Bloomberg Wants To Privatize Parking Meters And Lose Money On The Deal

Parking meter privatization has been a disaster in Chicago (ever notice how so many disastrous ideas come out of Chicago? Neo-liberalism, mayoral control of schools, parking meter privatization, deep dish pizza - all from Chicago.)

So of course the Mayor of Money wants to bring that disaster here to NYC.

But John Liu writes in today's Daily News that that's a bad idea:

Despite City Hall’s disastrous track record with outsourcing contracts to large corporations, like CityTime to SAIC and the 911 emergency-call system to HP, Mayor Bloomberg apparently continues to believe in the myth that private companies always do a better job than the public workers already on the payroll.

Perhaps in an attempt to repair his bad record of farming out multibillion-dollar technology projects, the mayor is aggressively moving forward with what may prove to be the largest such project in New York’s history: privatizing the operations and maintenance of the city’s nearly 90,000 total parking spaces. If his plan proceeds, a private company would soon be servicing our Muni-Meters and collecting the money.

Preliminary proposals are due tomorrow, Tuesday, so New Yorkers need to know the facts today.

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Over time, our parking system has consistently proven to be a hugely profitable business for the city. For this fiscal year, its operating revenues are projected to be $192 million — a 22% jump over the previous year — while operating expenses are projected to grow only 6%, to $67 million. The $125 million in net revenue the system earns for the city represents a profit of more than 65% — a profit margin that would make the CEO of any major company, even Bloomberg LP, envious.

What’s more, the 466 folks who the city has reported as operating and maintaining our parking system are good at their jobs. For this fiscal year, the average revenue generated per employee is projected to be a whopping $412,000. By comparison, in 2011, each JPMorgan Chase employee generated only $345,000 in revenue. So the city’s parking-system operation is hardly inefficient or bloated, at least compared to one of the world’s largest banks.

So why in the world does Bloomberg want to allow this tremendous public asset to be privately managed and operated? What is the evidence a corporation can squeeze more profitability out of the system? Perhaps the plan is to hike rates or shed employees. Perhaps it’s to look for a quick, one-shot cash infusion to close the $2.5 billion budget hole looming next year.


Either motive would be dangerous for taxpayers.

Maybe Bloomberg believes we need to bring more advanced technology to bear on our parking spaces. But the city hasn’t had any problem modernizing its parking system. Our Muni-Meters are state of the art and reliable, with more than 98% reported operability. We’re even exploring parking-rate innovations like using mobile phones to make it easier for drivers to feed the meter and find empty spots.

The mayor’s office says it is seeking to guarantee a minimum of $100 million in total annual parking revenue. But the parking system already generates $125 million of net revenues annually for the city. Why would we hand over our parking system to a private company in exchange for a $100 million guarantee and then let it share in the revenues above that? It doesn’t make any financial sense, not for the city or for taxpayers.

Bloomberg would know much of this if he just called Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, whose predecessor orchestrated one of the worst parking-meter privatization deals in municipal history. Chicago, home to the nation’s third-largest parking system, is now grappling with a contract that gave that city relatively small change up front, $1.15 billion, in exchange for a 75-year deal that has made for skyrocketing parking costs for residents.

Estimates are that the vendor will make almost 10 times what Chicago got for the contract. Meanwhile, the vendor is sticking Chicago taxpayers with a truckload of hidden costs, charging the city fees, for example, when meters are put out of service to accommodate parades, street fairs, construction or handicapped-parking placards.

A horrendous deal, indeed.

I hope Liu can stop Bloomberg.

But Liu has already been destroyed by Bloomberg's friends in the media and the federal government with campaign finance fraud allegations.

Bloomberg, who himself admitted he laundered $1.1 million to the Independence Party outside of the legal route, somehow remains in office with full powers while Liu, accused but never charged with finance fraud, is neutered by the press.

No wonder the corporate media and Bloomberg's friends in power went after him.

He tells the truth about corporate cronyism, corruption and privatization - like with this parking meter privatization deal Bloomberg wants to saddle the city with.

Imagine Bloomberg Had Gotten His Way On The 2012 NYC Olympics

Would have been a total, total nightmare.

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.

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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.

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.

Accountability For CityTime Company, But Not For Bloomberg

One of the buzzwords in education these days is "accountability."

Mayor Bloomberg loves to hold other people accountable for their performance of their jobs - especially teachers.

One of the reasons he supports publishing teacher evaluations in the newspapers is so that parents can hold their kid's teachers accountable for performance.

Yes, with Bloomberg, it's always about accountability and performance

And yet, how come he isn't being held accountable for the CityTime mess?

In a city where Boss Tweed, Mayor Jimmy Walker, and Stanley Friedman all brazenly pilfered public money during eras gone by, no government scandal compares to the size and scope of CityTime.

It was "the single biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the city of New York," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Wednesday.

But thanks to a dogged joint investigation by Bharara and Rose Gill Hearn, the commissioner for the city's Department of Investigation, the crooks are paying back most of what they stole.

