Queens Councilman Peter Koo has just been named the Chair of the Parks Committee at the City Council, and he couldn’t have come in at a better time. With a far bigger budget, much needed improvements will be happening in all of the city parks. Our guests will talk about where that cash will go: 50 more gardeners, 50-100 more Park Rangers, for starters. With so little funding for more than 40 years, how have the parks survived? The operation of the bigger parks was often taken over by conservancies that paid for much of the care and feeding. Dan Garodnick runs one of those conservancies, Riverside Park. He’ll talk about how much work goes into running one of the biggest park spaces in the city, and why overseeing a park means being an innovator (goats mowing lawns? Yeah, they got that). The panel will also talk about the smaller parks, the ones not covered by conservancies, who have had to struggle to fend for themselves, and what this money will mean to them. They’ll also answer the question, why now?