New Yorkers has forked over $900 million dollars to date, in an attempt to fix the City’s public wireless network.
By: Harry Cherry
That number, however, is about to grow exponentially.
Ever since the city tapped Defense contractor Northrop Grumman in 2006 to build and maintain the network, the overall cost has reached $891.1 million dollars, according to documents reviewed by the New York Post.
The City’s bill with Northrop Grumman increased over $55 million dollars — in unexpected costs for construction and additional services — as well as an addition $11+ million dollars for change orders.
An official within New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications told a reporter with the New York Post that it intends to renew its contract with Northrop through 2020 — and will cost NYC taxpayers roughly $40 million dollars more.
“It appears to me that we’re getting taken to the cleaners,” Robert Holden, a New York City councilman told The Post. “With all this extra money we’ve kicked in, you’d think [the network] would be better protected and we’d get a bigger bang for our buck, but we haven’t.”
The network suffered an outage earlier this month which lasted ten days, prompting calls from officials for answers. Officials, specifically, are demanding answers as to why the system’s software wasn’t updated — something which they say could have prevented the outage.
Federal officials issued a warning last year about the glitch — urging a fix.
Councilman Holden told The Post that officials feel “trapped” into extending the contract further because “no one” in the city’s government “knows how to deal” with the software.
“That’s why we’re overspending,” he told The Post. “It’s like we’re at the contractor’s mercy.”
Anne Roest, the former commissioner of the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications testified in front of City Council in 2017 that the city should withdraw from the agreement as soon as possible.
She told the city council that the system is getting “more expensive” and requires “hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades.”
“I find it troubling that DoITT is intent on extending the contract of a poorly performing vendor whose cost overruns have proven to be a drain on the public treasury,” Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres told The Post. “Instead of holding contractors accountable, the city continues rewarding bad behavior–all at taxpayer expense.”
A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications said in a statement to The Post that Northrop is the “only vendor that can operate NYCWiN,” but added that the department is in the process of switching “to a system that will utilize cellular carriers.”