Science Applications International Corp., the main contractor on the CityTime project - and one of the country's biggest defense giants - has agreed to return to taxpayers the astonishing sum of half a billion dollars by close of business Thursday.

Of that money, $466 million will go directly to the city treasury and the rest to the federal government. SAIC also agreed to forgo another $40 million in bills it had previously submitted to the city.

No local or state government in the country has ever recouped so much money from a single fraud, Bharara said.

The money represents a huge chunk of the nearly $700 million taxpayers shelled out for an automated timekeeping and payroll system that mushroomed over a decade to 10 times its original pricetag of $63 million.

Sounds good, except that the person who allowed all this thievery in the first place - namely Boss Bloomberg - hasn't once answered for the scandal:

Mayor Bloomberg, who stood next to Bharara at a press conference Wednesday, called this "a major victory for taxpayers...for justice and public integrity."

But for a guy about to receive a $500,000 settlement, the mayor did not seem all that elated.

Bloomberg has not yet explained how such a massive theft - the biggest stain on his administration - could occur for so long without any of his aides noticing.

Only one city official, former Payroll Administration director Joel Bondy, has lost his job because of CityTime.

Maybe when the criminal trial of the CityTime crooks finally begins, we'll learn what our own officials knew and didn't know.

Yes, maybe then Bloomberg will have to answer publicly for his own conduct in the oversight - or lack thereof - of the CityTime project and his own administration officials who were working on it.

Another Bloomberg Corruption Scandal

The Bloomberg scandals just keep mounting:

One of New York’s largest nonprofit job placement agencies falsely claimed to have helped find jobs for at least 1,400 people in less than two years, according to the city’s Department of Investigation.

The agency, Seedco, the investigative agency found, “developed systematic practices to report false placements” to the city’s Department of Small Business Services. In many hundreds of cases, Seedco, which is an important part of the Bloomberg administration’s ambitious efforts to find jobs for the unemployed, took a jobless client’s work history, altered dates and claimed past employment as a new job.

The investigative agency noted that the number of fraudulent claims could be much higher. For three years, from 2008 through February 2011, city officials “deemed it acceptable” for its nonprofit contractors to shred all job placement documents.

The New York Times, in two articles last summer, revealed these and other abuses after a former deputy director at a Seedco center, Bill Harper, provided 400 examples of false placements. Later, six former Seedco employees said managers had pressured them to produce thousands of fake job placements.

The Department of Investigation noted that Seedco responded by dismissing allegations of fraud as untrue and attacking the credibility of Mr. Harper. Even as agency officials took this public posture, investigators noted, senior staff members privately had unearthed an e-mail pointing to fraud.

Perhaps most confounding, city investigators discovered Seedco employees’ entering false job placements into its database as recently as last month.

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The Bloomberg administration gives “performance-based” payments to nonprofit job contractors that produce high numbers of job placements. And at the time of the alleged fraudulent job placements, Seedco was competing to win a new multimillion-dollar contract to run a work force center in the Bronx.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has lauded Seedco and its work in meeting his administration’s aggressive job-seeking goals. Seedco, with a board that is a who’s who of nonprofit royalty in the city, now holds $22.2 million in contracts from the Department of Small Business Services. Seedco also holds welfare-to-work contracts with the city.

Will Bloomberg be held accountable for this scandal?

Will any city official be held accountable?

They should be:

The city’s investigation report raises a question of why city officials did not push harder for answers. It does not suggest any complicity by city officials.

But last August, when the deputy commissioner of small-business services, Angie Kamath, was asked about allegations of fraud at Seedco, she insisted at first that no investigation was needed. “We have internal closure,” she said.

She said that if Mr. Harper was “seriously concerned about the integrity of the data,” he should have come to the city rather than The Times.

Yeah, city officials really seemed like they were going to get right on that investigation.

And once again, it is Bloomberg's unrelenting push for ever-higher performance goals that brought about the fraud:

Seedco no longer allows managers to judge employees based on their ability to meet aggressive job placement targets. Seedco notes, too, that it does not profit from its job placement work.

That excuse understates the pressure on nonprofit groups when it comes to job placement. As the city’s investigation department notes, nonprofit groups, not the least Seedco, are engaged in a highly competitive race for new city contracts. In Seedco’s case, agency officials pressured workers to produce more and more fraudulent job placements even as the agency sought a large new contract to open a job center in the Bronx.

Relentless competition always brings out the best in all of us, doesn't it?

I'm sure when Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg get their way next year and start pitting teachers against each other on a big state-wide bell curve built from relentless test score-based performance goals, nothing like what happened at Seedco will happen in the school system.

Pearson In Corruption Probe - Why Are The Regents And The NYSED Not Being Scrutinized Too?

The attorney general wants to know if the testing company gave free stuff to NYSED officials in return for contracts:

New York State’s attorney general is investigating whether the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks.

The office of the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas this week to the foundation and to Pearson Education seeking documents and information related to their activities with state education officials, including at least four education conferences — in London, Helsinki, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro — since 2008, according to people familiar with the investigation.

