Karesia Batan has spent more than a decade bringing free dance performances to Queens parks and plazas. She knows the city’s event permitting system about as well as anyone can, and what she knows is that it shouldn’t be this hard.

“It’s like, ‘Ok, where? Who do we call? What do you mean?’” said Batan, founder of the Queensboro Dance Festival, which stages 30 to 40 free performances, parties and classes across Queens each summer. She describes the city’s permitting maze as “avoiding a bunch of trap doors.”

A new report from the Design Trust for Public Space is pushing Mayor Zohran Mamdani and city agencies to do something about it. The report, titled “Untaped: Removing Barriers for Public Space Programming,” lays out a series of recommendations aimed at lowering the barriers that currently make organizing a public event in New York City a full-time job unto itself.

The numbers tell part of the story. The city has more than 30,000 acres of parkland, close to 600 privately owned public spaces, and more than 200 Open Streets. That’s an enormous amount of room for community life to flourish. But according to Matthew Clarke, the Design Trust’s executive director, a single small event can require the sign-off of up to seven different city agencies.

Think about what that means in practice. Sound permits come from the NYPD. Public art installations go through the Department of Transportation. Street festivals need approval from the Street Activity Permit Office. That’s three different agencies for what might be a neighborhood block party with a speaker and a banner. Add food vendors, a tent, or a stage, and the list keeps growing.

Clarke acknowledged that the Parks Department and the Department of Transportation do “an incredible job with limited resources.” The problem isn’t incompetence or bad intentions. The problem is sheer bureaucratic sprawl.

“It can get to the point where, unless you’re an expert in this, you can’t parse through all the information to understand some of these rules and regulations,” Clarke said.

That’s precisely where smaller organizations get left behind. Batan pointed to the Governors Ball, the three-day music festival held in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and the SummerStage series in Central Park and dozens of other parks across the five boroughs. Those productions have large budgets, dedicated staff, and lawyers and consultants who know which forms go where.

“It shouldn’t just be the Governors Balls and the Summerstages that can do this because they have a massive budget and they have a huge team,” Batan said.

Her organization features Queens-based professional dance groups performing in neighborhood spaces that aren’t Madison Square Garden or Central Park. They matter precisely because they’re local and accessible. “A lot of our public spaces are meant for the local community and they are smaller in scale,” she said. “That doesn’t mean their impact isn’t great.”

The Design Trust report’s central recommendation is to centralize public space programming oversight within the mayor’s office. That kind of structural change would theoretically give groups like the Queensboro Dance Festival a single point of contact rather than a phone tree of agencies with overlapping and sometimes contradictory jurisdictions.

Clarke was careful to frame the argument as reform, not elimination. The existing rules exist for real reasons. Protecting public safety, managing noise, keeping parks functional for everyone. “We’re not saying this should all just be absolved and that we should have a free-for-all,” he said.

But the current system, whatever its good intentions, functionally advantages the deep-pocketed and the already-connected. When navigating city bureaucracy requires expertise that most community organizers simply don’t have, you end up with public spaces that serve fewer people and less varied programming than the city actually needs.

Mayor Mamdani came into office promising to govern on behalf of working New Yorkers and the neighborhoods that often feel overlooked by City Hall. Fixing the permit process for community organizations would be a modest but concrete step in that direction. It wouldn’t cost much. It wouldn’t require a fight with Albany. It would just require the city to take seriously the idea that Sunnyside and Astoria deserve the same access to vibrant public life as the Manhattan parks that already have the resources to navigate every trap door.