Chief Leader – March 03, 2015
by SARAH DORSEY
Mayor Michael Bloomberg managed his 911-system overhaul so poorly that it was sheer luck that contractors merely overbilled the city by hundreds of millions of dollars and didn’t directly steal funds.
Or so Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark G. Peters claimed at a City Council hearing Feb. 25, blasting the previous administration for allowing multiple contractors and subcontractors to inflate price estimates by as much as 600 percent.
‘No Need to Steal’
“Indeed, it could be argued one of the reasons nobody was stealing money is if you’re getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars in price markups, stealing another couple million dollars may be just an unnecessary risk,” he said.
Mr. Peters spoke at a hearing called by five City Council committees and headed by Fire and Criminal Justice Services Chair Elizabeth Crowley. The fire unions were also there, railing against the de Blasio administration for failing to move toward ending the Unified Call Taking system (UCT), which requires police operators to interrogate people reporting fires rather than sending those calls straight to fire-alarm dispatchers.
The DOI’s report about the overhaul faulted the Bloomberg administration for giving too much of the work to consultants, allowing multiple layers of subcontractors and failing to oversee them properly. He said the city pressured workers to burnish monthly reports to make progress appear smoother.
The project is 10 years behind schedule and likely about $900 million over budget, Mr. Peters found. About $200 million of its costs were previously overlooked because they were hiding in other parts of the budget.
A Centralized Approach
The upgrade, commissioned by Mr. Bloomberg in 2004, was meant to speed up emergency responses and allow the antiquated call-taking system to handle more requests during large-scale crises. Call-taking for all boroughs was to be combined in a new center in Brooklyn, with a backup control center in The Bronx. The computer dispatch systems used by the Fire and Police Departments were to be merged into one.
Mr. Bloomberg implemented UCT in 2009. Ms. Crowley, and the fire unions, are harshly critical of that system, saying that it has caused delays and confusion and that fire trucks are sometimes given poor instructions on where to go. Under the previous protocol, operators asked, “911, what’s your emergency?” and transferred all fire calls directly to the FDNY. Now they ask first, “Where’s your emergency?”
Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy slammed Mayor de Blasio for failing to test out a move to the old system, despite word having reportedly come down last fall that a pilot program was in the works. He delivered his testimony off the cuff and raised his voice at times, particularly when saying that the UCT system delays calls and makes fire runs more dangerous.
‘Why Aren’t They Here?’
“Yet nobody from the administration is even here! They’re not even here!” he said. “It’s a disgrace. They say they care about public safety; why aren’t they here?”
The administration’s representatives had mostly left by the time the unions testified, but Anne Roest, the Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, who now heads the overhaul, testified, along with Mindy Tarlow, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Operations, and fire and police representatives.
Members of the Public Safety, Technology, Oversight and Investigations, and Contracts Committees grilled them about the DOI report and how they planned to avoid the mistakes of the past.
Ms. Crowley slammed the administration for not scrapping UCT and for not making enough changes to the overhaul’s original plan. She and Mr. Peters clashed colorfully after she pressed him for details about which costs were inflated and suggested he might be hiding something. He said she was accusing him of committing a felony and asked her to withdraw the complaint or present “written evidence of that within the next 24 hours.”
Mr. de Blasio halted work on the project last May while the DOI investigated. But he has indicated that it will continue with more oversight.
Failure to Communicate
There were times during the hearing when the witnesses seemed to be at odds with the Council over what they were there for.
“You’re still looking for that same end-goal—it’s almost Mission Impossible—that Bloomberg looked to do for so long [and] failed to do it. You’re not changing the course,” Ms. Crowley told Mr. Peters. He responded that he doesn’t set policy; he implements it.
He added at one point, however, that he was “not aware of an expert anywhere who suggests that a unified system isn’t a good thing.”
Richard Alles, financial secretary of the Uniformed Fire Officers’ Association, was also harshly critical of UCT, citing “10,000 complaints from fire officers in the field—10,000 incidents that included wrongful deaths, untold numbers of injuries that could have been prevented [and] loss of property that has run into hundreds of millions” due to delays and fire trucks steered to wrong addresses.
Though other reports by outside consultants Gartner and Winbourne had cited similar flaws in Mr. Bloomberg’s 911 overhaul in the past, former Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway issued a lengthy response to Mr. Peters’ report defending the upgrade that, he said, created “a completely new, vastly more-reliable and redundant 911 system.”
Bigger, Not Over Budget
He argued that the project did not go over budget; it merely expanded by $660 million to accommodate the backup communications center in The Bronx. That center, called PSAC-2, has not yet been completed. For technical reasons, a new building was required rather than using an existing location as originally planned.
Mr. Cassidy, speaking before the Council, had a slightly different perspective.
“…By the way, everybody in the New York City Fire Department knows that the old system was better,” he said. “They’re not allowed to say that, but virtually everybody in the Fire Department knows that.”
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