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.

Michael Pollan Knows Nothing About Mayor Bloomberg

.@michaelpollan @paultough NOT a good idea; Bloomberg has been a disaster when it comes to instituting tech systems; witness CityTime
— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) November 24, 2013

Apparently Michael Pollan missed not only the news about CityTime scandal - the worst fraud ever perpetrated against NYC - but also the 911 system overhaul mess that has seen Bloomberg spend over $2 billion dollars in tech upgrades that cause the system to freeze repeatedly and just may have led to the death of a four year old.

Or the EMT records modernization project Bloomberg instituted that the NY Post called a "technical nightmare" that causes the new wifi devices to freeze up and lose information - again putting lives at risk.

Or the NYCHA computer system upgrade that Bloomberg spent $36 million on that Juan Gonzlaez described this way in the Daily News:

Bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority gave their new $36 million computerized rent-collection system the bizarre acronym NICE (NYCHA Improving Customer Experience).

But for landlords and public housing tenants, the system — designed by firm Siebel-Oracle — is a cyber-monster run amok.

Since NICE was launched in February, the annual certification process for 100,000 tenants who receive Section 8 rent subsidies has turned into a hellhole of disappeared documents, erroneous payments and baseless eviction notices.

Many of the 30,000 private landlords who get paid by the Housing Authority are up fed up.

“It’s total chaos beyond belief,” said one Brooklyn building owner. “Landlords are being mixed up and getting wrong checks. Sometimes the computer automatically sends termination notices to every tenant in a building. Transfers get held up for months. The whole thing gets worse every day.”

Or how about the GPS systems Bloomberg bought for the FDNY that the NY Times described this way:

The Bloomberg administration spent millions of dollars to put custom-made GPS tracking units in fire and garbage trucks, only to have vehicles inexplicably show up on computer screens as if they had sunk to the bottom of Long Island Sound or New York Harbor, the city comptroller has found.

Faulty devices, inaccurate locations, needless features and prices to make a vendor blush — as much as $56,000 for a single unit in a sanitation truck — characterized the two projects, according to two audits released on Wednesday.

The comptroller, John C. Liu, said the findings were more evidence of the administration’s troubled record with computer projects.

“Once again, millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on technology that falls short of what’s promised, raising questions about the oversight of expensive outside consultants,” he said in a statement. Mr. Liu, a likely mayoral candidate, has crusaded against city technology spending on projects like CityTime, the scandal-plagued payroll system.

Last week, the Bloomberg administration acknowledged that it had mismanaged its major information-technology projects and vowed to improve oversight.

And let's not forget the Bloomberg Blizzard Disaster of 2011 that saw Bloomberg telling people to relax and take in a Broadway show as New Yorkers died in this city because Bloomberg was too incompetent to get the streets plowed in a timely fashion.

Or his downplaying of the storm threat pre-Sandy that caused some New Yorkers to take the storm less seriously than they should have.

I'm sick of these "experts" like Pollan pontificating about stuff they know NOTHING about, showing their ignorance in the bargain, and no one calling them on it.

Not that he's going to care, but I'M going to call him on it.

Pollan is an ignoramus if he thinks Bloomberg is some uber-competent techno-genius who should be tapped to fix the Obamacare mess.

This is the kind of statement that calls into question whatever else this guy writes or talks about.

Bloomberg Plans To Lease NYCHA Land To Private Developers To Get Money For "Repairs" In The Projects

In between his rants about stop-and-frisk and his belief that all NYCHA people should be fingerprinted, the mayor said he's going forward with NYCHA privatization plans:

During his radio show today, Mr. Bloomberg also announced this morning that the city plans to move forward today with a controversial plan to open NYCHA land for private housing development to raise extra money for repairs.

“We have to come up with some revenue-generating mechanism,” he said. “Either we walk away from our public housing, or we find some ways to make it better … We don’t have a printing press. We’ve gotta find some rational ways to do it.”

He wants a rational way to raise money to fix NYCHA buildings?

How about the old-fashioned way - raise taxes on billionaires and use the money to fix NYCHA buildings and the rest of the city infrastructure that's falling apart.

But oh no, can't do that - raising taxes on billionaires is unthinkable to our billionaire mayor, so instead he is going forward with a "revenue-generating" plan to lease some NYCHA land to private developers in order to "repair" NYCHA buildings on other parcels of land.

And of course the NYCHA land Bloomberg will eventually try to open to real estate developers will be in parts of the city where real estate values are high and land is tight.

Like the Lower East Side.
Maybe Williamsburg.

Maybe near Lincoln Center.

Oh, yeah, you can see the real estate developers licking their lips at these parcels of land opening up to development - and the eventuality that all NYCHA land will be open to them.

Classic Shock Doctrine stuff - Bloomberg's not missing a trick to privatize as much as he can on his way out the door to Bermuda.

NYCHA - No Visits To Help After Sandy, But The Rent Must Be Paid On Time

Denis Hamill in the New York Daily News:

This is where you should go, Mr. President.

When you arrive in New York City on Thursday to witness the ravages of Hurricane Sandy, set the presidential limo GPS to 56-10 Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway.

Walk through the quadrangle past the large, white Caterpillar generator that only started supplying limited electricity on Friday to the five-story dirty brick building that is part of the Edgemere projects, home to 14,000 people — most of whom live far below the poverty line.

