NYC Takes More Than A Year To Fix Tree-Damaged Sidewalks: Audit

NEW YORK — New York City's Parks Department takes months to inspect tree-damaged sidewalks and more than a year on average to fix them, an audit has found.

The department took an average of 419 days — or roughly a year and two months — to repair sidewalks busted by tree roots in the 2017 fiscal year, with one fix taking more than a decade to finish, according to the audit City Comptroller Scott Stringer released Monday.

Those repairs came along with lengthy waits for inspectors to even check out the damage, the audit found. It took the Parks Department an average of 101 days to inspect sidewalks in response to homeowners' service requests — more than triple the department's own 30-day target, the comptroller's office says.

"Our street trees are some of our most vibrant neighborhood markers, yet New Yorkers often have to wait more than a year for basic maintenance," Stringer, a Democrat, said in a statement. "That delay could be the difference between an accident and a safe walk or passage for a stroller or a wheelchair. We can’t wait until the worst happens."

Sometimes the worst does happen — and it costs taxpayers money. The city paid out $1.3 million in settlements to people who claimed they were hurt by sidewalks that city trees had damaged in the 2017 fiscal year, the comptroller's office says.

But a Parks Department spokesperson criticized the report, saying safety is a major concern for the agency when it comes to sidewalk repairs.

"The audit findings represent a fundamental misconception of the mission of the Trees and Sidewalks program," the spokesperson, Meghan Lalor, said in an email. "Repairs are prioritized based on relative risk to public safety and impact on the tree — not the age of the service requests."

The Parks Department can help New Yorkers repair damage caused by trees in the most severe cases through its Trees & Sidewalks Program, but property owners are still responsible for maintaining their own sidewalks, the department said.

The Trees & Sidewalks program, started in 2005, is meant to help owners of small residences repair root damage while protecting the integrity of the trees themselves, according to Stringer's office.

The Parks Department is supposed to assign each busted sidewalk a "priority rating" and create a repair design and work order for each project that surpasses a certain threshold, the audit says.

Those inspections examine several factors, including the volume of pedestrian use, the width of the passable sidewalk and the tree's condition, the Parks Department said. The sidewalk isn't a priority for repairs if it gets a low rating based on those critera, according to the agency.

While the Parks Department has a weekly report with various performance measures for the program, it does not track how long it takes for sidewalks to be inspected and repaired, according to the audit.

Among other things, Stringer's audit recommends that the department add timeliness metrics to its internal reports on the program and make sure that service requests are addressed within the 30-day target.

But the Parks Department says it's doing well — more than 99 percent of all service requests from the Trees & Sidewalks program were inspected within 30 business days so far this year, according to the agency.