By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
HARLEM — Twice a week for two years, retirees Doreen Kagan and Barbara Dunlap have attended morning swimming classes for senior citizens at Riverbank State Park. Their routine, they say, gets them out of the house, strengthens their friendship and improves their health.
Now they are trying to figure out what they’ll do if the state Legislature approves Gov. David Paterson’s proposed cuts at the park. The cuts, which would save nearly $800,000, would reduce operating hours, close an outdoor pool and end senior citizen classes and other community programs. Many fear that team sports would end as well.
On Monday morning, Kagan and Dunlap left class with a stack of flyers calling on people to rally against the budget-cutting plan. The movement includes a Facebook page where people have planned ways to fight what they say is the state’s broken promise to maintain the park in exchange for building a sewage treatment plant below it.
“To use an old fashioned word, there was a covenant with the community,” Dunlap said. That covenant, she said, requires that the park’s operations remain as is.
The spending reductions at Riverbank are part of a broader package of proposed cuts, including many complete closures, at dozens of parks and historic sites statewide.
Paterson, who protested the waste-treatment plant in when he was a state senator, stressed that he had to close a $8.2 billion budget gap, and that no state departments would be excluded.
Dan Keefe, a spokesman for the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, said the Riverbank programs were "certainly worthy" but were economically necessary. "There is a $9 billion budget deficit that the state has to deal with, and every state agency" will be affected, he said.
According to local lawmakers, nearly 900,000 people last year visited the 28-acre park, which stands 69 feet above the Hudson River — and the sewage treatment plant — and runs from West 137th Street to West 145th Street.
The state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation calls Riverbank “the only one of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.”
The park features a pool, skating rink, theater, pedestrian paths, a greenhouse, picnic areas, ball fields and courts, a gym and a running track.
Though specifics on the proposed cuts have yet to be made public, many of Riverbank’s sports teams also believe they will lose access to their home fields.
The coaches of Riverbank State Park’s youth hockey program, which just finished its season, say their 145 children may end up without a place to play.
Though the program sustains itself financially, a reduction in hours at the park — from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. — would make it impossible to continue there, the coaches said.
Keefe said team sports will still be funded. But he could not say how the changes to operating hours would affect them.
On Sunday night, the program’s squad of 9- and 10-year-olds won a six-team tournament in upstate New York. One of the head coaches, Kirk Jackson, said he told celebrating parents, “this could very well be the last year for Riverbank.”
