Bloomberg dove right into this mess. His first budget, which cut funds to virtually every department including police, added funds for the city’s technology. In his first State of the City speech in January 2002, he promised what most people thought was impossible—a “citizens’ service center” that would allow people to reach the city by calling three digits—311. This was the toll-free number that the federal government had long ago reserved for nonemergency community services, and some cities like Chicago, population nearly 3 million, and Baltimore, with 640,000 people, had already started 311 service. But an easy, efficient way for 8 million New Yorkers to complain was widely considered little more than this amateur politician’s fantasy.
Menchini, the city’s chief information officer, remembered helping Bloomberg write the section of his budget speech about 311. But when the mayor gave it, he added a zinger. He said it would be up and running in a year. “I knew that was not in the prepared text,” Menchini said, remembering how his colleagues started kicking the back of his chair. A year, huh? They laughed. Normally government takes a year to study the problem. At least. But that was a “Mike Bloombergism” and a key ingredient to his success—an extremely tight time frame. That meant everybody had to scramble, extra effort, extra hours. Menchini’s DoITT went into hyperdrive, and the 311 system opened successfully in fourteen months.
To achieve a working 311 quickly took an astonishing level of organization—some of it by the mayor’s own daughter, Emma Bloomberg. She faced early resistance—“DOT is stalling move,” Emma wrote about the Department of Transportation on one committee report in December 2002.9, 10 Everybody seemed to have a reason for delay—the default position in government that Mike Bloomberg often saw as failure.
Workers answering phones in some offices didn’t want to change jobs, especially if their salary and benefits might freeze as a result. Turf battles surfaced, but the mayor of New York City has a lot of power, and Bloomberg had no trouble using it. He wanted this system now, he kept reminding his people. In the first year. No excuses.
As city officials scrambled to find ways to make it work, staff members toyed with marketing strategies, some of them apparently keyed to Bloomberg’s peppery sense of humor. Suggestions for slogans included “All help and no attitude.” One inside favorite for an operator’s opening question to a New Yorker was “So, what’s your problem?” (Vetoed, of course.)
The staff also looked at sixty different ways to name this new service. They ranged from “Call Liberty” to “EZ-Apple” to “This is NYC.” Eventually it became known simply as 311, the city number for “everything but emergencies.”11 One important feature borrowed from other cities like Chicago was that a real human being would answer, even if that meant a slight delay.
Officially, 311 started operating on March 9, 2003. A new way to complain? New Yorkers caught on quickly. They could ask questions or, more frequently, grouse to an actual person paid to listen—about noise or garbage or even how new surveillance cameras were screwing up their television reception. More often, calls would be worth the city’s time, like school closings or storm warnings or the one from a veteran from Oklahoma who had worked at Ground Zero and wanted to come back and plant a seedling somewhere in the city.
The mayor himself was one of the first callers, and after he carefully punched 311, an operator asked for his name. “Mike Bloomberg,” the mayor replied, prompting the operator to ask how to spell that. “B-L-O-O,” the mayor began as his aides burst out laughing. The mayor grinned and declared success. A live operator had answered and made sure his name was spelled right.12
A common complaint was noise—almost a thousand calls a day about booming construction sites or blaring music or whining air conditioners. The noise numbers were so strong that Bloomberg decided it was time to have a new law about the growing racket in his city, even a limit on the amount of time your dog could bark—five minutes at night, ten minutes in the day. “Most complaints about noise are not frivolous,” Bloomberg said, citing the data from 311. He didn’t want to stop construction or close down the local bar, he insisted, he just wanted to “turn down the volume,”13 even for the Mister Softee ice cream trucks. This brought a new clamor—from parents of toddlers. So Bloomberg compromised. The jingle was allowed to jangle nerves while the truck was rolling through the streets. Once the truck stopped, the music was supposed to stop.14
What surprised Bloomberg and many of those computer-savvy aides around him was that there was plenty of raw data buried in the city’s many departments. The problem was that too often nobody seemed to know how to use it. This, of course, was Bloomberg territory. He used 311 as an investigative and management tool. At morning meetings, he would carefully examine the weekly 311 reports, including the city’s responses. If the garbage teams took too long in Staten Island and residents kept calling, Bloomberg noticed.
“He could see in those numbers whether any agency was performing,” said Bill Cunningham, Bloomberg’s press spokesman in his earlier days as mayor. “He called 311 himself a lot, even from his car—there are homeless people here, trash still there, and he would get his ticket and then follow up about it.”15
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There were plenty of examples of how Bloomberg demanded data to run his city, but Michael Flowers became one of his rock stars. A former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Flowers was originally hired to analyze why mortgage-backed securities had caused the meltdown during the Great Recession. He outgrew that job swiftly. Soon Bloomberg asked Flowers to become head of the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, also known as the Mayor’s Geek Squad.
Flowers surprised city insiders by going directly to Craigslist to find a group of mostly new college graduates he would soon call “the kids.” They were techies, of course, and some had economics degrees. Flowers also looked for a creative side—one was a former music major. Another was a huge fantasy baseball expert.16 The key prerequisite for the job—never think first about what was impossible. There were plenty of people in government to do that.
