it's bare bones."

As spring approaches, volunteers who run ''friends" groups at area parks say many of the conservation department's open spaces are in the worst shape they've been in recent history after years of budgets cuts. Since 2001 the state's urban parks budget has declined from a high of $31.9 million to $23.6 million this year, a 33 percent decline when adjusted for inflation, according to a budget analysis by the Environmental League of Massachusetts.

With the Romney administration proposing a $670,000 cut to the department's Urban Parks budget for fiscal 2007, which begins July 1, parks advocates say the department has come to rely too heavily on the good will of friends' groups to fulfill its mission. This spring, with the state's economy and revenue projections on the upswing, they say it's time for the state to step back up and assume more responsibility. They are preparing to lobby lawmakers for more funds and a bigger commitment to the parks.

The state parks agency ''has a lot of incredibly dedicated, hardworking staff, but they just don't have enough of them. They've taken some pretty serious cutbacks," said Patrice Todisco, executive director of the Esplanade Association, who has banded together with other parks advocates to lobby the Legislature for more funds and to find other ways to support harried state officials without taking on more of the burden themselves.

''We are trying to understand and figure out how to lobby" for more parks funding for the budget, Todisco said. ''We want to support the parks agencies."

''People are disgusted, to be honest about it," said Donna Johnson, president of the Southwest Corridor Park Conservancy, who said her group's members ask where their tax dollars are going.

''Neighborhood groups are happy to help, but not happy to pick up the entire tab," said Johnson, who estimates that about a third of the landscaped gardens that existed when the Southwest Corridor Park was built in 1989, with a staff of about two dozen, have died from lack of attention. Today, she said, three department staffers maintain the 5-mile park built on land once slated for a highway. Heavy granite planters, she said, are tilting and in danger of falling onto pathways due to lack of maintenance.

The park is in such bad shape, said Johnson, that a South End neighbor started paying her private handyman two years ago to clean up trash and needles left by illicit drug users, and to plant grass, trim trees and even do some landscaping.

In Charlestown, a state promise made in 1997 that City Square Park would receive between $175,000 and $200,000 each year has essentially fizzled into a $20,000 landscaping contract this year, according to Ken Stone, president of the park's friends group.

Department officials say the situation is not as dire as activists depict. Overall, Romney's proposal calls for $84.3 million in direct appropriations for Conservation and Recreation, a slight increase over last year, said Vanessa Gulati, a department spokeswoman. Despite the $670,000 proposed cut to the department's Urban Parks budget, Gulati said parks, urban swimming pools, and reservations will see an increase in spending as well, because the department has added a new $1.3 million budget category to pay for the new Spectacle Island recreation area in Boston Harbor and seven other parks built as part of the Big Dig.

''We were taking funding from the urban parks budget for those Central Artery parks. Now we will not be doing that," said Gulati, who said Urban Parks also received a boost last fiscal year when the department turned over snow plowing expenses to the Massachusetts Highway Department. The move, which came after four high school students were hit by a truck on department-controlled VFW Parkway in West Roxbury, allowed the agency to pour more resources elsewhere, she said.

Activists say, however, that lack of funding has prompted deferral of hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. Just like putting off home repairs, activists say, the work is a likely to cost more the longer it is deferred.

''I think people need to think about it like buying a house," said Katherine F. Abbott, a former department commissioner, who was ousted by Governor Mitt Romney after the West Roxbury accident. She is now director of the conservation and recreation campaign of the Trust For Public Land, a conservation group. ''You have to mow the lawn, paint the house, and take out the trash."

The Department of Conservation and Recreation was formed three years ago through the merger of the Metropolitan District Commission and the Department of Environmental Management. Gulati maintains that just 79 jobs were lost when the two agencies merged. Activists say the cuts were much deeper, but agree that state parks funding has see-sawed along with the state's economic fortunes for decades.

In the Urban Parks Division, 31 positions, or more than 10 percent of its workforce, are vacant, according to a draft organizational chart provided by officials to parks advocates last week. The positions include a district manager in the Harbor region, park rangers, laborers and administrative staff.

The unfilled slots and the conservation department's move to a decentralized management structure have left some urban parks with fewer workers, according to activists.

''You see there are not as many people in certain parts of the system," said Valerie Burns, president of the Boston Natural Areas Network, pointing to the Neponset River Reservation at the edge of Dorchester and Belle Isle Marsh in East Boston, two large open spaces that activists say have suffered from declines in department staff.

And that's not the only woe at the 350-acre salt marsh, said Elizabeth Regan, president of Friends of Belle Isle Marsh. She says the funding crunch reached almost comical heights last year after the department truck assigned there sprang a leak in its gas tank just above the one-gallon level. Since repair money was unavailable, she said department staff rode around for about a year with a gallon of gas in the tank and another gallon in reserve -- just enough to get from one end of the marsh to the other, she said.

''You can't make this stuff up," Regan said. ''The Romney administration has been a sham as far as their commitment to the environment. This is the worst level of support we've ever seen."

Despite the department's reliance on friends groups, Regan and Nancy Woods, cofounder of Friends of Magazine Beach in Cambridgeport, and Ken Stone, president of the Friends of City Square Park, say the department has shown ambivalence about working with the groups.

''It's not our job to chase DCR to make sure it gets done," said Stone of his Charlestown group's ongoing battle to get the department to properly maintain the park's fountain. Even when the group foots the bill for repairs, Stone said cutting through department red tape has taken perseverance and long delays.

Woods, who started the Magazine Beach group in 1996, found officials ''really just didn't care" to work with her group. ''I think," she said, ''the state has really let people down in terms of maintaining these public spaces that we don't have many of."

Despite frustrations, parks advocates said they hope to find ways to work with department commissioner Stephen Burrington, whom Romney appointed last fall. At Foss Park in Somerville, residents have already made inroads after a rocky start, said Peter Ungar, chairman of the Foss Park Neighborhood Association.

''In the past year or so, we've made leaps and bounds," Ungar said. ''We are actually beginning to see the change that we have been working for. We'd see a concern and before we have a chance to act on it, DCR was out there working on it. We are not at 100 percent yet, but we're getting there."

Christine MacDonald can be reached at cmacdonald@globe.com.