At issue is whether the activities of the tax-exempt Pearson Foundation, which is prohibited by state law from engaging in undisclosed lobbying, were used to benefit Pearson Education, a for-profit company, according to these people. Pearson sells standardized tests, packaged curriculums and Prentice Hall textbooks.

Specifically, the attorney general’s investigation is looking at whether foundation employees improperly sought to influence state officials or procurement processes to obtain lucrative state contracts, and whether the employees failed to disclose lobbying activities in annual filings with the attorney general’s office. The inquiry follows two columns about the conferences by Michael Winerip in The New York Times this fall.

If there is evidence that the foundation engaged in substantial lobbying and failed to disclose it, it could face fines and lose its tax-exempt status under state and federal laws. No subpoenas were issued to state education officials, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

My question here is, why isn't the attorney general looking into the NYSED too?

Or how about the Regents?

Isn't bribery a two-way street?

If Pearson handed out largesse in return for lucrative state contracts, didn't somebody on the state end take that largesse and in return hand out lucrative contracts?

The Times article suggests that's so:

In New York, Pearson Education most recently won a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state tests, and it maintains a $1 million contract for testing services with the State Education Department, according to state records. The last contract was awarded after David M. Steiner, then the state education commissioner, attended a conference in London in June 2010 that was organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers and underwritten by the Pearson Foundation.

This looks again like another instance of the Merry Pranksters at the Regents and the NYSED skating off without any accountability whatsoever.

We need a list of ALL state officials, including those at the Regents, who might have been on the receiving end of Pearson's largesse.

And then those officials need to explain how it is they signed off on Pearson's state contracts.

Because something smells here.

As Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, said:

“Despite a history of scoring errors, contract manipulation and corporate misbehavior, there’s been almost no public oversight of companies such as Pearson. It’s great that New York’s attorney general has now decided to examine the examiners and begin holding them accountable.”

Yes, it's great somebody's looking into Pearson.

They ought to look into the contracts of Wireless Generation and other politically-connected companies as well.

But the Regents and the NYSED need some scrutiny too.

Steiner needs to answer for his Pearson paid vacations

And how about Merry Merryl Tisch?

Did she go to Helsinki or some other exotic locale for an "education conference" at any point in time on somebody else's dime?

Expand the probe, Scheniderman.

Expand it to the NYSED and the Regents too.

NYCDOE Breaks Law In Order To Pay Off Crony Consultant, Joel Klein In Illegal Contracts

The Daily News covers the story this morning:

The city Department of Education evaded state law to pay a controversial consultant $287,500, officials with the city controller's office charge.

Even after the Education Department's $20 million teacher-recruitment contract with The New Teacher Project got rejected in March on technical grounds, the city sneaked through three payments last month, the officials charge.

"We have requested a meeting with DOE to address their persistent attempts to circumvent the Education Law and pay outside consultants without registered contracts," said Mike Loughran, a spokesman for Controller John Liu.

A review by Liu's office after it discovered the New Teacher Project payments found that the city Department of Education also attempted to pay $1.3 million to Wireless Generation.

The company is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and overseen by former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Liu's office blocked that payment because it had rejected the Wireless Generation contract earlier this month, saying Klein had not filed a necessary letter recusing himself from involvement in the contract.

The city Law Department and the city Department of Education, however, consider both contracts to be valid and are not recognizing the controller's rejection.

In a Wednesday letter to Deputy Controller Geneith Turnbull, city Law Department Contracts Division Chief Steven Stein Cushman blasts the controller's attempts to thwart its deal with The New Teacher Project, calling it "not consistent with the Education Law.

"Accordingly, the DOE rejected your return of the [New Teacher Project] contract and deemed the [New Teacher Project] Contract registered," he wrote.

Liu has to take Bloomberg, the DOE and the city Law Department Contracts Division to court to force this issue.

The DOE does NOT get to circumvent the law just because they want to pay off cronies at the New Teacher Project and Wireless Generation.

The Law Department Contracts Division does NOT get to declare a contract legal when the controller has rejected it.

And the Klein connection just smells bad.

In fact, the Klein connection needs to be looked at very closely.

How much of the $1.3 million DOE contract money does Klein get, either directly or indirectly, as a News Corp. employee overseeing Rupert Murdoch's K-12 online education division?

Klein himself signed this contract with Wireless Generation when he was chancellor and now stands to profit from it working for News Corp. overseeing Wireless Generation.

The impropriety on the face of it is bad.

Worse is the DOE's insistence on making these payments when the controller has rejected the contract because Klein refused to recuse himself from the contract.

In the same week that Bloomberg continued to threaten layoffs for thousands of teachers and STILL is cutting school budgets to the bone and forcing class sizes ever higher, how is it that he gets to hand out this contract money to consultants and cronies when the controller has rejected them?

He gets to do it because nobody takes him to court for it.

John Liu needs to remedy that forthwith.

In fact, this might be a job for the U.S. attorney's office as well.

