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.

Report: Fiscal Genius Mayor Bloomberg Royally Screwed Up 911 Upgrade

Explain to me how Michael Bloomberg continues to be revered as a fiscal genius after CityTime and this mess:

The city’s mammoth upgrade of its antiquated 911 emergency call-taking system was plagued by delays, cost overruns and “persistent mismanagement” under the Michael Bloomberg administration, investigators charged Thursday.

In a 109-page report, the Department of Investigation said failures over nearly a decade, including poor performance and price markups by a number of contractors, drove up the price of the overhaul by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The project, which was launched in 2004 to improve the city’s 911 call infrastructure and create essential backup protections, isn’t expected to be completed until 2017, at a total cost of more than $2 billion.

“[The project] not only is late and over its original budget, but also has tested public confidence in the city’s ability to deliver on necessary improvements to the 911 system that are critical to public safety,” the report says.

It's amazing what billions in your bank account can do for your reputation.

I guarantee you, were de Blasio to have similar scandals like CityTime or the 911 mess, the elites of this city, including the media, would not be so gentle.

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. 

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 Wasted Millions On 911 System

He tried to hide the waste, mocked an audit that was to look at his vaunted 911 system upgrades - and now we see why:

Less than a year after Mayor Bloomberg derided an audit of the 911 system as “stupid,” his own review revealed poor bookkeeping that resulted in up to $24 million in unnecessary payouts.

The KPMG review, commissioned by the Mayor’s Office of Citywide Emergency Communications, concludes that contractor Hewlett-Packard was overpaid for upgrades of the emergency call system between 2005 and 2012. The mismanagement resulted in as much as $11.5 million in unnecessary payments for 217 invoices and 5,850 time sheets.

The entire cost overrun over seven years was set at $24 million.

The 25-page report was completed last November but not released publicly. It was obtained by the Daily News through a Freedom of Information Law request.

City Controller John Liu, who conducted the audit that the mayor mocked, saw vindication. “This audit very clearly lays out fraudulent billings,” he said.

The errors read like an accountant’s nightmare:

• Hours claimed on Hewlett-Packard invoices were greater than the hours approved in time sheets, costing as much as $4 million.

• Underqualified contractors were paid more than they deserved, projecting to $3.4 million in unnecessary costs.

• Documentation was often unavailable, leaving KPMG unable to determine whether the price tag on services provided was appropriate.

The emergency communications office said it agreed with the KPMG findings, and would “strengthen the invoice review process.”

Liu has for more than a year tangled with Bloomberg over the upgrade of the 911 system, which is overdue and overbudget. During the summer, 911 was prone to crashes.

The full upgrade of the 911 system, initially projected to cost $1.2 billion, has ballooned to more than $2 billion.

Liu, who is running for mayor, claims Hewlett-Packard owes taxpayers $163 million for overbilling uncovered in the audit conducted by his office last year.

Bloomberg last year called Liu’s charges against Hewlett-Packard “intellectually dishonest” and “stupid."Liu’s auditors found Hewlett-Packard charged the city $192 an hour for menial tasks like opening a door for visitors.

$192 an hour to open doors.

Nice work if you can get it.

Gee, how will the city get by without the fiscal genius of Mike Bloomberg?

I have said before, I will say again - if there was ever a truly independent accounting of Bloomberg's time in office here (as opposed to one he pays for or one done by an entity with some ties to either Bloomberg the Man, Bloomberg the Company Or Bloomberg the Philanthropy), they would find the billions wasted in this man's 12 years in office.

They would find all the data has been phonied up - from the crime stats to the emergency response times to the graduation rates and test scores.

Michael Bloomberg the Genius is a fraud - and yet, because he has more money than God, he is feted as a fiscal genius and a municipal visionary and the like.

That's all about the power of his wealth and the fundamental flaw we have in this country whereby we worship money and believe people with it have it because they are smart and innovative.

The truth is, people with Bloomberg's kind of money are cunning and ruthless - that's all.

