Financial genius' 911 center is late and over budget

From the Daily News:

Mayor Bloomberg's $1.3 billion plan to modernize the city's 911 system is two years late, plagued by poor management and bad equipment, and has ballooned in cost to more than $2 billion, the Daily News has learned.

Launched in the summer of 2005, the Emergency Communications Transformation Project was supposed to centralize call-and-dispatch operations for police, fire and emergency medical services into a single state-of-the-art computerized system.

Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler, who oversees the project, has called it one of the Bloomberg administration's top initiatives.

"We are taking the city's archaic 911 system into the 21st century," Skyler said.

But a host of problems dogged the project from the start - none of which have been publicly acknowledged.

DoITT's commissioner at the time, Gino Menchini, gave Hewlett-Packard a $380 million contract to oversee a consortium of vendors that would design and erect the new system. Those vendors included Northrop Grumman, Verizon and Motorola.

Within months, virtually every aspect of the project was experiencing delays. Costs started to mushroom, with scores of computer consultants coming on board, many at annual salaries of $300,000 to $500,000.

Things fell so far behind schedule the city asked its quality control consultant, Gartner Group, to find out what was happening.

Gartner's report, issued to top officials in March 2007, said the city was "losing $2 million a month," from mismanagement.

It called the ballooning costs of a new "logging and recording system" for the NYPD "ludicrous."