Given the corruption that has been endemic with many of the outside consultant contracts handed out by the Bloomberg administration, any other contract that smells this bad on the face of it may just be as rotten as the CityTime Project contracts, the Willard Lanham contract and the Judith Hederman scandal.

All The Mayor's Scandalized Men And Women (and Cougars)

So many scandals in the Bloomberg administration, you need a scorecard to tell who is who.

Here at Perdido Street School, we're big on accountability as well as baseball, so we thought we'd provide you with an Bloomberg Accountability Scandal Scorecard.

First, here's a picture of the mayor lecturing about the importance of accountability and performance.


Next, here's the latest Bloomberg administration official to be linked to a corruption - her name is Judith Hederman and she used to be the Department of Education's chief of financial operations until she perjured herself, uh, misspoke in an inquiry into corruption involving a DOE computer consulting partner:






Here's the NY Post on the Hederman scandal:

Judith Hederman, executive director of the Division of Financial Operations, was making $168,000 a year when she abruptly resigned last week, according to education officials.

The Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation confirmed that it is investigating Hederman, 42, but declined to provide further details.

Court records show that the commissioner has been engaged in a lengthy probe of Future Technology Associates, a computer consulting firm that Hederman had overseen and shared offices with since as early as 2005.

FTA has a three-year, $43.2 million contract to integrate the DOE's payroll and finance system with that of the rest of the city's agencies.

Documents show the probe of the firm involves "allegations of corruption, conflicts of interest, unethical conduct or other misconduct."

That includes accusations that FTA has been hiring its workers through multiple contracts so that the "hourly fee for the consultant's services was marked up before being passed on to the DOE."

Hederman's husband also works for the DOE as an accountant. No word on whether he's a crook too, but it surely doesn't look good for Ms. Hederman. The Post notes that the allegations against Hederman and the company she was supposed to oversee, FTA, "echo recent charges filed against another DOE contractor, Willard (Ross) Lanham, who allegedly bilked the city of $3.6 million by using layers of subcontractors to jack up costs"

Which Brings us to the Lanham scandal. Below are pictures of DOE computer consultant Willard Lanham and his "cougar" wife, Laura. Lanham has been arrested for stealing millions from the DOE by overbilling the city and using the money to build his own real estate sub-development, including a street named for his now estranged wife. This story won't die because Laura, the estranged wife, is a self-described "cougar" who wants to star in a reality show and loves to blog about her conquests of younger men who like older women. You can see her fine work here. Unless you're trying to read the blog while on a computer with Internet set up by Willard Lanham - that wouldn't work so well because the work Lanham did didn't work so well.

So that's where some of the money that could have been used to save teachers from layoffs went - at least $3.6 million, at any rate, and perhaps a lot more since the work Lanham did was pretty crappy.

Below is a picture of another Bloomberg official who was supposed to oversee outside contractors but had to resign after it became clear that he was a) not doing any oversight of them b) allowing them to steal millions and c) may have been making money in the deal as well. His name is Joel Bondy and he is the former director of the NYC Office of Payroll Administration. You can read more about Bondy here and the CityTime scandal here.




Below is a picture of Cathie Black, former chancellor of NYC schools. Black is not accused of stealing any money, not yet, at any rate (though rumor has it she was given a six figure parting fee, which, if true, would be stealing in my book.) But I thought I'd add her photo to the mix because she really is an emblem of the cluelessness and corruption that the Bloomberg administration is. So, for old time's sake, here is a photo of Ms. Black:



Who will be the next person to make the Bloomberg Scandal Accountability Scorecard?

Hard to know, but since Comptroller John Liu is looking closely at many other contracts Bloomberg has signed with outside contractors, you can bet that there WILL be additions.

It's a shame that accountability at the DOE is ONLY for teachers and NOT for the people doing the oversight of the contractors, the contractors themselves or for Bloomberg.

But that's how it is in Bloomberg's New York.

Which is why we need a Bloomberg Scandal Accountability Scorecard in the first place.

Project Cougar - Maybe She Should Run The NYCDOE?

The arrest of the tech consultant that the NYCDOE had hired to provide Internet access to schools is the scandal that just keeps on giving.

Bloomberg claims he needs to lay off 6,166 teachers in order to save $300 million dollars so that he can spend $550 million in the next fiscal year to upgrade technology in schools.

Meanwhile he has spent over $1 billion on technology in the past few years and what do schools have to show for it?

An ARIS data tracking system school staff hate and don't use.

Internet access that doesn't provide any access at all (takes fifteen minutes to check your email sometimes, depending upon time of day.)

But of course the outside consultants hired by Bloomberg to provide all this technology have done very well.

Take the one who was arrested this week for stealing $3.6 million from the city from 2002-2008 on top of the six figure salary the DOE was already paying him.

Willard "Ross" Lanham was really living it up on the mayor's largesse.

He bought three luxuries home and built his own real estate subdivision on Long Island - even took the neighbors on vacation trips.

And his wife - now estranged - well, what can we say about her that the Daily News hasn't:

Red-spiked Steve Madden heels with a barely-there sundress, a fire-engine red shade of lipstick and green eyeshadow.