That's how he's been able to fool people over the last 12 years into believing he has made this city better.

He has not.

He has increased income inequality, he has made the city into a playground for the rich and famous, he has moved poor people to the edges of the city or out of the city (those he terms the "less fortunate") so that he could bring in the "fortunate" (i.e., rich white people.)

He has waged class warfare for the 1% and largely won that war.

Because he is a media mogul and because he is a billionaire, the press do not give him the scrutiny they will almost certainly give to his successor.

But make no mistake, he has been a disaster for this city and the people in it.

Just look at all the privatized public spaces, corporate stores that replaced the mom and pop places, the luxury housing that has replaced whole swaths of the old city and ask yourself if this city is better for the 99% who can either barely afford to live here anymore or cannot afford to live here at all.

Bloomberg's $2 Billion 911 Fiasco - Why No Accountability?

From the NY Post:

Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial $2 billion effort to modernize the 911 system — billed as a cure-all for every emergency-communications ill — was labeled a boondoggle by the city’s own experts two years ago, The Post has learned.

The project “does not have a defined business case” for spending $2 billion on a new 911 system, Gartner Consulting told City Hall in a March 2011 report marked “draft — confidential.”

In bureaucratic-speak, Gartner was telling Hizzoner “the program should not go forward” because the city hadn’t shown a legitimate need, as required by federal guidelines.

The consultant’s 45-page report, reviewed by The Post, explained the city was wasting its money by plowing ahead without resolving key problems. It slams the high-tech system for management failures and computer glitches, and clobbers key communications officials for refusing to cooperate and, instead, battling over turf.

The consultants report also found:

* Repeated failures of the emergency-response software were reported but were not fixed.

* The NYPD refused to merge its system for dispatching units with that of the FDNY and the EMS — although that was a key reason for creating the new system. And the departments would not work together to create a unified management structure for the new system.

* The city agencies involved in the plan would not assist the system’s architects in setting up the new 911 network.

The document has not only been kept from the public but was also withheld from auditors from the City Comptroller’s Office, who spent more than a year analyzing the mammoth project.

“If the city withheld any documents from my office during the course of our audit into the 911 system, they violated the City Charter,” Comptroller John Liu told The Post. “The Bloomberg administration should know by now that it can’t sweep its wasteful projects under the rug.”

The damning assessment of the Emergency Communications Transformation Program echoes much of what was laid out a year later in another document, the 911 Call Processing Review, or 911 CPR.
That report, kept secret for months until The Post revealed its findings, is now the subject of a major lawsuit between city fire unions and City Hall.

A highly edited version of 911 CPR was released in May in response to public pressure. Even the sanitized version of the report said the emergency-communications network was on life support because the technology didn’t work and the Police and Fire departments weren’t cooperating.

At the same time, fire officials started acknowledging that emergency-response times were actually on the rise — instead of decreasing — since the new system was installed.

Bloomberg spokesman John McCarthy said the city stands by its new emergency communications network.

“New York City failed to upgrade its 911 system for decades until the successful overhaul by this administration,” McCarthy said.

Where's the accountability for our fiscal genius mayor who wasted $2 billion on this fiasco?

The full 911 report needs to be released and Bloomberg, the people around him, and his outside consultants need to be held accountable for this mess.

The papers were screaming over the loss of $250 million in education aid.

What about $2 billion wasted on this 911 boondoggle?

And that amount has to be added to all the other money Bloomberg gave away to the CityTime crooks and other criminal consultants.

Putting The $250 Million In Perspective

That's the amount in increased aid the city will lose if the DOE and the UFT fail to come to an agreement over evaluations by January 17.

An additional $200 million in grant money may be put in jeopardy as well.

The total operating budget of the DOE is $19.7 billion.

The CityTime crooks stole $700 million from under the nose of city officials.

The Bloomberg 911 system is $1 billion overbudget.

