Democrat run New York City's 911 upgrade is decade behind schedule and nearly $1 billion over budget, a scathing report by Department of Investigation finds

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Report shows Bloomberg administration woefully mismanaged
overhaul as vendors and consultants ran it with little
supervision from City Hall.

A scathing report by the city’s Department of Investigation
found the Bloomberg administration mismanaged for years the
city’s massive overhaul of its 911 communications system.

The upgrade is 10 years behind schedule, nearly $1 billion over
budget and needlessly slowed down by a persistent battle of the
badges between the FDNY and the NYPD, the report shows.

The details in the 105-page report are startling:

-The overhaul, now scheduled for completion in 2017, has soared
in cost by almost $900 million — from $1.3 billion to $2.2
billion.

-More than $200 million of those costs were not previously known
because Bloomberg aides buried them in the budgets of other
agencies.

-Officials rewrote the monthly reports of 911 project managers
or pressured them to “sanitize” and “soften” negative news so as
to “to improve the spin” on its progress.

-Multiple layers of private consultants and vendors virtually
ran the overhaul with little supervision from city employees. At
times, those consultants ended up marking up their bills to the
city as much as 600%.

-During one 18-month period, City Hall kept cancelling meetings
of the interagency city group that was nominally in charge of
the project, leading the city’s own quality control consultant,
Gartner Group, to complain: “The most senior members of the
administration simply failed to pay attention.”

-City Hall abandoned its original plan to create a single
unified dispatch system for police, fire and ambulances due to
fierce resistance by the police and fire departments to give up
control of their separate computer networks and dispatch systems
— a digital age version of the historic battle of the badges.
That change occurred despite repeated warnings from Gartner that
separate systems would drive up costs and be less efficient.

“As a consequence . . . the NYPD’s and FDNY’s upgrades have been
managed on different tracks, with the NYPD upgrade completed in
May 2013 and the FDNY’s upgrade still not scheduled to be
completed for several more years,” DOI Commissioner Mark Peters
wrote. “This delay has had serious – potentially life
threatening – consequences,” given that the dispatch of
firefighters and ambulances is still being done through
antiquated computer systems that are decades old.

In recent years, several major fatal accidents — including the
2013 death of 4-year-old Ariel Russo — and fires were marked by
hair-raising reports of snafus and delays in getting vital
information to firefighters and ambulance crews in the field.

The main components of the 911 upgrade include the creation of a
new call-taking center in downtown Brooklyn, a separate backup
center in the Bronx, dedicated telephone and data systems for
emergency responders, new computerized dispatch software for
police, fire and ambulances, plus a half dozen smaller
technology upgrades.

Much of what Peters found in his probe affirms what the Daily
News has been reporting for more nearly six years.

Back in October 2009, The News revealed the 911 project was
years behind schedule and had ballooned in cost to $2 billion.

A the time, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg sharply disputed the
newspaper’s findings.

“I think it’s probably fair to say we’re 10% overbudget on what
was in the original spec ,” Bloomberg said, insisting the city
had merely added some new features to the project.

Former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly attributed any delays
to “problems with contractors.”

Bloomberg’s point person on the 911 project, former Deputy Mayor
Cas Holloway, has been one of its biggest supporters. He once
defended it at a 2013 hearing while standing in front of an
image of a Daily News front page that asked, “How Safe Are We?”

Holloway even took the unusual step this week of releasing his
own 210-page defense of Bloomberg’s handling of the project.

It was “delivered on budget” and is “an overwhelming success”
that is “faster, has more capacity. . . and is more stable and
reliable than ever before,” Holloway wrote.

The only major increase in cost, for about $660 million, he
wrote, came in 2008 when the city opted to build a completely
new backup call center in the Bronx instead of refurbishing an
existing office building in Queens, as originally planned.

But the DOI report makes Swiss cheese of Holloway’s account.

It documents how nearly $300 million in extra costs resulted
when the city had to terminate its original lead contractor on
the project, Hewlett-Packard, for poor performance and replace
it with Northrop-Grumman.

And then there’s the extra $200 million that was virtually
hidden away, Houdini-like, in other agencies.

In 2005, for example, the city awarded a $75 million contract to
the URS Corp. to renovate FDNY command offices in the various
boroughs. But officials assigned $67 million of that to the
Department of Design and Construction, never counting it as a
cost of the 911 project, Peters said.

Likewise, when the Intergraph Corp. was handed an $88 million
contract in 2009 to install a new computer dispatch system for
the Police Department, only half of that cost was charged to the
911 project budget. The remainder was charged to the regular
NYPD budget.

“You can’t run major, complex technology projects like this
unless you have detailed, accurate facts on the ground,” Peters
said Thursday.

Finally, there’s the question of whether city officials sought
to suppress bad news about the project in monthly reports.

Holloway was legendary in City Hall for demanding detailed
monthly “dashboard” reports from his underlings to track the
progress of major projects. He demanded color ratings — green
for on track, yellow for caution and red for major problems.

At least five city employees who managed the 911 overhaul told
Peters their reports were often rewritten by supervisors or they
were pressured to sanitize their reports by changing a red flag
to a yellow or a yellow to a green.

Not surprisingly, a major unfinished portion of the 911 project,
the outfitting of remote radio sites throughout the city, was
listed as green, or on track, when Bloomberg left office in
December 2013. But when Mayor de Blasio took office, the 911
staff immediately changed it to yellow, then to red a few months
later. Suddenly, the radio project was found to be 18 months
behind schedule, at a possible cost of another $100 million.

In other words, the old ratings appear to have been doctored.

Ever since de Blasio took office, hundreds of private
consultants have been sent packing and city officials are
managing the 911 project themselves. We’ll soon see if that
makes a difference.

The gyrations of ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his deputy Cas
Holloway to defend out-of-control delays and cost overruns of
the rebuilt emergency call system fall far short of being
believable. see page 24

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/911-overhaul-2b-disaster-
report-article-1.2105176