Saturday, April 14, 2012

Bloomberg Appeals Court Decision On 911 System Report To Keep Boondoggle Under Wraps

The Accountability Mayor refuses to be held accountable himself:

The Bloomberg administration appealed on Friday a state judge’s order requiring New York City to release an consultant’s report that is believed to be critical of the 911 emergency-dispatch system.

“The city has been forthright and already provided reams of critical documents — but releasing an unfinished work product will chill the candid discussion necessary for genuine analysis,” said Gail Mulligan, the city’s assistant corporation counsel. “Today’s legal filing means that an automatic stay is in place. We’re hopeful that the appellate court will consider our arguments carefully.”

On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered the city to turn over the documents by Monday of next week. He compared the city’s claim that the report should be kept private to former President Richard Nixon’s claims of executive privilege during the Watergate scandal.

But an appeal means the report will remain under wraps for the foreseeable future.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg commissioned the report following the city’s poor response to the post-Christmas blizzard in 2010, a storm that paralyzed the city for days and tarnished the mayor’s reputation as an expert manager. The mayor has repeatedly apologized for the city’s response to the storm, calling it inadequate.


The Teacher Data Reports they released as soon as they could.

The 911 report that shows Bloomberg's administration to be crooked and incompetent - that they're sitting on for as long as they can.

This system is $1 billion over budget and doesn't work.

The report shows that.

Bloomberg wants to make sure New Yorkers don't learn that for a long, long while.

In other Bloomberg tech news, the administration whacked its top technology official on Thursday over all the "hiccups" the administration has had with technology projects going millions over budget and becoming outdated before they're finished.

New York City’s chief technology official resigned after clashing repeatedly with a deputy mayor over the management of several costly, ambitious and troubled projects that have bedeviled the Bloomberg administration, people briefed on the confrontations said on Friday.

The departure of the technology official, Carole Post, was announced on Thursday, a day before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would challenge a judge’s order to release what is said to be a sharply critical consultant’s report on an over-budget, much-delayed modernization of the city’s emergency calls and dispatching system.

The 911 system overhaul was one of a number of technology projects that were signature initiatives of the Bloomberg administration, but encountered cost overruns and performance issues.

City Hall aides said Ms. Post, who is the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, should not be blamed for the mismanagement of the $2.3 billion 911 project, whose woes predated her arrival in the job by several years.

But the city’s deputy mayor for operations, Caswell F. Holloway, grew increasingly frustrated by and impatient with Ms. Post’s department’s work on major initiatives, individuals involved in the city’s technology operation said.

...

In meetings over several months last year and as recently as March 27, people briefed on them said, Mr. Holloway, a hard-charging infighter who formerly led the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, voiced concerns about the cost of an upgrade to CityNet, the city’s internal data network; continuing problems and shortcomings with CitiServ, a data center that was supposed to consolidate dozens of city agency servers; and a shortage of users for NYCWin, a secure municipal wireless network.

The wireless network, for example, which cost $500 million to build and costs $40 million a year to operate, is underused and arguably outdated.

CityNet has experienced interruptions in service, despite a system of redundant fiber optic rings intended to enable it to withstand a breakdown. And the $95 million CitiServ project has confounded agency officials, with DoITT struggling to migrate old systems into the new data center.

The technology department is officially referred to by its acronym, DoITT, but is sometimes derided as “Don’t Do It” by city workers who seek to avoid working with the department.

Tech projects way over budget, not delivering what was promised, or worse, outdated by the time they're completed.

That's Bloomberg' technology legacy as mayor.

Doesn't matter if Bloomberg has a great track record in the private sector as some technology genius.

As mayor, his record sucks at best.

At worst, it veers on the criminal (a la CityTime.)

Which is why he wants to sit on the 911 report.

He's got to know that this $2 billion boondoggle is going to make CityTime look like good governance.

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