Sure, losing an increase in $250 million in aid to the school system would suck - if that money were actually going to be used in schools.

But let's be frank - Bloomberg and Walcott have cut school budgets by 14% over the past few years even as they have increased spending on technology contracts, testing contracts and outside consultants.

The new teacher evaluation system is premised upon having both state and city tests in every subject in every grade all throughout the year.

They're not going to use the $250 million in classrooms or schools.

They're going to use it for technology contracts and testing contracts and consultants.

This is the kind of "aid increase" that winds up costing more than the actual aid increase (kinda like how the NY State Race to the Top "award" of $700 million cost districts around the state a total of $2 billion in reforms.)

The media will bludgeon teachers with that $250 million figure on the off chance no agreement is reached, but honestly, Bloomberg loses more a year to crooked consultants than that and most of this money will never see the inside of a classroom or a school unless it's in the form of a standardized test or a six figure Common Core consultant.

911 System Failed During Sandy

Bloomberg's 911 system is more than $1 billion over budget, years behind schedule - and it still doesn't work.

The NY Post reports it failed spectacularly during Sandy:

What a disaster!

Superstorm Sandy flooded the city’s new $2 billion 911 system with thousands of duplicate calls — sending firefighters on wild-goose chases that kept them from responding to real life-threatening alarms, sources told The Post yesterday.

Of the 7,377 calls received by the FDNY as the storm hammered the city on Oct. 29, only 1,945 were legitimate, internal documents show. The rest were duplicates that dispatchers had to weed out of the system, sometimes after trucks were already speeding to a location where first responders had been sent.

Things were a little better the next day, once the storm had passed — but not much: 6,209 calls were received, and 2,236 of them were real emergencies.

“We were inundated,” said John Veneziano, vice president of the dispatchers union. “We were sending out alarms we shouldn’t be going on. The [new 911 network] was flooding our system.’’

Mayor Bloomberg has acknowledged the system was deluged with about 10 times the average number of police and fire calls. But he did not address the havoc caused by the new system — which he continues to support.

New procedures require 911 operators to act on all calls, before anyone determines they’re not duplicates or even hoaxes.

In the old system, fire dispatchers first would figure out whether calls were valid before sending trucks out.

A 911 source told The Post that the fear of duplicate calls was discussed by city officials in the days leading up to the storm.

But they knew there was nothing they could do as Sandy bore down on the city.

“It’s not a surprise,” the source said. “That has been a problem since the start. They’ve gone through many emergency incidents, and they still can’t solve this problem.”

The new Unified Call Taker was supposed to streamline 911 by merging separate dispatch systems run by the NYPD and FDNY. But it has become a major embarrassment for City Hall, nearly collapsing during the Christmas blizzard of 2010.

Afterward, Bloomberg commissioned a review of the system that led to the release of a scathing report — first revealed last spring by The Post — that said response times have actually slowed since it was put into place.

 Just another example of how unaccountable Mayor Bloomberg is.

One billion overbudget, years behind schedule, still doesn't work well and needs to be replaced.

This duplicate call problem is serious.

But Bloomberg dismisses it.

Where is the accountability for this mess?

Can you imagine if David Dinkins had put a system like this into place?

You can be sure he's be held accountable.

And yet somehow, Bloomberg skates accountability, shirks responsibility and displaces blame onto others.

Must be great to be an unaacountable billionaire media mogul/mayor.

Bloomberg The Tory

Bloomberg addressed the Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham and claimed he has governed as a Tory in New York, bringing a milder form of right wing politics to the city that has more in common with the Tories in England than the GOP in Washington.

Bloomberg also took the opportunity to brag about his supposed successes as mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said he and Mr. Cameron had each made difficult decisions on the economy, a reference to the sweeping austerity measures Mr. Cameron has introduced. Balancing his own city budget, Mr. Bloomberg said, involved “raising taxes and cutting spending, and let me tell you, that didn’t make me the most popular man in New York.” 