Enter the narrow hallway and turn left and go knock on the door of Apt. 1G, where you will find a large beige masking-taped “X” on the door scribbled with black marker that 12 people and one cat live inside in four bedrooms that have had no heat or hot water since the day the storm hit.

“I would love President Obama to come and sit right here at my kitchen table,” says Anita Vaughan, 49, matriarch of this family that consists of her and her husband, Donald, four adult kids and six grandchildren under age 5. “I voted for Obama four years ago. I voted for him again last Tuesday.
So did all the other five adults here. . . . We only got lights on Friday. Tell him to wear a sweater because we have no heat.”

“And you can’t use any of the baseboard outlets or else they give you shocks,” says her son, Desmond, 22, whose cashier/grillman job he’s had for the past six years at the local McDonald’s was also washed out by Sandy.

“We can only run extension cords from the sockets up high where the water that flooded through the ground floor windows and up through the floors didn’t short circuit,” says Cynthia Torres, 20, holding her year-old baby, Jovan, on her lap.If the President shows up, he’ll have to forgive them for not wearing their Sunday best.

“Barack better not expect us to wear clean clothes if he comes because we haven’t been able to do any wash since the storm,” Anita Vaughan says, pointing to 17 heavy duty garbage bags of laundry lining the kitchen and foyer.

Take a tour of this apartment, Mr. President, as I did on Tuesday, and see the plaster and paint falling from the spongy bathroom walls that are bubbling like pancakes on a hot grill. See the roaches zigzagging the crumbling walls, shiny and plump, feelers probing for food in this dark and dank roach resort. Come see the federal NYCHA dollar at glorious work.

“The cockroaches came in with that flood water,” says Anita Vaughan. “Open the kitchen cabinet doors and you think they gonna run out with the Campbell’s soup cans,” says Anita’s daughter Syrina, 18. “So many of them. We never had roaches like that. We keep a clean house, but there was so much dirty water. . . .”

When the storm hit, the entire family of 12 had to retreat up to a fifth-floor neighbor’s apartment for three days while the adults went to work each day sweeping the water out of the four bedrooms, kitchen and living room with brooms.

“Nobody from NYCHA came to help with a pump or anything like that,” says Torres. “We had to sweep 2 feet of water out of the apartment ourselves. And keep sweeping it down the hallway into the street or else it flowed right back in.”

Didn’t NYCHA at least provide industrial brooms or squeegees to help them bail out the apartment?
“Hell, no,” Cynthia Torres says. “They never came once to see how we were doing when we were living for 10 days in the pitch dark with no phones, no hot water, no heat, no cable, sometimes no drinking water or food, no nothing. Two NYCHA guys came today for the first time since the storm.
They looked around for about 30 seconds. And before he left, the manager told us where we could go to pay the rent on time! We’re living like animals and all they were worried about was the $1,000-a-month rent.”

“We stayed because we had nowhere else to go,” says Anita Vaughan. “I’d tell President Obama that this has been my home for 30 years. I’m on heart, blood pressure meds and insulin for diabetes. I couldn’t keep my insulin cold without electric. I had to have my kids run back and forth to my sister’s house for that. Plus my husband, Donald, he just had two kidney transplants and suffered a stroke.”
Donald Vaughan, 49, sits on the edge of a bed in a back bedroom with a home attendant and shows me the bandages from his transplanted kidneys as he sits before the precarious warmth of a space heater.

“I worked for Lo Bello Electric, as a Local 363 electrician,” he says. “But I can’t work right now. You don’t mind if you could watch a little TV, but we have no cable, no phone, and no Internet yet. Plus my blue minivan, the family van, was destroyed in the storm. I had no flood insurance. Gone. . . .”

“Last night they shut off the water altogether again,” says Torres. “You couldn’t flush unless you hauled water in from the hydrant outside. When it came back on today, the soldiers, the National Guard, they came and knocked and said don’t drink it because it’s all rust colored. We’re washing with dirty water.”

Aria Doe who runs the Action Center out of the Community Center at 57-10 Beach Channel Drive arrives with her husband and fellow workers delivering a new crib and bedding for some of Anita Vaughan’s grandchildren.

“One resident was actually ticketed for opening a hydrant while the building had no water,” she says.
“All the kids have sniffles and colds because this place is so damp from the storm,” says Anita Vaughan. “All our mattresses are still soaking wet from the flood. We put new blankets on top of the wet mattresses at night and by morning they’re wet. Nobody can get dry mattresses. I asked the NYCHA guy what we can do about the place being so damp with no heat. He tells me, ‘Keep the windows open all day and night till it dries.’ But when we open the windows it’s freezing here by the sea at night and today it’s raining.”

What would be the main thing she’d tell President Obama if he visited her on Thursday?

“I would tell him I am glad he got reelected because I think he has a good heart,” Anita Vaughan said, her family gathered around her in the damp projects kitchen in post-Sandy Far Rockaway. “But I’d tell him I think NYCHA should give me a new apartment before all my kids get really sick or there’s a fire in here. I’d tell President Obama that I voted for him twice and I believe in him but I also believe that this is no way for human beings to have to live in America.”

This is the place, Mr. President.

How is this not like Katrina?

Obama won't go there.

He doesn't give a shit about these people any more than Bloomberg does.