Metrotech Center does not immediately elicit awe-inspiring thoughts. It is an average looking business park, built in the 1990’s, home to the NYU Brooklyn Campus and JP Morgan Chase offices. Its red-brick exterior stretches across a drab Brooklyn super-block.
Metrotech Center’s exterior does not reveal its integral tenant housed inside. The Public Safety Answering Center (PSAC) fields over 5,000 emergency calls per day, whose numbers are increasing in this COVID entrenched year.. The city agency comprises two facilities that answer over 11 million calls each year. PSAC is the Metrotech Center location. As noted, it’s an average business park. But, this is just PSAC I. It has a spoiled and controversial twin due north.
PSAC II finished construction in the Bronx in 2016. Its accolades include daring architecture, a lush green wall, and LEED® Gold certification. A noticeable departure from the traditional red-bricks of Brooklyn, the story behind the “perfect cube” and its underlying capital project has been subject of public ire and interrogation.
Reviewing New York City’s list of capital projects, one project sticks out above all the rest. The median budget of all the listed projects was $69M (as of December 1st, 2021). The Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP) has a projected budget of over $2.2B, more than thirty-one times the median ($69M), by farth most expensive project on the list.
Are emergency communications that complex?
Well, yes.
New York City was the first to adopt “9-1-1” as an emergency number in November of 1969, and from its inception, “the complex communications systems sometimes became clogged”, as per the New York Times. Interconnectivity between police, fire, and medical services were an early requirement, signaling the need for a united response team. The idealized coordination of efforts was challenged, as the teams were siloed organizationally and operationally (though improved, disjointedness continues to present day).
Callers overwhelmed the number for non-emergencies, causing service interruptions. Fortunately the system’s early only adoption accounted for a fraction of its eventual volume. Telephone availability in the households proliferated over time, increasing access to calling services and subsequently 911. More recently, cell phone ownership expanded access and dictated technical requirements for the calling systems to read a cell phone’s geolocation.
As 911 systems became a common and expected service, the public witnessed trauma that spiked demand in the early 2000’s. Both 9/11 and the 2003 blackout demonstrated the systemic weaknesses, particularly in contingency and redundancy planning. During these traumatic events, citizens turned in desperation to a known resource. When the skyline showed smoking buildings or deafening darkness, citizens acted to report and seek comfort. They called 911.
Under Mike Bloomberg’s mayoral administration, the Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP) kicked off in 2004, with summary goals of 1) improving emergency response times and 2) upgrading technical systems (radio, call-taking, and dispatching). The expected cost was $1.34B.
What went wrong? Mark G. Peters, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Investigation (DoI) conducted a report in 2015 that explored this question.
The report noted “management failures, internal control weaknesses, and contractor performance deficiencies” during the 7-month investigation of the project. The problems persisted for 9 years. Within the 112 page report, the Department of Investigation noted 7 summary deficiencies.
- Failure to plan.
- Failure to govern.
- Excessive reliance on external consultants.
- Undue pressure to present positive reporting.
- Failure to monitor integrity independently.
- Failure to account for total program costs.
- Failure to keep records and documentation.
To summarize: the who’s who of capital project turmoil.
ECTP is a compelling project – it combines a technical upgrade, coordination across city agencies, vendor and stakeholder relationships, and real estate development (for the new PSAC II facility). The complexity asked for trouble.
Though it’s still hard to accept the extent of deviation from the project’s intended course. From the start, it was ill-planned, poorly structured (see findings 1 and 2 of the 2015 report). Correction relied on transparency over the work, which was not encouraged (see findings 3 and 4). An authority was not positioned to audit operations (finding 5). The icing on the proverbial cake – cost and documentation (findings 6 and 7) – ensured challenges in diagnosing the severity of impropriety.
If you compare the 9/11 memorial ($1B), LinkNYC’s wifi kiosks ($200M), broadband infrastructure ($157M), Madison Square Garden ($1.2B in today’s dollars), the ECTP’s $2.2B price tag is unwieldy. Its eventual public good can be argued, but waste of mismanagement and fear of repercussions is a lesson to all.
Even after the Department of Investigation’s damning 2015 report, components of the project, like PSAC II’s newly minted building, won recognition for IT collaboration. This very building and the hiring of the second systems integrator (after the first proved ineffective) was acknowledged as the reason the budget increased from its original $1.3B to its then-2015 price tag of $2B . While it is important to acknowledge the hard work done, it’s hard to ignore the underlying skepticism that this amounts to more spin and public marketing.
This is a human project: its objective is to provide improved, reliable service to those in need of immediate help. How do we provide similar lifelines to our city employees, who find themselves as a cog of a hunkering steam engine seconds from roaring off its tracks? How do we ensure individuals are empowered to speak up when they correctly observe negative indicators without fear of repercussions? We have a whistleblowing system, but we may also need a harmonica-tooting system that allows external corrective action without the heavy-handedness and stigma of formal whistleblowing.
We need honesty in our projects, especially in those that are complex and highly sensitive in nature. We need an emergency system for our public employees, who find themselves in bureaucratic, poorly-understood projects. We deserve candor in ambiguity and complexity.
That’s what our first responders deserve.