Bloomberg: We Must Continue With CityTime

What the hell, it's only $700 million overbudget:

Mayor Bloomberg insisted Friday the scandal-plagued CityTime project "has to get done."

A handful of consultants have been charged with scamming the city out of $80 million on the payroll-computerization system, but Bloomberg said New York should get most of the cash back.

"That doesn't make it any better. The real damage is it slows you down from developing a system that we really need," the mayor told WOR radio.

"The consequences of those things are much greater than the money, but we should get most of this money back."

CityTime, meant to convert thousands of public employees to electronic timesheets, is years behind schedule and has ballooned over budget to nearly $700 million.

City officials finally admitted the problems, long after Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez uncovered irregularities in the bloated project.

Bloomberg noted 90,000 workers get their pay through the system, with that number slated to rise to 175,000.

There's no turning back, he insisted.

"If you stopped it today, 90,000 people wouldn't get a paycheck," he said. "Those agencies that use it, by and large, are very happy. They say it saves an enormous amount of time and labor... For all the problems with it, it will save us money once it gets going."

Uh, huh - and since it's only 12 years since they started the project, it should be up and running by 2022, give or take a decade or so.

Bloomberg NEVER wants to admit a screw-up.

Not ever.

He NEEDS to be held accountable for this.

He hired Joel Bondy to run OPA.

Bondy worked for the company that was overseeing CityTime.

The OPA director that Bondy took over for, Richard Valcich, had already publicly stated CityTime was a mess.

But rather than do anything about that, Bloomberg hired a crook to watch over other crooks who were "consultants" on the project.

That was approximately $650 million dollars ago.

Now the arrogant prick refuses to take any responsibility for the scandal, the theft, the hiring of Bondy, or the lack of oversight he conducted on Bondy.

And he STILL maintains that the city will have to lay off employees even as he has literally lit money on fire in this CityTime mess.

$700 million would pay for an awful lot of employees, wouldn't it?

It would.

Given the scope of this scandal, the first city employees who ought to get laid off are the ones involved in CityTime.

After that, the next employee who ought to be laid off is Bloomberg himself.

Time to go, Moneybags.

Time to go.

CityTime Company Tried To Buy Off Critic Of Program

In the old days, they used to call this thing "bribery":

What to do when you're a private computer consultant whose project for the city is excruciatingly over-budget and falling way behind?
Hey -- how about this? Offer the city supervisor a job!

That's the approach taken by officials of the Virginia-based defense contracting company, Science Applications International Corp., who are running the now deeply scandal-scarred CityTime payroll computerization project, according to Juan Gonzalez's latest blast in today's News.

The offer was allegedly made in January, 2002, to Richard Valcich, ex-director of the office Payroll Administration, who was then overseeing the bungled project that has since soared from $63 million to a more than $600 million cost for taxpayers.

Valcich apparently blew a gasket when an SAIC official made the job pitch in a meeting. He then wrote a polite but stern follow-up letter spelling out in writing that it is a violation of every rule in the book to offer post-city employment to a city official overseeing your work.

In the letter, Valcich apologized "if I seemed rude and abruptly shortened your discussion on a future post city-employment position with SAIC." He added: "[I]t is inappropriate to discuss any post employment with a company that I do business [with]... "[I am] flattered you would consider me for such a position with SAIC but there are restrictions due to the city's conflicts of interest rules."

The letter is the latest nugget to emerge from city Comptroller John Liu's highly critical September audit of the deeply-tangled CityTime project which was intended to simplify city worker time-cards and payroll. Last week, the feds busted four consultants accused of milking the effort of $80 million through their own bogus timecards and shell corporations. One of those arrested, Mark Mazer, had "special access" -- it's the feds' term, not ours -- to Joel Bondy, the Office of Payroll Administration director who succeeded Valcich who retired in 2004.

Liu's audit also surfaced another Valcich-to-SAIC letter written a year after he turned down the job pitch and reported in Tuesday's News and Times. In that February, 2003 letter, Valcich accused the firm of deliberately obstructing progress.

In the Bloomberg administration, they call this "networking."

Kudos to Valcich for turning SAIC down.

I wonder just what kind of bribes SAIC has thrown at people in the DOE?