Public Employee Press

City report slams contracted-out 911 project

By MIKE LEE

A 105-page report issued Feb. 6 by the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) listed numerous examples of inefficiencies and incompetence by city officials and private consultants in their management of the controversial 911 upgrade program during the Bloomberg administration.

The DOI found that the 911 system program, known as the Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP), was fraught with poor management, oversight failures, and inferior performance that resulted in the project being a decade behind schedule and costing nearly a billion dollars over the initial budget projection.

In the report, requested by Mayor Bill de Blasio last May, the DOI concluded the contracted-out program ran nearly $900 million over budget due to inefficiencies caused by using multiple layers of outside consultants, inept management and software glitches during implementation, all of which cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars and put the lives of millions of New Yorkers in jepoardy.

This overhaul of the 911 system, originally slated to go online in 2007, is now scheduled for completion in 2017. The initial budget was at $1.3 billion, but now the expected cost stands at $2.2 billion.

An angry Mayor de Blasio told reporters, "That was a project that had really gone wrong. Too much money was being spent, and the results were not good enough. The checks and balances weren't good enough."

DOI Commissioner Mark G. Peters concluded that from 2004 to 2013, city officials failed to adequately supervise subcontractors, who inflated costs of products and services, in one case up to 600 percent. They also discovered that senior program officials compelled workers to "sanitize" documents in order to mislead city officials and the public into believing the system implementation was going better than it actually was.

The review found that the program had an excessive reliance on consultants, and inadequately planned the direction and scope of the operation. The program manager had an inconsistent agency record-keeping system and also failed to appoint an independent integrity monitor to oversee the problems in the large-scale technology program.

The DOI investigation added, "Once again, city officials, at a high level, allowed a much hyped tech program to run out of control and failed to provide basic supervision and oversight."

"Under the Bloomberg administration, we saw constant processes where the entire control was given to consultants," said DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido, who spent years researching the controversial program and leading the charge in calling attention to the multiple problems in implementation, delays and cost overruns.

"So you had a consultant supervising a consultant, who was supervising a consultant," he said.

Over the years, DC 37 criticized the project in white papers and at demonstrations and City Council hearings. Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News wrote several exposés about the project.

The DOI report gave several recommendations for the 911 program and other large scale tech projects, including creating direct relationships with vendors, thus reducing the number of contractors and subcontractors; appointing a strong central manager and an independent integrity monitor to avoid ceding total responsibility over large scale projects to outside contractors.