Bloomberg Administration Hid 911 System Overruns, Conducted Little Oversight Of Consultants Or Vendors

Juan Gonzalez reports that fiscal genius Mayor Bloomberg oversaw a 911 system overhaul that was $1 billion over budget and ten years delayed.

Gonzlaez also writes that Bloomberg officials hid the cost overruns:

-The overhaul, now scheduled for completion in 2017, has soared in cost by almost $900 million — from $1.3 billion to $2.2 billion.

-More than $200 million of those costs were not previously known because Bloomberg aides buried them in the budgets of other agencies.

-Officials rewrote the monthly reports of 911 project managers or pressured them to “sanitize” and “soften” negative news so as to “to improve the spin” on its progress.

And of course there was no accountability from the Bloomberg administration on the consultants or vendors putting the project together because these weren't lazy city employees working on it, they were heroic private consultants and innovative private vendors:

-Multiple layers of private consultants and vendors virtually ran the overhaul with little supervision from city employees. At times, those consultants ended up marking up their bills to the city as much as 600%.

 -During one 18-month period, City Hall kept cancelling meetings of the interagency city group that was nominally in charge of the project, leading the city’s own quality control consultant, Gartner Group, to complain: “The most senior members of the administration simply failed to pay attention.”

I wrote yesterday that if de Blasio oversaw such a public safety and financial disaster, there would be hell to pay in the media for it.

But really, other than a couple of Juan Gonzalez columns and a few other news items, it seems former Mayor Bloomberg remains the fiscal and management genius he was always depicted as in the media.