Linda Lee asks about $721 wanger wagon fee

In Queens, it's six.

Six, okay.

And then for the larger events that need to go to the citywide special events team, how many folks are there?

Eight.

Eight, okay.

So these are going to be oddly specific questions, sorry, because I didn't even know what a wanger wagon was.

And then so I know that there's now a fee of the $721 that we would be charged that we would have to use from our office budgets if we wanted to have a wanger wagon at one of our events.

And so just wondering when that charge was added, why, if you could go a little bit into that.

Thank you for the question.

And I have to admit, before I started doing this work, I did not know what a wanger wagon was either.

So, you know, you're not alone in that.

The policy, I believe, was updated in the prior fiscal year.

But if it's okay, I'd kind of like to walk you through what the kind of rationale was.

When you have a wanger wagon, which for your other colleagues, it's a mobile stage.

And they are sizable.

I don't recall off the top of my head the exact dimensions, but it's kind of like you're driving a trailer truck.

So you need a vehicle that's called a totter to bring the wanger wagon from one location to another.

And to drive that, you need a special driver's license.

Okay.

The CDL, commercial driver's license.

License, yeah.

And so there's only a select number of people in each borough who have that.

And they tend to be, I think, the park supervisors.

And generally speaking, on any given day, we have about one park supervisor in a district.

And those are the people that drive our packers and our heavy-duty vehicles.

So what we realized is we were kind of looking at our park ratings and our ability to clean our parks is that we were taking these people.

Out of the park effectively for an entire day.

Because when you're getting a wanger wagon, you have to get the

a totter first, then you have to drive it over to the wagon because they tend to be in separate places because the totters are used for other activities as well.

Then you have to drive it to the event location.

And not only that, you have to take an additional staff person with you because when you're driving that around,

You know, it's not unusual for the location where the Wenger wagon would be kind of unfolded to be in an interior of a park.

And that means we need someone else out there making sure that no one is injured.

There's no kids, you know, driving by on scooters or anything.