Report: NYC's Overhaul Of 911 System Delayed, Over Budget

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) --  Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration was on the offensive against the mayor's immediate predecessor Friday, claiming former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's showcased upgrade of the city's 911 emergency system is years behind schedule and $700 million over budget.

As CBS2 Political Reporter Marcia Kramer reported, the city's Department of Investigation also claimed Bloomberg staffers lied about the progress of the upgrade.

The report released Friday contends further that Bloomberg, who left office at the end of 2013, and his team did not ensure that the police and fire departments and other agencies coordinated efforts.

EXTRA: Click Here For The Full Report

"For years there was no central decision maker that would insist that all the agencies involved be on the same page and operate together,'' said Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters.

The probe also says that private contractor costs ballooned out of control and that the Bloomberg administration shielded the public from how the project was going.

"The people in charge of running the project failed to properly manage on a real close level the contractors and consultants they hired,'' Peters said. "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.''

In April of last year, it took an ambulance about 21 minutes to get to a fire in Far Rockaway, Queens. Four-year-old Jai'Launi Tinglin and his 4-year-old half-sister, Aniya, were killed in the Easter morning fire

At the time, Peters called the delay in the arrival of the ambulance "far too long."

"EMS took forever to come," witness Megan Maloney told CBS2's Kramer on May 19, 2014. "It was like, these kids are dying in front of you."

Peters said Friday that if the city's planned upgrade of its 911 system had been completed, the ambulance probably would have arrived much faster.

"Because the different parts of the system don't talk to one another, there was a 20-minute delay in sending an ambulance out, and that was in part a technology issue," Peters said.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the blackout that enveloped much of the Northeast in 2003 prompted the Bloomberg administration to commission a program to modernize the city's 911 system, which had suffered failures during each crisis.

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.

By 2012, the new call-taking software had been installed and one multi-agency dispatching center, known as Public Safety Answering Centers, was completed in downtown Brooklyn. But the second center being built in the Bronx is not fully operational. The fire department's computer-aided dispatch system also has not yet fully come online, according to the DOI report.

The probe did not discover any criminal behavior but laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Bloomberg administration.

"We found significant mismanagement," Peters told WCBS 880's Alex Silverman.

It found some contractors were paid 600 percent more than they should have, CBS2's Kramer reported. Changing general contractors in mid-stream, for example, cost an extra $100 million.

"You can do a huge amount for a lot of people for $100 million," Peters told Kramer.

The report also suggests the former mayor's team attempted to keep news of the rising costs from the public.

"Workers reported being pressured to spin or sanitize," Peters told 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."

Kramer asked why the progress reports were allegedly fudged, since Bloomberg considered himself a technology guru.

"Part of that, anybody running a large project wants generally to be able to deliver good news," Peters said.

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.

The officials also noted delays at the Bronx dispatching center were in part because the original venue for the center, in Queens, was later deemed unfit.

The officials also denied that the administration did not devote enough resources to the project, noting that former Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway was intimately involved with the details of the project. Holloway acknowledged that the project was "not without challenges'' but insisted that the project "achieved all of its major objectives.''

"The Bloomberg administration committed to and delivered a new, reliable and redundant 911 system that serves New Yorkers far better than the decrepit, fragmented systems it replaced,'' Holloway wrote in a report released in advance of DOI's findings.

Bloomberg's team also blamed a pair of contractors, Verizon and Hewlett-Packard Co., for delivering products that were faulty and behind schedule. Verizon later paid the city $50 million to compensate for the delay while HP paid $33 million in a settlement.

Officials now hope the the modernization project for dispatching ambulances, fire and police will be finished by 2017.

"When this system is finally implemented in 2017, it should address exactly those problems of coordination between agencies," Peters told 1010 WINS' Juliet Papa.

Going forward, the DOI is recommending that all big technology projects have an independent integrity monitor and that the city should deal directly with contractors, not subcontractors, to get the best price.

(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

In:
• Michael Bloomberg