Self-proclaimed cougar Laura Lanham is ready for a typical Saturday night out - although she makes it clear her provocative outfit isn't hunting gear.

"I don't prowl - they find me," the lithe, hazel-eyed housewife said Saturday. "The young guys love hanging out with me and my friends because we're not demanding."

Lanham, 42, met with the Daily News at Four - a trendy Melville, L.I., spot that bills itself as a "Food Studio/Cocktail Salon" - to describe an ordinary day in her unusual life.

The mother of three said she never set out to be a cougar. She was 23 when she married now-estranged hubby Willard (Ross) Lanham - a Department of Education computer consultant accused of stealing millions in public money - and led a typically sedate suburban existence.

The couple has a 15-year-old daughter, and Lanham is stepmother to a 24-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter.

But when she filed for divorce in April 2008, Lanham soon found herself looking at men her son's age in a different light.

"Yes, I'm attracted to them," she said. "But you know, at first I thought it was weird, because I'm a mother. My friends said it's much more common than I thought."

The "yummy mommy," as Lanham was billed in one of her blog postings, acknowledges there's an attraction to the 20-somethings in Long Island dance clubs that was missing with her 57-year-old husband - with whom she still shares a home.

"I'm not going to say there isn't a sexual compatibility there, because there certainly is," she said. "Let's put it this way: I get along with these kids."

In a strange twist of fate, Lanham's 15 minutes of recent fame is all because of her estranged spouse.

His arrest for allegedly swiping $3.6 million in city school funds propelled her into media attention. The one-time aspiring Playboy centerfold has handled it well, and even expressed her desire for a reality show.

Her friends say she should aim higher.

"They said, 'Look at Demi Moore. You could be the Demi Moore of Long Island!'" Lanham said.

Now this woman I like - living it up on the city's largesse, unapologetic about it all and just looking for the next cocktail and next co--, er, young buck to make those nights go by faster.

Hell, judging by the articles about her, I'm surprised that Bloomberg hasn't offered her a job as schools chancellor to replace the now defunct "cougar" Cathie Black.

I think because Laura Lanham doesn't go to the same UES parties as Bloomberg, she hasn't been offered the position yet.

But now that she's getting some press and getting the mayor's attention, maybe now he'll put her in her rightful place in the Bloomberg worldview - a position of power and prestige.

After all, Laura Lanham has lived off the largesse of others, has stolen everything she has, is a bloodsucker extraordinaire and seems clueless about every important aspect of life - just like Cathie Black.

Why not have one predatory cougar replace the last one?

Bloomberg Should Be Brought Up On Racketeering Charges

Juan Gonzalez shows how the DOE tech consultant stole $3.6 million from the city and how he was aided by DOE vendors IBM and Verizon:

Prosecutors say former Department of Education consultant Ross Lanham bilked more than $3.6 million from taxpayers. Lanham was the man in charge of a federally funded project to wire our public schools for Internet service - an effort that has already cost a whopping $1 billion.

Prosecutors claim Lanham directed subcontractors he supervised to hire the people supplied by his own company - among them his brother - then grossly inflated the billings of those people.

He pocketed the difference for himself.

They say he approved payments for no-show jobs, arranged kickbacks from contractors, and then hid all of this from Education officials by using layers of other phantom companies.

...

Take Lanham's brother, Robert, for example. His main job was working from home reviewing electronic files of school phone bills, according to a report released yesterday by Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon.

For this Robert Lanham was paid a very healthy rate of $40 per hour.

Willard Lanham's company then charged a Verizon subcontractor $175 an hour for the brother's labor. The subcontractor, in turn, billed Verizon $192.50 for the same guy.

Verizon then marked up the final price to the DOE to $225 an hour.

Made mobsters and streetcorner hoods display more ethics than these clowns.

Gonzalez points out the connection to the CityTime scandal that had six people being arrested after they stole more than $85 million from the city:

Just as with CityTime - the huge computerized payroll project from which four consultants are accused of stealing more than $85 million - the alleged mastermind of the scheme was the very person the city had put in charge.

Just as with CityTime, city officials who were supposed to supervise Lanham were nowhere to be found. They allowed him to approve spending increases and claimed no knowledge of a scheme that went on for years.

And just like CityTime, big-name national firms involved in the project never alerted authorities to the apparently shady dealings. Instead, those companies - this time it was Verizon and IBM - like Lanham profited from excessive markups for the same consultants, then helped disguise their payments.

He wonders how it is nobody from Verizon or IBM got charged in this case:

No official from Verizon or IBM was accused of any wrongdoing. You have to wonder why.

It's pretty apparent that some executives from those companies knew much of what was going on.

"Verizon employees were unaware of any wrongdoing in connection with the project," company spokesman John Bonomo said.

"We have told DOE we are prepared to return any inappropriate profits," he added.