Flowers instructed the kids to soak up data and analyze it, but also to listen to the frontline experts and try to be humble about it. The inspectors in the field could smell a problem long before it reached the official complaint stage, and Flowers wanted to balance those gut instincts with hard data.17
When the Geek Squad began collecting and cross-pollinating the city’s data, some of their work quickly became city legend. The fight against FOG—or, fats, oils, and grease in the sewers—was a constant urban battle. The “fatbergs,” as giant globs of fat were sometimes called, caused more than half of the backups in city sewers.18 So when the city’s Department of Environmental Protection couldn’t identify culprits pouring grease directly into the drains, they called in the Geeks. Instead of inspectors going door-to-door—or back door–to–back door—in hopes of catching somebody in the act, Flowers and Co. found data from the Business Integrity Commission. The small agency created in 2001 to investigate and control the criminal influences in the garbage and waste-hauling business19 had been collecting a lot of formerly unnoticed details about which restaurants paid for private trucks to haul away their grease. Then the Flowers crew matched that data of those that didn’t pay for the haulers with the city drains most often choked with FOG. They handed inspectors a list of potential dumpers, many of whom were quickly caught and ticketed for clogging the city’s sewers.20
Bloomberg’s Geeks also worked to discover the residential buildings that had been subdivided into firetraps, the “illegal conversions” hidden in homes and apartment buildings around the city. Finding these nests of renters and their unscrupulous landlords was far from easy. The buildings, tax, and housing preservation departments all used different ways to identify the same building. The police used its own mapping system. The fire department often identified a structure by its proximity to the nearest fire “call boxes.”
The Flowers team started with a ton of building data—the th
ousands of registered properties in the city. They added complaints or comments from nineteen other agencies plus crime rates and the number of ambulance visits to specific sites. They followed inspectors around, and when one took a quick glance at a building and said no problems there, the Flowers team members asked why. When the inspector explained that the brickwork was new, he said it was an indication somebody was taking care of the building. Flowers found another knot of data—the agency that gave out permits to do brickwork. That went into the mix. The conclusions of the Geek Squad shocked even the old pros. When inspectors used the lists, they found violations severe enough to vacate a building rose by about 70 percent.21
The Flowers model sounded like a game plan taken straight from Bloomberg’s desk. “They took massive quantities of data that had been lying around for years, largely unused after it was collected, and harnessed it in a novel way to extract real value,”22 concluded one team of independent data experts who analyzed Bloomberg’s data strategies.
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The success of 311 gave Bloomberg confidence to take on a far more difficult task—modernizing and streamlining the emergency call system at 911. Early on, Bloomberg’s team analyzed the patchwork and sometimes rickety 911 system that averaged eleven million calls a year and found that it “was the worst example of outdated technology” in the city.23 It badly needed an update, but city experts warned the mayor that 911 would be far more difficult than 311. Getting the police, firefighters, and emergency workers and their unions to work together was a no-win task for any politician. As one adviser put it during a key meeting with the mayor, the unions would “park dead bodies on your doorstep if they don’t like what’s happening.”24 To Bloomberg, that sounded less like a warning than a challenge.
Before 911, many people had a list of emergency numbers by the phone—police, fire, ambulance, helpful neighbor. Or they simply dialed 0 and gambled that the operator knew what to do. The three-digit code 911 was established nationwide on January 12, 1968, and New York City soon replaced its seven-digit emergency number for calling the police station with 911. The system in New York for police steadily added new services—the fire department and emergency medical units—but the rivalries between these different branches seemed to grow more intense over the years. The police and firefighters in particular were the Sharks and Jets of emergency services, and they refused to share blame when anything went wrong or to cede control when somebody tried to fix the system. Previous mayors had tinkered with the problem or pretended the system was better than it was.
As a result, Bloomberg inherited a jerry-built 911 system that could barely cope with a real emergency. The police had been using a modified airline reservation created in 1969. The dispatching system was so creaky and unpredictable that it had to be shut down one hour every other week for maintenance. On occasion, dispatchers resorted to paper and pencil.25
The test that Bloomberg needed arrived at 4:10 p.m. on August 14, 2003,26 when the lights across a steaming city began to flicker, then died altogether. Elevators shuddered to a halt. The subway froze and stoplights went dark. It would be the beginning of the Blackout of 2003, the city’s worst loss of power since 1977, when widespread looting and arson and crime levels signaled a low point for an already depressed city.
Bloomberg, who had been in Brooklyn, rushed back to city hall, where the backup generators were roaring.27 He called officials. He called the press. He spoke in what was, by then, a comforting monotone, this time heard only by any New Yorker who had a battery-powered radio: “The first thing that everybody should do is to understand that there is no evidence of any terrorism whatsoever,” he said. Police would be at the big intersections, he said. Subway officials were plucking people out of steamy cars underground. He told people their evening events were probably canceled and that they needed to take it easy trying to get home. “With a lot of luck, later on this evening we will look back on this and say, ‘Where were you when the lights went out?’ But nobody will have gotten hurt.”
