NY Daily News – December 03, 2014
by Juan Gonzalez
Mayor de Blasio has finally taken the city’s problem-plagued 911 system overhaul out of the hands of private consultants and shifted its management in-house, the Daily News has learned.
Over the past few weeks, de Blasio’s aides have renegotiated and sharply cut the scope of a contract with defense giant Northrop Grumman for supervision of the $2 billion project.
Only about 30 Northrop consultants will continue working on the overhaul after Jan. 1, City Hall aides said Tuesday. That’s down from 137 Northrop consultants assigned to it as recently as this summer.
Northrop, you should know, was billing taxpayers an astounding $300,000 to $430,000 annually for each of those 137 consultants.
From now on, a small committee of NYPD and FDNY brass, along with the city’s technology commissioner, Anne Roest, will directly supervise the individual subcontractors on the project, such as Motorola, Cisco Systems and Intergraph, which Northrop previously managed.
The city will also hire additional systems managers for unfilled slots in the Office of Citywide Emergency Communications to assist with that supervision.
A key recommendation of separate probes earlier this year by both de Blasio’s aides and the city’s Department of Investigation was for “city personnel to take control of the program, directly manage tasks, and exert greater control over contracted workers,” Roest noted.
If this practice of consultants supervising consultants on city projects sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The same problem cropped up in the infamous CityTime scandal, where city officials were asleep at the switch.
Northrop Grumman is now the second technology contractor to run into trouble supervising the 911 overhaul. Hewlett-Packard, the first company in charge, was removed by the city in 2010 following numerous complaints from city officials over its poor performance.
Meanwhile, the project fell years behind schedule and nearly $1 billion over its original budget. Not surprisingly, the new system has been marred by several high profile crashes and glitches with communications equipment. Some of those led to delays in firefighters and city ambulances responding to emergency calls, and to dispatchers for police, fire and EMS being unable to communicate with each other.
“The extra layer of consultant supervisors was both costly and inefficient,” said a city official who spent the entire year reviewing defects in the overhaul.
But the slashing of Northrop Grumman’s contract, which is $285 million, won’t bring any immediate savings, officials warned.
That’s because the Bloomberg administration failed to account during its final year in office for more than $100 million in additional costs for needed equipment for the 911 project.
“At least now we’ll be able to keep the overall budget number at $2 billion,” one source said.
As for the project’s completion date, City Hall aides now say it will be mid- to late 2016 before the final piece, a 911 backup call center in the Bronx, begins initial operation. If so, that will be an amazing 12 years after the project was first launched.
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