And finally he points out how much Bloomberg is going to spend on outside tech consultants next year (after already spending over $1 billion on tech upgrades) and calls it organized criminal activity:

Amazingly, Bloomberg's school budget for next year already includes an additional $500 million for Internet wiring. Meanwhile, teachers are being laid off and instructional budgets are being cut.

...

How many more of these cases will it take before someone realizes the Bloomberg administration has unleashed a whole new form of racketeering inside city agencies through its uncontrolled rush to computerize every aspect of government?

Indeed.

Even more importantly to me, how many more criminal cases involving outside tech consultants will it take before somebody cuts off Bloomberg's ability to unilaterally decide to spend $550 million next year on technology contracts while laying off 6,166 teachers in a move that will save $300 million?

Seriously - how many?

And when will Bloomberg himself be called to account for these crimes?

He's big on accountability for others, but when it comes to these crimes, there seems to be no accountability for the Bloomberg cronies doing the stealing or the Bloomberg administration officials who were supposed to be watching them - or for Bloomberg himself.

DOE Consultant Wife Plans Reality Show Career

Want to know where some of the money DOE tech consultant Willard Lanham stole from the DOE ended up?

It ended up paying for the picture of his estranged wife - who blogs about sex and the pursuit of younger sugar daddies with lots of money to take of older women - at a site called cougarlife.com.

Here's the Daily News on the "cougar" angle to the DOE story:

Laura Lanham - the self-styled "cougar" still sharing a Long Island home with her estranged husband - believes she could become America's next big reality star.

"My life is already a reality show," she told the Daily News in her first interview since her spouse was charged with stealing $3.6 million in city school funds.

"You can't make this s--- up," the brunette mother of three said Friday at a Panera Bread on Long Island. "My reality is surreal. It's crazy."

Lanham, 42, was living in suburban obscurity until husband Willard surrendered Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court, charged with pocketing money designed to provide New York students with Internet access.

Suddenly, her writings and risque photos from the web site cougarlife.com are big news - as was her nasty three-year divorce struggle.

Financial problems forced her to stay in the same house with her husband despite their crumbling marriage, along Laura Lane - a street he built and named after her. The strange arrangement seems to work.

"It's a big house," she explained. "We have separate rooms ... I'm happy. I love my life."

In addition to her blog, Lanham once sent nude photos to Playboy and confessed that she's an exhibitionist.

"Sex sells, period," she said.

It sure does - just ask Mayor Bloomberg's pal, Rupert Murdoch, who has made an entire publishing career out of selling it - but let's be honest here, this woman wouldn't have had the capital to fund her "cougar" lifestyle if not for the DOE largesse her estranged husband lived off of for years courtesy of the Mayor of Money and Chancellor Klein.

Hell, this guy stole enough money to build his own real estate sub-development and name a street after his (now estranged) wife.

That's some largesse, wouldn't you say?

I would, and I think it IS the stuff of reality TV.

Perhaps we can see how other DOE tech consultants live and work, stealing money from the good people of New York while the Mayor of Money lays off hard working teachers and increases class sizes.

Oh, and the "technology" that Lanham put into the schools (dubbed "Project Connect" by the DOE)

It doesn't work.

That's why they're spending $550 million in the next fiscal year to upgrade the technology.

That too ought to be the subject of a TV show.

Call it Mayor Mike's Failed Mayoral Control of the NYC School System.

Or better yet, Bloomberg Sucks.

No Accountability For Bloomberg On DOE Consultant/IBM/Verizon Scam

As usual, accountability is for the little folks, not for the Mayor of Money.

Why didn't the DOE notice that an outside tech consultant hired to provide Internet access to public schools was stealing millions?

Well, they do lots and lots of contracts and who can keep an eye on all those?

Not kidding, that's what the Mayor of Money said yesterday on his radio propaganda hour on WOR:

On his weekly radio show on Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the alleged theft “unconscionable.”

“Whenever there’s fraud, you can look back and say, ‘We should have looked there,’ ” he said. “But keep in mind the city has a budget of $65 billion a year, with lots and lots of contracts and lots of opportunities.”

Shorter Bloomberg: "Shit happens!"

Except that this crooked shit was happening for a long, long time:

Sometime in 2002, a manager at I.B.M., which was working on a large project to wire New York City schools for the Internet, noticed something unusual about payments the company was making for some workers.

The payments, investigators said this week, were going through a company called Lanham Enterprises, which was owned by Willard Lanham, the same person who was directing the wiring project for the city.

The manager asked a colleague if this was proper, according to a report by the office of the special investigator for city schools. The colleague said others at I.B.M. were also concerned, with one saying he “did not trust Lanham.” But Mr. Lanham, known as Ross, assured I.B.M. that he had spoken with a supervisor at the Education Department, who “was O.K. with it,” and the matter was taken no further. The supervisor would later tell investigators he did not recall such a conversation.

It was the first of several warning signs about Mr. Lanham, whom investigators have accused of stealing $3.6 million from the city through marked-up billings using a complex scheme of contractors and subcontractors, including I.B.M. and Verizon. But because of Mr. Lanham’s unchecked power over the project, which the city was paying him $200,000 a year to oversee, virtually all of the suspicions came to naught.

