Another Bloomberg Scandal - the 911 Emergency System That Is $1 Billion Overbudget

Bloomberg said New Yorkers had to overturn term limits and give him a third term as mayor because only his fiscal genius could save the city from financial ruin.

He said this even as the CityTime crooks were stealing $700 million from the city, various DOE crooks were stealing tens of millions, the GPS system for the NYFD and Sanitation Departments were showing trucks in the East River at a cost of $17 million and the NYCHA computer system was causing tons of problems even though Bloomberg had spent $34 million on it.

Now comes another scandal - the 911 emergency system:

City Hall aides repeatedly bungled supervision of a massive upgrade of the 911 system, even as the project fell years behind schedule and its cost ballooned by as much as $1 billion, an audit has found.

When Mayor Bloomberg launched the 911 project in 2004, he promised a seamless system that would replace antiquated police, fire and EMS call-taking and dispatch functions with 21st century technology. It had a price tag of $1.3 billion and was supposed to be done in three years.

City Hall now concedes the cost has zoomed to at least $2 billion, and Controller John Liu will claim Wednesday that the price tag is closer to $2.3 billion.

Liu will also release an audit that concludes management failures dogged the multiagency project almost from the start. It blames City Hall aides for repeatedly failing to address the problems.

"Key decisions are not being made in a timely manner," warned the Gartner Group, the city's own quality control consultant on the project.

Its memo urged "active participation by City Hall" in resolving the conflicts.

Much like the notorious CityTime payroll project, the 911 upgrade kept devouring astonishing amounts of money while getting delayed.

A new Brooklyn 911 center that was supposed to be finished in 2007 did not become fully operational until late last year. A second emergency center originally scheduled for the same time in the Bronx - as a backup in case of terrorist attack or natural disaster - will not be ready until 2015.

...

By May 2009, Gartner's warnings became more dire about the mushrooming costs and continuing lack of direction on the project.

The interagency steering committee had "little or no participation by City Hall representatives," Gartner wrote in May 2009. "All City Hall meetings have been canceled."

By then, it was clear that some major vendors on the project, such as Verizon and Hewlett-Packard had provided equipment and technology that was performing inadequately, the audit said.

Hewlett-Packard was eventually bounced as the project's chief system integrator, and the city is demanding more than $50 million from Verizon for the delays it caused.

In her official response to Liu's audit, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post did not object to any of its findings.

"The city long ago identified the issues raised in the current audit, and had taken the measures necessary to address them," Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said in a statement.

There you have it - another example of Bloomberg's fiscal genius (i.e., the stealing of public money for private gain) at work.