De Blasio "Insources" IT Work For New York City

Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio is about to end the era of huge technology firms feeding off taxpayers with their legions of $500,000-a-year consultants camped at scores of city agencies for years.

On May 15, de Blasio’s top aides completed months of secret talks with the city’s largest municipal union on a far-reaching new “IT Insourcing” agreement.

First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris has committed in that pact, a copy of which the Daily News obtained, to “use city employees for IT work where it will achieve financial savings and improve service delivery, by reducing reliance on external IT consultants.”

City officials expect to save $3.6 million this year through the insourcing plan, but that figure could potentially rise to nearly $100 million over five years, according to the pact’s supporting documents.

De Blasio has thus turned into general policy an effort he began last year, when he took much of the city’s botched upgrade of the 911 system away from private contractors like Northrop Grumman and turned it over to municipal workers.

This signals a major shift by our city away from the “privatizing” or “outsourcing” model that has reigned in urban America for more than 20 years.

“There’s been a bias in too many places at using folks outside the public sector for certain city functions,” Shorris said Thursday. “We want to get away from a reliance on outsourcing things that don’t need to be outsourced.”

Mayor Bloomberg loved outsourcing everything he could - especially IT contracts.

And he defended this outsourcing even after the projects went years over budget or the outside consultants were found to be stealing millions from the city.

Here is part of a column from Adam Lisberg back in 2011 in the DN on that subject:

On his Friday radio show, he was asked about a new shift in city policy that had been in the newspaper for two days running - and didn't seem to know it had happened.

It's a shift on something that had been a sore point for Bloomberg's critics - outside contractors paid six-figure salaries for tech projects that blow deadlines and budgets, like the scandal-ridden CityTime system.

The mayor has long defended his administration's contracting policies, even though municipal unions and Controller John Liu say city workers could do the job for less.

So it was news last week when one of Bloomberg's deputy mayors, Stephen Goldsmith, agreed with critics and said New York will save tens of millions of dollars by bringing the work in-house.

On the radio, WOR-AM host John Gambling tossed Bloomberg a softball about it. But instead of explaining the new company line on insourcing, the mayor defended outsourcing.

"People say, 'Oh, you're spending too much money on outsiders.' If you didn't do that one contract outside, you'd have to have those people permanently on your staff," the mayor said.

"The consultants, they say, 'Oh, they charge a lot more.' Well, because that's the business," he continued. "They don't work all the time, so they have to get paid more. And sometimes they have expertise you don't have in-house."

CityTime, the 911 mess, the NYCDOE scandals (two here and here) the FDNY GPS mess, ARIS, the NYCHA computer mess - the Bloomberg Era incompetence on outsourcing goes on and on.

And yet, Bloomberg's pals in the news media gave him a pass then on this incompetence and they continue to give him a pass today.

Bloomberg was never personally held accountable for these.

It is good to see the current mayor change course and start to use municipal workers for these projects.

Why Are Bloomberg And Klein Still Considered Tech Geniuses?

Harris Lirtzman left this comment on the ARIS post from this morning:

I thought you and your readers might be interested in an article I wrote on Schoolbook on Jan. 28 in the long, painful lead-up to the contract negotiations called "Cut Waste at Education Department Before Negotiating Teachers Contract."

One could put any number of the technology and organizational and procurement boondoggles from the Bloomberg Era in any order of waste, perversity or simple ineffectiveness: my top candidates were SESIS (the "Special Education Student Information System"), your very own beloved ARIS, failure to collect hundreds of millions in federal and state reimbursements to the City for providing "related services" to students with disabilities because the DOE has no effective way to capture the information that would support the claims, stopping non-competitive contracts and procurements to "DOE-friendly" organizations and reforming or eliminating the failed and expensive school network systems.

I have always found it remarkable that the man who was responsible for building one of the most successful financial technology companies in the world could not get a single effective technology system build during his time in the City-- ARIS, SESIS, City-Time, Enhanced 911--but yet he and Joel Klein were lionized as visionaries and effective managers by many who wanted to believe.

