NY Daily News – February 26, 2015
by Erin Durkin
City Council members charged on Wednesday that the de Blasio administration isn’t doing enough to overhaul the city’s troubled 911 system after an investigation found the project was badly mismanaged for years. The de Blasio administration halted work after the Department of Investigation found that the project was nearly a billion dollars over budget. The department also found officials were hiding $200 million in spending, while rewriting reports to hide negative news.
But Elizabeth Crowley said the city should abandon unified call-taking — where police, fire, and medical emergency calls are all initially handled by the same call takers.
“Eleven years later, our system is no more reliable,” she said at a Council hearing Wednesday. “Response times are longer than they’ve ever been in the past.”
“There are no changes that the administration has put in place to stop the waste of critical time,” she said.
Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters steered clear of weighing in on the policy, but said his probe of the project under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration found contractors inflating prices by as much as 600%, $700 million in cost overruns and another $200 million hidden in other agencies budgets.
The cost of the project has now ballooned to over $2 billion.
“They didn’t know what they were doing and weren’t properly supervised by City Hall,” he said of project contractors.
He said only luck spared the city from outright theft like that perpetrated in the CityTime project.
“The good news is nobody was outright stealing money,” he said. “That is more a function of good luck that anything else.”
Peters said that project “officials created an environment that discouraged truthfulness — seeking to spin, soften, or sanitize negative information about the program in reports.”
Despite the massive failings, he disputed Crowley’s claim that the system has gotten worse.
“The system as a whole is more reliable today than it was 15 years ago,” he said.
The two sparred throughout a tense hearing, culminating in Crowley saying that Peters appeared to be hiding something.
“You just made a fairly serious accusation that I assume you and the Council will be prepared to back up in writing over the next 24 hours,” he snapped back. “If that accusation is accurate, you’re accusing me of committing a felony…I would appreciate if you would either dial down your rhetoric and withdraw that accusation, or I would like some evidence.”
Anne Roest, commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said the DOI report “validates the direction” de Blasio has gone with the project. She said officials have centralized authority over the project and cut out unnecessary vendors and consultants.
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