A Tale of Two 911 Reports
Friday, February 06, 2015
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Architectural renderings of new 911 call center (WNYC)
Seven months after Mayor Bill de Blasio stopped work on the city’s 911 call system, the Department of Investigation has found the the 10-year, $2 billion dollar upgrade was plagued by mismanagement and delays costing millions of dollars.
In a report released Friday, investigators say there were too many consultants, but no one in charge to mediate the longstanding turf wars between the police and fire departments, who couldn't even agree to share an equipment room.
The report by DOI Commissioner Mark Peters is sharply critical of the last administration. But Peters, who was appointed by de Blasio and served as his campaign treasurer, says there was nothing political about this report.
"This report is just listing facts," said Peters. "There’s no rhetoric. There’s no finger-pointing. It’s just the facts."
But those facts are in dispute among Bloomberg alumni. Last month, former Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway preemptively defended the administration.
Was the program over budget? No, Holloway said in his own report. The program is on budget — but the numbers went up because of a $700 million decision incorporated into the 2008 capital budget to build a back-up call center from scratch, instead of retrofitting it into another building.
But Peters said the building, called PSAC 2, is not that expensive.
"We don’t know the exact cost, but probably more like $300 million of that is the changes in PSAC 2, so there’s still hundreds of millions of dollars over budget that has nothing to do with adding a new piece of scope," said Peters.
Both reports were more than 100 pages long.
The facts on which they both agree: the 911 system desperately needs to be fixed and it’s not done yet.
At an unrelated press conference, Mayor de Blasio said the city's DOI report "fills in the blanks of what went wrong." Regarding Holloway's report, the mayor was not impressed.
"If those individuals want to defend that that’s their right," de Blasio said adding, "but I think it is quite evident that this was a project that had gone wrong and needed serious change."
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BRIGID BERGIN, Reporter
Brigid Bergin is the City Hall and politics reporter for WNYC.