ARIS we hardly knew ye but we're so glad to see you go.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/opinion-cut-waste-coming-table-over-teachers-contract/

I would add the NYCHA computer system, the FDNY and Sanitation Department GPS systems, and the EMT tablets to the list of Bloomberg tech boondoggles that Harris lists (SESIS, ARIS, CityTime and the 911 system.)

Let us imagine Mayor de Blasio had even a tenth of the failure that Bloomberg had with these boondoggles.

Can you imagine the press coverage?

And yet, Bloomberg has never been personally called to account for the billions of dollars of taxpayer money he lit on fire for these projects. 

Firefighters Union To Sue City Over Bloomberg's Unworkable 911 System

From the NY Post:

The firefighters union plans to sue City Hall to get rid of the new centralized 911 call system, which it says has created dangerous delays, including in the response to a serious Bronx fire yesterday.

The Uniformed Firefighters Association is claiming that a 911 call for the five-alarm blaze came in at 2:40 a.m. and, because of human error, was not relayed to the FDNY until 2:48 a.m.

When units arrived at 2:52 a.m., the blaze at 1507 Commonwealth Ave. was already raging. The fire left 25 people homeless, injured 11 firefighters and left two kidsen suffering from smoke inhalation.
The reason that this fire got out of control is that when we got there, it was already out of control,” union President Steve Cassidy said.

“It was an eight-minute and 22- second delay in the 911 dispatchers handing this off to the Fire Department.”

Cassidy said the union will seek an injunction to go back to the pre-2009 system.

Currently, callers to 911 speak to an operator, who takes down the circumstances and their address before transferring them to an FDNY dispatcher. Under the old system, as soon as callers to 911 said their was a fire, they were transferred to an FDNY dispatcher before their name and address were taken.

Cassidy said the old system reduces the risk of computer error or having an operator misinterpret the caller’s information.

The Bloomberg administration said everything worked fine, there were no delays and the new 911 system is the bestest thing ever.

Let me know when Bill Keller adds this mess to his "Bloomberg's legacy" columns.

Bloomberg Administration Knows 1/4 To 1/3 Of All 911 Calls Are Getting Lost In The System, But Continues To Deny The Problem Exists

In case you missed this very important Juan Gonzalez investigation on Bloomberg's faulty 911 system upgrade, here it is in full:

Less than 24 hours after the death of little Ariel Russo in a car accident on the upper West Side, EMS supervisors began an exchange of bombshell emails about repeated “lost calls” from the city’s new 911 system.

The emails obtained by the Daily News show for the first time that high-ranking officials knew the extent of the problems with the $88 million system very early on — just days after the system was launched and before 4-year-old Ariel died.

Lt. Carl Nunziata, an overnight shift boss, sent the first email on June 5. It was at 5:51 a.m. and addressed to Carla Murphy, the head of computer programming for EMS.

“Last night we had a couple of jobs I would like for you to look at,” the email began.

Nunziata said a call came from the NYPD to EMS as a “lost call.” Another call came in for an emotionally disturbed person and inexplicably had no address attached to it.

“Why are these jobs coming in this way?” a perplexed Nunziata asked. “And what are we suppose(sic) to do with these type jobs?”

The startling reply from Murphy came just after 10 a.m. on June 6. Some of the brass already knew.

“[Deputy Fire] Chief Napoli reported the problem to me several days ago and I provided a list of incidents where this had occurred over 3 days for Intergraph to resolve,” Murphy wrote.

A flurry of “lost calls” were “happening to about 1/4 [to] 1/3 of incidents transmitted from NYPD ICAD,” she said.

ICAD is the acronym for the new computer system built by Intergraph Corp. It is used by 911 operators to assign police and to transmit details of emergency calls to EMS and FDNY dispatch centers in downtown Brooklyn.

