MIDTOWN — The city’s Department of Investigation found city officials sanitized documents in order to gloss over problems with the decade-long, multi-billion dollar overhaul of New York’s troubled 911 system, the agency said Friday.
Officials overseeing the program created an "environment that discouraged truthfulness" in order to "spin" information about cost overruns and system failures during the creation of the system, according to a Department of Investigation report. The program, called the Emergency Communications Transformation Program, was supposed to be completed by 2007, but now is expected to be finished in 2017, at a cost of nearly an additional $700 million.
“City officials also pushed workers to ‘sanitize’ documents in order to make ECTP’s progress and overall health appear better than it actually was," the DOI said in a statement. "Once again, city officials, at a high level, allowed a much hyped tech program to run out of control and failed to provide basic supervision and oversight.”
Investigators found that officials failed to properly supervise sub-contractors, some of whom marked up services and products up to 600 percent, according to the report.
Additionally, there were at least $211.4 million in costs for ECTP projects that were paid out of individual agency budgets and not counted in the total cost of the program.
The NYPD and FDNY were also allowed to create separate 911 systems rather than a coordinated one.
The system has gone down several time during the past few years, forcing dispatchers to write 911 calls by hand and then call Emergency Service Technicians over the phone.
The death of two 4-year-old siblings in a Far Rockaway fire was blamed on a more than 20-minute delay in the ambulance dispatch system.
The DOI issued several recommendations for the project including a more “well-defined” written project plan, stronger central management and less subcontracting.
Form deputy mayor Cas Holloway, who served under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, defended the program ahead of the DOI report.
"The Bloomberg administration committed to and delivered a new, reliable and redundant 911 system that serves New Yorkers far better than the decrepit, fragmented systems it replaced," Holloway said, WCBS reported.
The mayor’s office did not return an immediate request for comment.