The companies assumed that if Mr. Lanham said it was fine, the city had approved it.

The case, which comes on the heels of an $80 million fraud prosecution involving consultants on another city project, the CityTime automated payroll system, illustrates again the vast amounts of money the city is spending on technology, and the trust it was putting in independent consultants. The Education Department said that once Mr. Lanham’s activities came to light, it added controls to prevent a recurrence.

...

During the six-year period when the authorities say he stole the money, Mr. Lanham was apparently left to operate on his own. “It is difficult to understand how the D.O.E. could allow so much power to reside in a consultant, even an honest one, which Mr. Lanham was not,” the city’s investigative report said.

Just like in the CityTime crookery, just like during the Bloomberg Blizzard Disaster of 2010, just like when the NYC test scores were shown to be inflated, Bloomberg skates accountability by shrugging like he's Donald Rumsfeld blaming the Iraq war mess on fate.

"Oh, well - what can you do?"

What can you do?

I'll tell you what we can do.

You can take away the mayor's ability to spend these hundreds of millions of dollars without any oversight whatsoever.

As John Liu completes his audits of other DOE contracts, we will see just what other messes Bloomberg has allowed since 2002.

More importantly, however, we now have more than enough reason why Bloomberg CANNOT be allowed to spend $550 million on tech upgrades next year when he is laying off 6,166 teachers in order to save $300 million.

I CANNOT repeat this statement enough.

The outside contractors with the no-bid contracts are STEALING THE CITY BLIND.

It is all in the CityTime and the Project Corruption reports.

Time to put an end to the open wallet Bloomberg has.

If he wants to spend $550 million on tech upgrades at the DOE, let him SPEND HIS OWN MONEY.

Not one thin dime of taxpayer money should go for this.

Not one thin dime.

Not after CityTime, not after Project Corruption at the DOE.

Not with all the other suspicious contracts Comptroller Liu is looking at.

Any Consultants Get Arrested At The DOE Today?

Just wondering.

You know, the NY Post didn't want to publish that story until they realized there was a sex angle with the divorce and the "cougar" wife/hooker.

Would have loved to see the editorial argument in Murdochland:

"No, we can't cover a story about another outside consultant stealing millions from the city!"

"Yes, but there's a hooker/wife with topless photos and an escort service website where she trolls for younger sugar daddies to take care of her! We HAVE to cover that! We can run the photos!!!!"

Oh, the sacrifices that have to be made at the Murdoch Street Post in order to bring enough sex and sleaze to the readership.

DOE Oversight - Or The Lack Of It

Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools Richard Condon said the following about the oversight capabilities of the DOE on its outside consulting contract for Project Corrupt:

MANHATTAN — A former Department of Education computer consultant ripped off nearly $4 million from city schools to fund a lavish lifestyle — the latest in a string of black marks for city contractors, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.

William "Ross" Lanham allegedly blew the $3.6 million in cash on high-end cars, including a Lexus, Corvette, Porsche and Cadillac Escalade as well as real estate, including three homes on Long Island.

...

Lanham, who earned $1.7 million working for the DOE, surrendered to federal authorities Thursday morning on mail fraud and theft charges. He could face 20 years in jail if convicted.

IBM and Verizon, vendors for "Project Connect," are accused of turning a blind eye to the alleged scheme, according to a report by Richard Condon, Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, also released Thursday.

"IBM and Verizon, by their silence, facilitated this fraud," the report said. Neither company was charged.

Condon's report also slams the DOE for lax oversight.

"It is difficult to understand how the DOE could allow so much power to reside in a consultant, even an honest one, which Lanham was not. Project Connect was a billion dollar undertaking, yet no one exercised any oversight of Lanham," it read.

Indeed it is.

The DOE under Bloomberg is famous for its oversight and accountability measures for teachers, but apparently doesn't seem to give a shit about oversight and accountability of consultants or vendors.

John Liu will take action to rectify this lack of oversight and Scott Stringer has connected this disturbing lack of oversight and accountability to teacher layoffs:

City Comptroller John Liu has also directed a review of contracts with all vendors accused of wrongdoing in the report.

"Federal charges once again, that a consultant has stolen millions from the taxpayers, are infuriating enough. Even more disconcerting, however, are indications that corporations with billions of dollars in City business have aided and abetted and profited from the scam," Liu said in a statement, which called for greater oversight of city subcontracting.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer also slammed the DOE for spending so much on technology without sufficient oversight.

"At a time when the Department of Education is still threatening to lay off more than 4,000 teachers, it is extremely distressing to learn that the department can’t seem to keep track of its own contractors — or the money they spend," he said in a statement.

Bloomberg CANNOT get his way on these layoffs or budget cuts when he is spending so lavishly on tech contracts and the consultants themselves are STEALING millions.

Project Corrupt At The NYCDOE

The Daily News has some more salacious details on the outside tech consultant arrested yesterday for stealing $3.6 million from the city:

A cuckolded computer consultant hired to link the city's 1,400 schools to the Internet was charged Thursday with downloading $3.6 million into his crooked pockets.

