The city's hulking, expensive and now stalled emergency response system upgrade was the product of gross mismanagement, a new 109-page report [PDF] from the Department of Investigation found.
The report does not indicate that there was any criminality suspected in the doling out of contracts, though it does accuse city officials of mismanagement, in addition to encouraging workers to "sanitize" documents in order to downplay the troubled system's struggles.
The new system, launched in 2004, isn't expected to be completed until 2017, at which point its price tag will have ballooned to more than $2 billion. The original schedule for the Emergency Communications Transformation Program, as its called, foresaw its completion by September 2007 to the tune of $1.3 billion.
In its research, DOI found the project's various struggles to be born of mismanagement, "internal control weakness" and poor contractor performance, all of which conspired to slow the project and drive up costs.
In addition to gross inefficiency when it came to employing sub-contractors, senior program officials attempted to “sanitize,” “soften” and “spin” the project's actual status to make it appear less fraught than it actually was. In a shimmering example of government inefficiency, the NYPD and the FDNY were allowed to design separate systems, which is problematic when attempting to coordinate a rapid response to an emergency.
The report did issue a series of recommendations, including encouraging the city to appoint a central manager to take charge of the flailing project, which it has. It should quit handing undue responsibility to outside contractors, and it should appoint an integrity monitor to ensure the problems of the past aren't repeated. It should also standardize its method of record-keeping on large-scale, multi-agency projects, and employ a document-retention policy. It seems that many of these recommendations should have gone without saying, but here we are.
The report had many similar findings to a 2012 review by the comptroller's office, though this new one endeavored to explore not just went wrong, but why. “The importance of this report is that it laid out in such detail how this went off the rails, and it laid out what we need to do to make sure it doesn’t go off the rails again,” Mark G. Peters, commissioner of the Investigation Department, told the Times.
The findings do not differ significantly from those revealed in a report released by Department of Information Technology, which also recommended that large, unwieldy aspects of the project be broken into more manageable projects, reduce "layers of vendors," and appoint a leader to oversee contracts and the remaining vendors.
The inefficiency of the system is ironic, considering the whole point was to streamline emergency response from various agencies. Instead, the system has been blamed for exacerbating already life-threatening emergencies by persistent lag times—in one instance, there is evidence to suggest that 4-year-old Ariel Russo might have survived after being hit by a car in 2013 had emergency workers reached her in a more timely manner.
