Public Employee Press

Part 6 of a series
Consultants botch call center project

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The city’s $1.3 billion plan to upgrade its 911 system has become a gold mine for contractors but a black hole for city taxpayers.

The Emergency Communications Transformation Project is running two years behind schedule, and a $730,000 cost overrun has raised its price to $2 billion, according to recent hard-hitting reports by Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez.

Mismanagement and conflicts of interest plague the contracted-out plan to merge the Police, Fire and Emergency Medical Service call-in and dispatch operations into a single system.

“We have been sounding the alarm for a long time now about the widespread waste in the city’s use of information technology consultants,” said Assistant Associate Director Henry Garrido, who spearheads DC 37’s white paper studies of contracting out. “The call center scandal is only the latest example of the city’s misguided IT procurement practices.”

Two years behind schedule

“The tragedy is that the city is unwilling to use its own workers for these jobs that get farmed out to excessively compensated and unaccountable consultants,” said Robert D. Ajaye, president of Electronic Data Processing Personnel Local 2627. “We have people with the background to do this work. And if our members need specific skills for a particular project, you can easily address that through training — professional development that the city should encourage.”

Other problems plague the call center project.

The cost of renovating a single floor at 11 MetroTech in downtown Brooklyn, the central location of the new 911 operation, has ballooned from $80 million to $166 million. EMS dispatchers were supposed to move to the Brooklyn center in March, but they have not been able to because the Verizon phone system isn’t up and running.

Police operators won’t be able to move until March 2010 — two years later than planned — because subcontractor Motorola failed to provide the Police Dept. with workable computer software for the dispatch system.

The cost of a satellite center in the Bronx has doubled to $1 billion. The backup emergency communication center won’t open until 2013.

Gonzalez also reported apparent conflicts of interest in the upgrading plan. Not long after they awarded a $380 million contract to Hewlett-Packard to oversee the merger of the systems, former Dept. of Information, Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Gino Menchini and his deputy, Larry Knafo, became executives at Northrop Grumman, a subcontractor supervised by Hewlett-Packard.

“We have members who are well-qualified to do this work, yet there are probably 30 to 40 consultants working on the project,” said a Local 2627 member at the Fire Dept., who spoke to PEP but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Many of the consultants working on the project make from $300,000 to $500,000 a year. Some Local 2627 members with comparable skills top $100,000, but most earn $70,000 to $80,000, Ajaye said.

“There is no reason for consultants to be here at all,” Ajaye said. “Computer work is based on a universal methodology. If you can fix a Ford, you can fix a Chevy.”