NYC Council Holds Hearing Into Report On Overhaul Of 911 System
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- The City Council is holding a hearing into a scathing report on the overhaul of the 911 system.
The Department of Investigation found the Bloomberg administration mismanaged the project.
"The people in charge of running the project failed to properly manage on a real close level the contractors and consultants they hired," Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters said earlier this month. "And there was a real lack of transparency. We didn't have accurate reports on how the project was going and how much it was costing."
Officials are accused of rewriting monthly reports of project managers or pressuring them to sanitize negative news, according to Peters.
"Workers reported being pressured to spin or sanitize," Peters told CBS2's Marcia Kramer. "As a result, for month after month after month, even when it was clear that the project wasn't moving, there were green lights on all the reports saying everything is fine."
The Bloomberg administration's plan was sweeping. It aimed to obtain better communication gear for first responders, streamline and safeguard the 911 call-taking and dispatch system, and merge the city's Police, Fire and Emergency Medical Service dispatching systems into a joint operation to be located at two secure centers.
The original plan was budgeted at $1.345 billion and set to be finished by September 2007. But costs have ballooned to $2.031 billion, according to the probe.
The overhaul is now 10 years behind schedule and nearly $1 billion over budget.
Former members of the Bloomberg administration dispute the findings.
They stressed that the modernization was badly overdue and pointed to the massive improvements to the system, including several layers of redundancy that could kick in during a crisis and the 911 system's ability to field 50,000 calls an hour, a dramatic increase.
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