Given that 911 operators process an average of 3,000 ambulance calls a day, the Murphy email raises the possibility that the number of lost calls may have been in the hundreds or thousands.

A “lost” message, according to fire officials and Intergraph’s own manual, occurs when transmissions from NYPD to EMS fail to reach the intended recipient, usually because of a break in a computer link, or because of a garbled transmission.

  

“We get several of these a day . . . which may not have sufficient information for responding units to find the incident,” Murphy wrote, copying several top brass.

Whatever the number, it certainly points to a bigger problem with the new system than the minor “bugs” Mayor Bloomberg conceded on May 31.
 

Ariel was struck on June 4 at W. 97th St. and Amsterdam Ave., as she walked to school with her grandmother around 8:15 a.m. She was clinging to life, as police on the scene repeatedly asked for an ambulance.

The News revealed a few days later that there was a delay of more than four minutes in dispatching an ambulance. She later died, but it’s not clear if the delay contributed to her death. The girl’s family has filed a $40 million lawsuit against the city.

Fire officials, who blamed that delay on human error, said Monday that everything was fine with the new system.

“There has not been a single lost call with the new system,” Deputy Fire Commissioner Frank Gribbon insisted Monday.
 

They say an EMS worker failed to see the 911 ambulance request on her screen before going on a break, and admitted so afterward. Since then, she has contradicted that account. She denied seeing any new call on her screen before her replacement took over.

And the union for EMS paramedics has claimed the call for help was somehow lost in the system.
The EMS log of that incident lists several “PD-LOST” messages in the first few seconds of the transmission from 911.

Fire officials say no calls have been missed and the new system is faster and more reliable than its predecessor.

“The new ICAD system is so fast that the moment the NYPD call taker starts keying in information, the transmission starts to EMS,” Gribbon said. “There are instances when we receive partial data from ICAD. But we always get the full data within seconds.”

So a “lost” call is not really lost, according to Gribbon, just temporarily garbled or unavailable.

“It may not be the perfect term to use,” he conceded.

“That’s nonsense,” a veteran EMS dispatcher said. “He’s obviously never worked a dispatch terminal.”

“Since this new system started, our people get on the phone to 911 every day and ask, ‘where’s the information on that ambulance job you were supposed to send me?’ ” the dispatcher said. “The operator may tells us, ‘I sent it to you 20 minutes or an hour ago,’ but it’s still not our screen. If that isn’t lost, what is?”

Fire officials later acknowledged that dozens of paramedics and supervisors working at the EMS dispatch center the day of the accident should have been able to see the ambulance request on their individual computer monitors. Officials say the request would also have been visible on a huge screen in the EMS center that highlights in white any calls that have been delayed more than three minutes.

A public outcry ensued and officials have promised a full investigation. As of last week, at least 15 people had been interviewed under oath, including an EMS captain and a lieutenant. None has reported seeing the Ariel Russo ambulance request on EMS computer screens, say union leaders with knowledge of the interviews.

“Nobody saw the call for the little girl because it wasn’t there,” said Israel Miranda, president of the paramedics and emergency technicians union. “It was a lost call, and city doesn’t want to admit there’s a big problem with this new system.”

This is horrific but not a surprise.

The Bloomberg people never take responsibility for mistakes or problems, they always look to balme it on others - especially city workers.

We had better hope there is not some major disaster, either weather-related or otherwise, that brings in a ton of 911 calls before Bloomberg finally flies off to Bermuda and the next mayor comes in and (I hope) fixes this system.

Firefighters Union: Bloomberg Funks With Emergency Response Time Data

From the Daily News:

The city is playing with fire as 911 call centers go dangerously understaffed and the FDNY underreports its emergency response times, union officials claimed Wednesday.

The FDNY is fudging its emergency response times by as much as a minute by not including how long it takes a caller to get through the understaffed 911 system, said firefighter union head Steve Cassidy.

“They’re not counting the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator. The time is significant — over a minute,” said Cassidy, citing FDNY response time data from the last two weeks analyzed by his union.

