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CityTime's Sequel: How Bloomberg Wasted Another $297 Million
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 24, 2011
Modified Sep 24, 2011
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 24, 2011
Modified Sep 24, 2011
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Remember CityTime? It's Mayor Bloomberg's $740 million boondoggle to modernize the city's payroll administration that—oh look, Willow the cat! Anyway, it turns out that Bloomberg is really good at wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on implementing technological advances that years later appear to be abject failures. The Times reports that $363 million has been spent on Nycaps, a plan to "modernize" the personnel information on the city's employees that originally was budgeted for $66 million in 2002. That's right, $297 million spent over nine years for a website made in 1996.
A report conducted by the project's monitors and obtained through a FOIA request stated in 2003, "No sense of economy, efficiency, or value is evident in any area of the project." Raj Agarwal, the official who was tasked to manage the overhaul and quit because of the city's "incompetence," says, "It was a runaway project."
Mayor Bloomberg made a fortune and created an empire through data-organization, but his successes appear to be limited to the private sector. Despite warnings that the project was flawed, his administration appears to have thrown money at the contractor, Accenture, who was charged with not only creating Nycaps but defining exactly what it would do. Most companies "dislike giving both roles to the same contractor because it can lead to rising costs," but in Bloomberg's defense, it does save them having to write two checks.
Accenture "viewed the project as offering a convenient way to train interns and recent college graduates" while billing taxpayers up to $383/hour. The company was paid $108 million from 2005-2007 alone. All of this would be bad enough if the system worked, but problems appeared as early as 2002, when personal information of city employees was compromised thanks to a security flaw.
Nycaps is up and running, but it's "far from the project envisioned in 2002." A spokesperson for the mayor says that Nycaps and CityTime have "very little in common…save for the fact that they are now both fully functional systems used daily by thousands of city employees." Sort of like how Mayor Bloomberg and evil billionaire oligarchs have little in common, except for their taste in decor.
Tagged
accenture
bloomberg
boondoggles
City hall
citytime
mayor bloomberg
waste
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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