He cited a series of statistics that he said showed his pragmatism had yielded results: Crime is down 30 percent, he said, high school graduations are up 40 percent and welfare claims are down 20 percent.

He never did mention how the crime stats are phonied up, the graduation rates are phonied up, and the agencies in the city government are bastions of corruption (Seedco being the latest scandal there.)

He didn't mention the failed 911 system he has built that has gone $1 billion over budget and still isn't finished after eight years work.  He also failed to note how he has tried to keep New Yorkers from knowing the extent of his incompetence over the 911 system by hiding an independent report into the debacle.

He also didn't mention the CityTime scandal that saw crooks steal $700+ million dollars from the city in the worst fraud ever perpetrated against city taxpayers.

And he didn't mention the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010 when he couldn't get the streets cleared for days but told people to relax, stop whining about all the piled up snow and go take in a Broadway show instead as people in the boroughs died from a lack of medical care.

Instead he declared himself a great leader and his claims have, as usual, gone unchallenged.

But the Tories, in private, did mention one of Bloomberg biggest accomplishments, one which they envy very much - his refusal to compromise on anything:

Conservative officials, who have felt hampered by their coalition government with a liberal party here, also expressed admiration for the New York police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who visited London before the Olympic Games this summer. “They run things a bit like we’d like to,” one official said, “if we didn’t have to worry about inconveniences like compromise.”

Yeah, that's what Britain needs - a government run by a bunch of rich, out-of-touch oligarchs who don't give a shit about anybody other than themselves and who use the police force as their "own private army."

Yeah, that's what Britain needs.

Remind me, didn't Britain get rid of absolute monarchy back in the day?

Maybe we ought to try the same here in NYC.

Bloomberg's $2 Billion Dollar 911 Boondoggle

Yesterday the city released an "edited" version of a report on the city's 911 system conducted by an outside consultant group and it did not paint a pretty picture:

For months, Mayor Bloomberg has shamefully held back on releasing a consultant’s report on the city’s revamped, $2 billion 911 emergency response system, a review ordered after the disastrous response to the 2010 snowstorm.

Now we know why: The findings paint a terrible picture of what happens when a New Yorker picks up the phone and calls for help.

Virginia-based Winborne Consulting found that:

1. NYPD and FDNY 911 dispatchers waste time asking callers duplicate questions and taking down identical information;

2. multiple conflicting databases — which Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway acknowledged date to the 1960s and ’70s — result in dispatchers sending some units to the wrong address;

3. the city doesn’t count response time from the beginning of a 911 call, and

4. response time averages include many calls that are actually the result of that scourge of the cell phone age: mistaken butt-dialing.

All this raises truly disturbing questions about an operation that is challenged daily during routine calls for help and would be supremely tested in the event, God forbid, of another terrorist attack. Implicated is not only the supposedly state-of-the-art call center — for which City Hall spent $680 million alone — but the management of the switchover and the instruction required to make the technology work.

As I noted yesterday, the city has been sitting on this report for awhile and STILL refuses to release the whole unedited thing.

Bloomberg claimed the report is not finished and may contain errors, which might lead New Yorkers to make erroneous conclusions about the state of the system and Bloomberg's handling of it.

This same problem did not bother Bloomberg when it came to the error-riddled Teacher Data Reports - you know, the ones with the maximum margins of error of 87%.

Those he got out as soon as he possibly could because, as he said,

no evaluation system is every gonna be perfect...Parents have a right to know every bit of information that we can possibly collect about the teacher that's in front of their kids. This is about our kids' lives. This is not about anything else.

But an unedited version of the 911 report - that he can't release because it might contain errors.

That information people don't have the right to know.

Even though that information is, quite literally, about people's lives.

The difference between the TDR's and the 911 report, of course, is that this time if there are errors in the data the city is releasing, the errors might make him look bad, as opposed to teachers.

But the reality is, this report doesn't contain errors - it contains unvarnished truth about how much money Bloomberg has wasted to develop as system that is no better than what came before, that is STILL costing much more money than it should and what is much, much worse, costing lives of people who could have been saved.

