De Blasio 911 report savages Bloomberg, ex-aide returns fire
5:25 a.m. | Feb. 6, 2015
follow this reporter
The Emergency Communications Transformation Program, one of former mayor Michael Bloomberg's major projects, is an over-budget, grossly mismanaged attempt to modernize the city's 911 system, the de Blasio administration concludes in a blistering report released today.
In a rare and equally blistering defense, Cas Holloway, Bloomberg's former deputy mayor, rebutted the Department of Investigation report in advance of its official release.
Holloway, who now works at Bloomberg L.P. and was interviewed by the D.O.I., invited City Hall reporters to a Lower Manhattan office in mid-January to deliver a response in advance. In his own report, which exceeded 100 pages and contained documents, charts, graphs and a 23-page introduction, he acknowledged some of the problems with the program but insisted its successes outweighed them.
In the 105-page D.O.I. report commissioned by Mayor Bill de Blasio, commissioner Mark Peters said the decade-long effort to overhaul the city's 911 system is "years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over its original budget."
The program was to have been completed in September 2007 and cost the city $1.3 billion. It's not yet finished and its cost has climbed to more than $2 billion, in part because the city abandoned its original plan to renovate an existing facility for one of the centers needed for the initiative and instead selected a different site in the Bronx that required new construction.
In his study, which echoed previous criticisms of the program that were laid bare in news articles and a separate D.O.I. report last summer, Peters took dead aim at one of the traits Bloomberg prided himself on most: his management style.
"D.O.I. has identified a variety of management failures, internal control weaknesses and contractor performance deficiencies that, between 2004 and 2013, created the conditions for the substantial delays and rising costs which have plagued the program," he wrote in the report. "No overt criminal conduct was discovered. However, D.O.I. did identify inadequate program controls permitting inflated price estimates by contractors, as well as attempts to hide the significance of problems facing the program."
The 911 system was supposed to be overhauled to cut down on inefficiencies. Instead, Peters said, the Bloomberg administration wasn't able to successfully coordinate efforts between key city agencies, including the NYPD and FDNY, which wrestled over control and did not work well together. Specifically, he cited the city's decision to create two separate computerized dispatch systems for the two agencies rather than a single one that would have saved at least $11 million, the report said.
He also blamed a lack of planning early on, inadequate oversight of contractors, poor record keeping and "undue pressure applied by program officials upon employees to report positive information about the status of ECTP to City Hall."
The project is now expected to be completed by 2017.
Since de Blasio took office, he halted much of the nonessential work on ECTP, has cut down on outside consultants and agreed to appoint an independent monitor, Peters said.
Holloway, who worked closely on this project when he was in City Hall, did acknowledge early on in his response that ECTP was not a perfectly executed project.
"The 911 overhaul was not without challenges. Most notably, a software component critical to the activation of the system—Verizon's VESTA platform—was delivered late, delaying NYPD's move to the new 911 call center," he wrote.
He also wrote that several vendors "failed to deliver a functioning Computer-Aided Dispatch system."
Nonetheless, he said, the system is operable.
"By the standard that matters most, the 911 overhaul was an overwhelming success: it works," he wrote. "It is faster, has more capacity, new back-up infrastructure and is more stable and reliable than ever before; as a result, emergency response times are faster and measured more accurately than ever before. But D.O.I.'s report will likely conclude otherwise, and put forward a range of management critiques that the record and results of ECTP do not support."
He insisted the report would be neither "objective" nor "thorough," based on last summer's D.O.I. report.
The D.O.I. report focuses heavily on how the management of the program, with one section devoted to "initial program management," another to "program delays," and another to "lack of agency coordination and leadership."
Despite the scathing report, Holloway concluded, "an objective assessment of the project would have to conclude that ECTP was a tremendous success."
His detailed report was by far the most involved defense the former Bloomberg administration has issued against criticisms from the current City Hall.
Holloway wrote a far shorter passage defending Bloomberg's handling of Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts after getting skewered in a New York Times story, but for the most part, the former mayor's advisors have been relatively mum as de Blasio has lobbed attacks their way.
The ex-mayor himself made a pledge not to criticize de Blasio during his first year in office and, if the first month of 2015 is any indication, has continued that pattern.