“When the (FDNY) says response times are four minutes for structural fires, the reality is they’re five minutes, if not longer. When they talk about medical emergencies that are 5 1/2 minutes, the reality is they’re closer to seven,” Cassidy said. 

He blasted the department for not releasing info to the public that tracks emergency response calls from the moment a 911 call is answered by an operator. Historically, the stats are based on when a fire truck or ambulance is dispatched on a call.

Bloomberg claims the city has the fastest response times in history:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fewer people died in fires in New York City in 2012 than in any year since modern record keeping began nearly a century ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Wednesday.

 

There were 58 fire-related deaths last year, compared to 66 in 2011, according to the city's data, which extends back to 1916.

Bloomberg said the shrinking figures marked a continual decline in fire-related deaths in recent decades. There was an average of 140 fire-related deaths a year in the 1990s, and 278 in the 1970s, according to the city.

"With (a) record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said in a statement.

Last week, he announced that there were fewer homicides in the city -- 414 in 2012 -- than at any point since modern crime records began in 1963.

The fire department's ambulance service also broke a new record for response times, Bloomberg said. The average response time to life-threatening medical emergencies was 6:30 minutes in 2012, shaving off a second from the previous record set in 2011, he said.

Of course if you add the the time a 911 caller spends with the 911 operator, then the response times are not historic in the least.

Is Bloomberg unaware of the funkiness in the city' reporting of the data?

Is he aware of it but doesn't care?

It's one or the other and either way, it's a big problem.

Looks like we need a Truth Commission for the FDNY data, along with the NYPD crime data and the NYCDOE test scores and graduation rates.

Bloomberg's Closing 20 FDNY Houses, But Won't Say Which Ones

When you're the Mayor of Money, you don't have to tell anybody anything - at least that's what this sounds like:

The FDNY refused to identify 20 fire companies slated for closure yesterday, sparking outrage from the City Council - and the threat of legal action.

Mayor Bloomberg plans to shutter 20 companies as part of the city's budget cuts, but the identities of the endangered units have been shrouded in mystery.

Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano admitted he had a tentative list of units on the chopping block but he would not disclose it to lawmakers.

"Negotiations are still ongoing and I'm not going to send it out until I have to," Cassano said at a contentious Council hearing.

His stonewalling sent lawmakers into an uproar.

"There is no lawful means for you to not provide the committee with that information," fumed Queens Councilman Dan Halloran, who ordered Council lawyers to file a subpoena to obtain the list.

Other lawmakers vowed to file a Freedom of Information request or refuse to vote on a budget - which must be submitted by June 30 - unless the Council is provided the list.

"The mayor won't tell us the companies but expects us to vote on the budget - what color is the sky in his world?" asked Queens Councilman Peter Vallone Jr.

What color is the sky in Bloomberg's world?

He doesn't have to tell you.

And if you don't like it, well, too bad.

As Bloomberg likes to say, accountability in this city comes around every four years for the mayor.

And back in 2009, Councilman Vallone, you gave the Mayor of Money a pass on it.

So if you want to know the color of the sky in Bloomberg's world, you'll have to FOIL it, just the way the City Council is FOILing which firehouses he wants to close.

You should hear back in, oh I dunno, six months to a year...

Bloomberg Sends 12 FDNY Companies For Training Yesterday

From the Nothing Is More Important Than Professional Development file:

WEDNESDAY

Snowbound roads in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island remained unplowed, with the locals livid and longing for help.

A morning conference call held by the city Office of Emergency Management focused on which streets to make a priority, as plows finally reached parts of Howard Beach and Fort Greene.

Despite the ongoing snow woes, there was one last strange choice: A dozen fire companies were sent to a Randalls Island training session, taking them off the streets.

Gee, those training sessions seem like a great idea, Mr. Mayor.

Never know when there might be a citywide disaster that paralyzes New York for a few days.

You sure want those FDNY companies ready for that event.