Chair Hankerson adjourns the Parks permitting hearing

Faster approvals, clearer policies, fee waivers, better online guidance, and I know that they're working on more.

The permit team is dedicated.

They are understaffed.

And the system and the rules itself is what remains too rigid.

Programs like Summer Stage at our scale depend on reliable, timely access to park space.

And our permitting experience is honestly no different from anyone else's.

So if it's hard for us, I can't imagine, as we've been talking about, what it's like for a volunteer group trying to plan a small event.

As the design trusts recently...

untaped report documents.

You need the park permit, you need the separate sound permit, you have to go in person, you need a money order.

It's crazy.

It's too complicated.

So with that, I have three suggestions.

First is to account for scale and investment.

At summer stage, even though we are free of charge, we want to make sure that we are bringing the most important artists to New Yorkers for free, and we raise millions of dollars to do that.

Most concert venues book one to two years out, but as you heard in terms of the timeline, we're lucky that we can plan nine months ahead.

And permits are only approved four months before we announce the season.

So artists are often booked elsewhere and we can't get them.

I think another example is, although it's not special events, in January we applied for an August tennis clinic and by late July we still had not heard anything.

So we can absorb the uncertainty, but small groups can't.

Second, make the process more flexible and transparent.

There's a whole system of grandfathering dates in Central Park that those dates in my 12 years at CPF have not ever changed, even though the whole world around us has changed.

We hold permits for dates we can't ever use, but if we exchange them, we'll lose our tenure.

We get bumped even though we have tenure.

And it's practically a full-time job to keep track of all the trades and swaps.

And in the end, it just means that we lose artists because we don't quite know when dates are really going to be available.

And then third, don't charge fees for free programs.

And we've been hearing some rumblings about that.

All that does is take resources away from free programs for New Yorkers.

The answer is really 1% for parks, not charging nonprofits.

I can say that we are eager to work with NYC Parks and others to help improve the process.

I know that a more effective user-friendly system is within reach, and I look forward to working with the council and the deputy mayor's office on a soon-to-be-formed interagency task force for the public realm that will be looking at

permitting reform.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

All right.

With that, the Parks Permitting Hearing of September 30, 2026 is now adjourned.