$2 billion down the drain so far and counting.

We don't know how many lives have been wasted because of this system because Bloomberg refuses to release the data and tell us.

When does Bloomberg get held accountable for this mess?

When?

Judge Orders Mayor Data Report On 911 System Released

Mayor Bloomberg claims that a report on New York City's troubled 911 emergency system shouldn't be released to the public because it contains errors and is an unfinished document.

The report shows that response times for the city's emergency services have gotten longer even as the city has spent $2 billion dollars on the 911 system. The report also says that the city has misled the public on response times by cutting 33% of the total minutes from the overall response time.

Bloomberg says the report is not actually finished and the information contained within could mislead the public about the project, which has gone $1 billion dollars over budget.

But as Accountable Teacher pointed out here, this same mayor had no problem releasing the Teacher Data Reports for 18,000 NYC public school teachers even though those documents had a maximum margin of error of 87% and were used to mislead the public about the efficacy and skill of NYC schoolteachers.

But somehow what's good for teachers in this city isn't good for the mayor of this city.

Until today, that is:

Mayor Bloomberg was ordered yesterday to release a scathing analysis of the city’s trouble-plagued 911 and emergency-dispatch systems.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, in a stinging rebuke to the mayor, told city lawyers they have one week to turn over a copy of the so-called “911 CPR” analysis and all drafts of the document.

Engoron said City Hall can’t keep the report from taxpayers who funded it.

The bombshell study, first reported last week by The Post, shows the city’s 911 and emergency-dispatch systems are getting worse at handling emergency calls despite $2 billion spent to improve them.

The judge actually compared Bloomberg to Nixon in his written statement:

The judge compared the mayor’s efforts to hide the document to former President Richard Nixon’s efforts to stonewall Watergate probers.

“Nixon kept claiming executive privilege . . . and the public and the courts didn’t buy it,” Justice Engoron declared. “We are talking about much the same thing.”

Engoron dismissed the city’s arguments, claiming the report, “belongs to everybody. I don’t think we have nuclear secrets here.”

Bloomberg certainly shows a Nixonian flair in how he runs this city - with an iron fist, bludgeoning his enemies with his money and his media empire (or the media empire of his fellow oligarchs, Zuckerman and Murdoch), using his police force as his "own army" to enforce his corporatist rule.

And just as Nixon lied about the Vietnam War, lied about Watergate, lied about pretty much everything, Bloomberg lies about the crime stats, the education stats, the recycling stats and now the response times of the FDNY and EMS services.

George Carlin once said that he believed not one thing his government told him - not one.

The same strategy should be used when viewing Bloomberg's public statements and city data.

Everything is skewed to make himself look good and make his "enemies" look bad.

And even when a judge orders him to release the report and compares his attempts to hide the data to Nixon's attempts to hide Watergate evidence, Bloomberg STILL defends his cover-up:

Later, Bloomberg again defended his stance. “I don’t know how any government would be able to function if you had to put out every single paper even at the beginning of a study and all through the study,” Bloomberg said.

The NY Post says the city's lawyers haven't decided whether to appeal.

I suspect there will be an appeal to this decision and Bloomberg will try and delay the release of the report for as long as he can so it does as little damage as possible to his legacy and reputation while he is still in office and people are paying attention to him.

But had this been Teacher Data Reports with a MOE of 87%, this report would have been released today, packaged in a bow and hand delivered to the hacks at the Times, News, Post, Observer, Wall Street Journal, et al.

Because this is a Mayor Data Report by an independent auditor, Bloomberg is trying to keep it from seeing the light of day.

What are you afraid of Mr. Mayor?

It seems you only believe in accountability for teachers and schools, not for yourself, not for your administration and not for the numerous projects you have wasted billions on - like CityTime, like the FDNY GPS systems, the NYC Housing Authority computer system, like the 911 upgrade.