Willard (Ross) Lanham, aided by corporate giants IBM and Verizon, masterminded the massive fraud to enjoy a life of luxury from 2002 to 2008, according to a scathing report from the special schools investigator.

"Lanham effectively stole from schoolchildren so he could buy fancy cars and valuable real estate," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

Prosecutors described Lanham's greed as staggering. He was charged with looting the Department of Education while earning a $200,000 annual salary and living with his family in a sprawling, two-story Long Island home.

As he earned an illegal fortune off phony companies, inflated fees and a pair of no-show jobs, officials said, he built three luxury homes on a piece of abandoned Long Island farmland.

Once finished, Lanham even named the private street after his estranged wife, Laura Lanham.

The couple have since endured a long, angry and ongoing three-year divorce, with the wife dumping her 57-year-old husband to pursue younger men while blogging about her "cougar" lifestyle.

Willard Lanham - who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted - smiled wryly when asked about his 42-year-old wife before he bolted from Manhattan Federal Court.

Willard Lanham also maintained a $600,000 fleet of high-end automobiles, including a flashy yellow Corvette, a Porsche, a Mercedes-Benz, a Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade.

He owned a $380,000 property in Bethpage, L.I., and held an interest in a multimillion-dollar Bridgehampton, L.I., development, according to court papers.

Just last week, he treated his family and a next-door neighbor to a pricey Florida vacation with a stay at the Hard Rock Cafe.

"It was an expensive trip," the teen neighbor told the Daily News before a young man from the Lanham house ran over to end the interview by slamming her front door shut.

The probe, aided by the city Department of Investigation, found Lanham was hired to work on three major DOE projects - including the highly touted "Project Connect."

The scam was simple: He hired contractors at low hourly rates, persuaded subcontractors to bill the city at a much higher rate and pocketed the difference, officials said.

In all, his Lanham Enterprises allegedly was paid $5.3 million for consulting work that cost his company only $1.7 million.

The accused swindler even ripped off his own brother, hiring him for a $40-an-hour consulting job while charging the city $225 an hour, a criminal complaint charged.

I am sure Bloomberg will try and blame this on just Lanham when he gets asked about this today on his WOR radio show, but the truth is that two major DOE vendors - and major American companies - also aided in and profited from the scam. The NY Daily News reports that:

Richard Condon, special commissioner of investigation for city schools, said IBM and Verizon "by their silence facilitated this fraud."

But both companies noted they cooperated with the probe, and neither business, nor any of their employees, were charged with a crime.

The Times reports that:

Verizon and I.B.M., the largest of the vendors involved in the projects, played a role in the scheme and profited from it, according to the city’s special commissioner of investigation, Richard J. Condon.

How many other outside consultants are stealing money from the DOE and being "facilitated" in the theft by vendors like IBM and Verizon?

We don't know, but neither does Bloomberg because he has done little to no oversight of the consultant jobs since he became mayor.

You see, Bloombert thinks outside consultants, because they are non-unionized, non-governmental employees, are by their very nature honest and worthy.

It's those nasty crooked governmental employees - like those teachers the NY Post has been chronicling all week, you know the 12 out of 75,000 who have done something unethical, unseemly, or illegal - who need oversight.

Accountability is NEVER for the outside consultants and it is NEVER for Bloomberg himself.

But now that Project Corrupt at the NYCDOE has been revealed, oversight MUST be done not only on all outside consultant gigs, but also on the mayor himself.

As John Liu said yesterday:

“Federal charges once again, that a consultant has stolen millions from the taxpayers are infuriating enough. Even more disconcerting, however, are indications that corporations with billions of dollars in City business have aided and abetted and profited from the scam. As with the CityTime scandal, oversight of subcontracting is acutely needed right now.”

This mayor CANNOT be trusted with the city money without some independent oversight of what he is doing with it.

This mayor CANNOT be allowed to claim he needs to lay off 6,166 teachers in order to save $300 million when he is squandering $550 million on tech projects like Project Corrupt that have little benefit to anybody who isn't on the Bloomberg/Klein/Murdoch crony payroll.

And make no mistake, former chancellor Klein and prime teacher hater Murdoch are BOTH tied up in this corruption.

Murdoch now owns Wireless Generation, a tech/ed company that Klein - who now works for Murdoch - signed a bunch of DOE contracts with to bring tech services to the public school system.

How did this contract come about?

How did Klein come to sign it?

How did Murdoch decide to buy the company after Klein came to work for him?

So many questions, so few answers.

But there are plenty of things to mull over in this deal and plenty of oversight to do on the Wireless Generation deal as well as the other tech deals Bloomberg has done at both the DOE and other agencies.

Between CityTime, Project Corrupt at the DOE, the Independence Party/Haggerty corruption case and other problematic consultant jobs pointed out by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News, we have more than enough evidence to see that Bloomberg CANNOT get his way on financial issues involving the city without outside input.