I was tryin' to find my way home,
But all I heard was a drone -
Bouncing off a satellite,
Crushin' the last lone American night.
This is Radio Nowhere ... is there anybody alive out there?
Unfortunately, the lyrics to this powerful Springsteen song about "social alienation" (according to Wikipedia) are cutting a little close to home for Philadelphia's various uniformed employees.
Over the last two days, Daily News crime reporter David Gambacorta has produced a flood of stories that, in terms of the city budget, fall into two categories: money not spent well or money not spent at all. Granted, the latter story about the Philadelphia Housing Authority is just as much about cuts in federal funding but there's nothing stopping the city from ponying up for enough of the new radios for the PHA force.
But what good would that extra money do when it seems clear, according to these reports, that it could be spent on a system that simply doesn't work?
At issue is the $62 million Motorola digital radio system that city officials had claimed they had "fixed" in 2005 but has apparently failed at least 14 times since then.
The system, used by cops and fire fighters, depends on sending a digital signal back to a central location which is then transmitted to other radios. Analog radios, on the other hand, communicate directly with each other. So even if two digital radios were within a few yards of each other, if the central location fails, the two radios will not be connected:
The radios came with emergency buttons that were supposed to give cops or firefighters 10 seconds of clear air on all nearby radios, creating priority over all other transmissions.
But the emergency buttons were flawed, too. When firefighter Leon Phipps was trapped in a West Philadelphia house fire in April 2004, his emergency button didn't work when he screamed for help, he claimed afterward. Phipps, 53, suffered career-ending injuries in the blaze, and Motorola eventually settled a lawsuit with him.
Unfortunately, stories about misspent funds, money spent on faulty products or contracts that are expected to cost $X million and come in at $4X million seem all too common. (Remember the $18 million - or was it $30 million - water billing system that didn't work? Or, of course, the $0 - make that $200,000 - Wireless Philly system that may end up costing even more?)
Sometimes, these can be chalked up to plain old bad luck but in the case of the Motorola system it seems that someone was just too eager to spend a lot of money on a fancy system before making sure the system worked:
The controller's report surprisingly found that there was no documentation to suggest that city officials - before shelling out $54 million - had bothered to verify the effectiveness of Motorola's system by visiting other big cities that used it.
When Fire Department officials in Phoenix, Ariz., field-tested Motorola's system for eight weeks in 2004, they found that their old analog system held up better during emergencies.
To top it off, the city will most likely have to spend another $13 million to upgrade the system so that Motorola will continue to provide maintenance and service after their current service contract ends in 2010.
Would you buy a car without test driving first or a house without having it inspected? Hopefully, the city will be a little more careful with Our Money in the future.