The saga of the Citytime scandal seems to keep getting worse for Mayor Bloomberg. It’s been extensively reported that a number of Citytime subcontractors were arrested for stealing millions of dollars from the city through fraudulent billing practices and the culprits will very likely end up with an extended stay at a U.S. prison.
But that only scratches the surface of the fallout surrounding Citytime. The project was started in 1998 and budgeted for $60 million. It is now over $700 million with a contract renewal coming up for another $108 million.
While the natural tendency is to blame the contractor, and the theft involved makes it easy to scapegoat, the facts here show gross negligence on the part of the Bloomberg administration, and in particular from Joel Bondy, executive director of the office of payroll administration.
Bondy was responsible for overseeing this project for the administration, and ultimately for the taxpayers. It seems he simply sat by as issue after issue cropped up, not on the development side, but on the implementation side, that were not technical issues but political ones he could have taken charge and made sure this massive project moved forward on schedule.
Opposition from the municipal labor union bosses, who like the fuzzy system we have been using, caused major setbacks. Also, foot dragging from union lackeys in key agency jobs set some schedules back years. All these people should have to pay some price for contributing to the wasting of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The real danger of a scandal like this is that it can be used to attack many legitimate cases of the city using contractors over government employees. Comptroller John Liu has been exploiting this almost from the moment he got elected in order to score points with the union bosses who endorsed and funded his campaign. He has used this as an excuse to try to slow down city contracting in an effort to force the city to hire permanent and expensive city workers to do work better done by the private sector.
But the fact that contracting ultimately saves the city money and brings in expertise that city employees don’t have is irrelevant to Liu. He only wants what his patrons in the unions want, more union workers with high salaries and unaffordable benefits packages.
We must resist any temptation to scapegoat the process of contracting. Citytime will ultimately be implemented and will save the city money over the next few decades. As conceived it was the right thing to do. Blaming the contracting process is not just disingenuous, but expensive. Not that political hacks like Liu care.
Robert Hornak is a Queens-based political consultant, blogger, and an active member of the Queens Republican Party.