Bloomberg and his security detail even walked a few yards away from city hall to the Brooklyn Bridge, to hearten those trudging home in the unrelenting heat. “Walk slowly,” he said as temperatures hovered in the nineties. “Stay cool.” “Walk slowly?” one woman complained. “We’re going to get home around 10!”28
After most of the lights came back on seventeen hours later, Bloomberg ordered an inquiry, and the first details he saw were alarming. There were no clear emergency protocols for city hall officials. Children were stranded in recreation centers as parents without phones sat in traffic without stoplights. At least one major hospital had no Internet to access emergency data. City pools, which might have provided relief, were closed without electricity to circulate the water. The parks department welcomed residents and tried to keep them safe as they slept on the grass or on benches during the steamy night hours.
Most alarming of all, many callers to 911 sat too long on hold. Police reported that 911 received 132,000 calls that day—86,000 more than normal. The fire department, which normally took about 1,200 calls a day, received 6,646 calls and responded to 3,619 incidents. There were fifty-five serious fires, thirty-four of them caused by people resorting to candles.29
Bloomberg ordered a full report on how to improve the city’s response. The task fell to Andrew Alper, then president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, and Susan Kupferman, director of the Mayor’s Office of Operations. Within three months—a long time in business, a nanosecond in government—they reported that even with no mass trauma and no spike in crime, the 911 system had coped with six times as many serious fires and three times as many medical emergencies. A network of seven different dispatch centers and three dispatch systems “leads to an inefficient on-scene incident command structure.” Some callers had to repeat their information three times in order to get the right kind of help.
Mike Bloomberg and his team vowed to fix it, but their plans for 911 were barely noticed by the city’s press. Bloomberg announced his proposal on October 28, 2003, when there was a huge spray of cameras, a full house of reporters. They came, however, not to read a twenty-four-page report written by bureaucrats. The draw was the mayor’s new Latin Media and Entertainment Commission chair—at the same event, the mayor announced that it was Jenny from the Block, Jennifer Lopez from the Bronx.
Almost nobody asked about 911.
Still, tucked in that document was a plan to iron out the many wrinkles and duplications of a system essentially run by three separate and often competing teams—the police, the firefighters, and the ambulance workers. It would be one of the biggest jobs of the Bloomberg era, and they almost got it done. Almost.
Bloomberg proposed consolidating and integrating all these call-taking services for an estimated cost of $1.3 billion. By 2007, the price tag had risen to $1.5 billion, with additional plans to add a new call center in the Bronx that would cost even more. This would give the city a backup facility if the primary one failed. But as redoing 911 kept getting delayed, the city’s problems with 911 did not.
The Christmas blizzard of 2010 became another rough reminder of lapses in the emergency system. But the real problem that weekend was that nobody seemed to be in charge to declare a snow emergency. The mayor’s plane was spotted in Bermuda for the holiday.30 The deputy in charge, Stephen Goldsmith, was away in Washington, D.C., dealing with his own emergency marital problems. With no warning for private cars to stay off the streets, the ambulances and fire trucks could not get through. Streets in the outer boroughs, in other words, not Manhattan, went unplowed for days, and the mayor was forced to apologize. “We did not do as good a job as we wanted to do, or as the city has a right to expect,” he said, three days after the blizzard. “We’ll figure out what happened this time and try to make it better next time.”31
Another weather disaster, another report. This one listed failures that sounded all too familiar. The 911 system “became overburdened with calls,” and Bloomberg’s a
dvisers recommended that the mayor “accelerate” his plans for the new Emergency Communications Transformation Program, or ECTP, to reform 911.32
It would take a little over a year before Bloomberg announced “major milestones” for 911 NYC.33 Consolidation of the services would work eventually, but it would cost $2.36 billion by the time Bloomberg left city hall.34 There were still a few rough edges, but before he left office, Bloomberg boasted that for the first time in city history, all emergency call takers (police, fire, and medical personnel) were on “the same floor and operating on the same technology.” This new organized force could handle fifty thousand calls per hour, forty times more than the average daily rate and nine times more than the peak call volume for 9/11.
Investigators for Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, spent a year looking into the cost increases for the new 911. Their report in 2015 was overseen by Mark Peters, de Blasio’s campaign treasurer who had become head of the city’s Department of Investigation. Peters said that after looking at 1.5 million documents and conducting fifty interviews, he found “persistent mismanagement,” but “no overt criminal conduct.”35 Bloomberg, who had warned his former city staffers not to respond to his successor’s insults, made an exception for the Peters report. Caswell Holloway, Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor, issued a point-by-point response, labeling the de Blasio administration’s charges as “untrue.” The delays were understandable, given the human and technological complexities. And the increase in cost came when Bloomberg decided to add a backup system that certainly made sense after 9/11.36
What ultimately mattered was that the Bloomberg team upgraded 911 before they left in 2013.37 And in the end, if Bloomberg did not perfect 911 in his city, he made it vastly more efficient than he had found it.
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The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 17