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The New York Times/ - Politics, Ter, 03 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
Mayor Defends Withholding Report on
911 System
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration came
under attack on Tuesday for keeping secret what is
said to be a sharply critical report on New York City’s
much-delayed, wildly over-budget 911 emergency
dispatch system, as elected officials accused it of
trying to portray a technological debacle in the rosiest
possible terms.
The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer,
praised the mayor for seeking an outside review of the
revised 911 system, but he demanded that Mr.
Bloomberg abandon a legal fight to block the release
of that review. The changes to the 911 system have
become controversial because the cost has ballooned
by as much as $1 billion, thanks in part to contractors
who were later fired, feuding police and fire officials,
and revolving-door overseers at City Hall.
“City Hall has kept us in the dark for too long,” said Mr.
Stringer, a possible candidate for mayor next year,
who likened the 911 system’s problems to those of
CityTime, the scandal-marred payroll project. But Mr.
Stringer said the 911 system had much higher stakes:
life and death.
“The safety and security of our city demands swift
action,” he said. “Whatever you have, come and tell
us.”
Mr. Bloomberg did not budge, saying the report was
preliminary and would be released when it was
complete. But he suggested that doubts about the 911
system were unfounded.
“Response times are better than they’ve ever been,”
the mayor told reporters at a news conference in
Queens. “Deaths from fires and accidents are the
lowest they’ve ever been.”
“Obviously,” he added, “things are working.”
The performance of the 911 system has become an
issue in a dispute between the Bloomberg
administration and firefighters over the city’s proposal
to close some firehouses. The firefighters say the city
has claimed lower response times to justify the
proposed closings.
An audit by John C. Liu, the city comptroller, found in
October that the time it took operators to obtain vital
information from 911 callers — around two minutes —
had been subtracted from response-time calculations
since 2010, when the city shifted some 911
responsibilities from operators at the Fire Department
to operators for the Police Department.
“Nobody really cares how they break the response
time down,” said Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the
Uniformed Firefighters Association. “But if I dial 911
because somebody in my family’s having a heart
attack, or there’s a car crash, or a helicopter goes
down in the East River, and somebody shows up in six
minutes, don’t tell me you don’t count the first two
minutes and you were there in four.”
The city says that it never calculated the response time
beginning with the call to the 911 operator. Under the
old system, it began tracking the time from the moment
the call was transferred from 911 to the Fire
Department. The city further insists that a decline in
serious fires and fire-related deaths is proof that
response times have improved.
The outside review of the 911 system, formally called
the Emergency Communications Transformation
Project, was performed by Winbourne Consulting, a
technology firm based in Arlington, Va., that has been
involved in the project since 2004. Jeffrey Winbourne,
its chief executive officer, declined to comment on
Tuesday, referring inquiries to the mayor’s office.
The argument this week over the review of the 911
system, first reported by The New York Post on
Monday, was not the first time the administration’s
praise for the project was at odds with reviews of the
system’s performance.
On Jan. 5, Mr. Bloomberg and Cas Holloway, his
deputy mayor for operations, announced that the new
911 system was up and running, and that police, fire
and emergency medical dispatchers were all working
“in one place and on the same system,” as the mayor
put it.
Two weeks later, however, a confidential briefing book
prepared for Mr. Holloway warned of potential risks
and problems, including indications that the police and
fire bureaucracies had not worked out their
differences. For example, each department was still
working from separate geographic-information files,
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