🌳 $60M in Tree Maintenance Contracts Go to Questionable Vendors

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello to the 94 members of the Better Block Project. Thanks to everyone who signed up to be a part of a new Tiger 🐯 Team to work to solve problems in Bed Stuy together. Our first meeting for 🧹 Cleaning up Trash on Fulton will be this Thursday and we’ll schedule more kickoffs as we finalize each group.

🌳 $60M in Tree Maintenance Contracts Go to Questionable Vendors

On Tuesday, we held a meeting with City Councilmember Gutierrez’s office and City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan’s office to raise our concern about the inadequate tree maintenance in Brooklyn, and get feedback on our policy ideas. Shekar is the chair of the City Council committee on Parks and Recreation, so is an influential voice when it comes to tree policy in NYC. Our goal of the meeting was to:

1. Meet with Parks to better understand why tree maintenance was such an issue

2. Get feedback on our policy ideas to introduce a “no permit” level of maintenance and simplify the permit process to do medium & complex maintenance

3. Discuss next steps for implementing the policy and improving tree maintenance operations overall

Unfortunately, NYC Parks decided not to show up to the meeting. In preparation for the discussion, we sent Parks a list of questions to better understand the issue, and in reaction to those they decided not to attend, but promised answers over email. We haven’t received any responses yet 🤦.

While that was disappointing, the meeting with Shekar Krishnan’s office was revealing. We learned that the day prior, Krishnan’s office held a hearing with NYC Parks regarding contract activity with vendors that had been convicted of wrongdoing. You can find the video to watch the 9/29 hearing here. Two of the vendors subject to the hearing happened to be those responsible for tree maintenance across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Specifically, we learned:

• In 2023, Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping, was awarded $40M in contracts for tree services in Brooklyn and Queens. Two of the principals in the company pled guilty to insurance fraud and filing false instruments regarding city contracts

• Separately, the owner of Griffin’s Landscaping, who had a $20M contract awarded in January 2025 for tree planing in the Bronx, was sentenced to 2 years in prison for bribing a town employee to illegally dump construction waste

The result of these convictions was temporary work suspensions, but both vendors are still working with Department of Parks and Recreation. In the hearing, Krishnan cited that Parks could not find alternative vendors given there were no qualified replacements, essentially labeling these tree maintenance vendors as “too big too fail.”

It’s remarkable to learn that the city still works with these contractors, but it does provide some rationale as to why tree maintenance has been so poor across the city. While Parks has complained that tree maintenance is due to an “understaffing/budget issue”, it’s clear that poor management is also playing a role.

We plan to stay close to Krishnan’s office to understand how we can support them to reform how tree maintenance is performed across the city. They also were supportive of our policy proposals, and we plan to circle back in a few weeks once they have a chance to evaluate, to see if we can get a bill passed this upcoming year.

🔎 Filing a FOIL Request

In the short term, we believe the best solution to better tree maintenance is making it legal for residents to make small repairs, and simplifying the permit process for larger maintenance. However, in the long term, we believe that the City of New York needs to do a better job maintaining the trees so residents don’t have to. Trees are city property, and it shouldn’t be residents’ job to trim them. Given the longer term goal, we filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to get more information about how tree maintenance works in NYC. The city is required to respond to FOIL requests with any available information they have. We’re aiming to understand how often tree maintenance has occurred, scheduling, budgeting, litigation from inadequate pruning and data about the pace of permit processing. The full request is attached below, huge thanks to Cristy for helping us pull this together!

Our next steps are to continue to work with CM Gutierrez, CM Krishnan and CM Nantasha Williams to advocate for legislation to improve the status quo of tree maintenance in NYC. We think we can get something passed in the next 12 months, and will share updates as we learn more.

⏳ Where we are on the other problems we’re working on

• 🚌 Cleaning up Fulton and Franklin Bus Stop: A few of us plan to attend this coming Monday’s Community Board 3 (CB3) General Meeting to advocate for faster action to resolve the illicit activity on the bus stop at Franklin and Fulton. CB3 meetings are attended by elected officials and agency leaders in the community so can be an effective way to raise awareness on local issues. If you are available to join, please attend! The more neighbors who show up demanding action for the bus stop on Fulton and Franklin, the more likely we’ll see real change.

• 🗑️ Improving Trash on Fulton: We have 6 members of the Better Block Project who have volunteered to be a part of the 🐯 Tiger Team to help clean up trash on Fulton Street. We’re kicking off our efforts this coming Thursday night, with an early focus on understanding how we can get increased budget to clean the street

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: 1105 Fulton has submitted a permit for the demolition of the building, which is currently in Plan Examiner Review according to the DOB NOW website. We’ll keep monitoring the site to get a better sense of when the demolition might occur to understand next steps with the property

• 🌳 Building a Park: We’re still working on identifying lots for the new park, and plan to do a neighborhood walk to assess different locations to determine the best lot to focus on in the coming weeks

That’s all for this week’s update. If you want to help in one small way this week, forward betterblockproject.com to a neighbor you know is interested in getting involved in community work in Brooklyn.

See you next week,

David