Charging a decade of mismanagement and incompetence, the new chairman of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation said yesterday that his agency had "completely screwed up" the planned billion-dollar reconstruction of Kings County Hospital, the city's largest public medical center.
In 1984 the agency embarked on what was then a $550 million project to build a new 1.4 million-square-foot public hospital for the largely impoverished neighborhood in central Brooklyn. "Ten years later," said Luis A. Miranda Jr., chairman of the corporation's board, "after having spent $119 million to date, we have only an administrative building, a food service building, a couple of holes in the ground, a few parking lots and some pictures of past mayors with hard hats claiming they have fulfilled a promise."
In addition, he said, "what we do have is an angry community and very little to show for it."
He laid the blame for the failure on his agency and its staff, the hospital's management and the project construction manager. "The absence of a team effort produced little or no project accountability, significant delays and a more costly project," Mr. Miranda said. "Because we have handled the management of the project so poorly, now it becomes everyone's and nobody's fault."
Following the lead of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who last week imposed a moratorium on the construction plan, Mr. Miranda called yesterday for a review of the project. That will mean yet another delay in the tortuous effort to replace a 62-year-old public hospital that is a virtual museum of an early-20th-century medical center. Almost all of its 1,200 beds are in large open wards, and the building makes do with balky window air-conditioners, broken elevators, frequent "brownouts" and an emergency room that cannot begin to meet the health needs of central Brooklyn's low-income residents.
An Angry Reaction
The announcement of the review yesterday infuriated community leaders in central Brooklyn, who have spent years demanding that the hospital be replaced. Elected leaders in the largely black area, already angry at Mayor Giuliani's moratorium, suggested that yesterday's action might be an attempt to scale down or even kill the project.
Mr. Miranda's sharp criticism of his own agency's work under the Dinkins and Koch administrations is supported by interviews over the past week with city and hospital officials, as well as community leaders, who described a decade of legal problems, bureaucratic infighting and political wrangling that has stymied the rebuilding efforts.
The starting date for construction, originally set for early 1992, has been postponed several times, most recently until last month. At the moment, no one involved with the project knows when construction will actually begin.
Several hosptals corporation officials said that the agency staggered under the weight of a project far larger than any it had ever completed and that the logistical difficulties of building a huge new hospital next to an existing one proved far more difficult than either the agency or the contractor ever expected.
Mr. Miranda, who was appointed by Mayor Giuliani, acknowledged in an interview yesterday that the project might have been too much for the hospitals corporation, saying it was possible that the new hospital might have to be built by another government agency and then turned over to the hospitals agency to run.
"If we don't know how to build a billion-dollar project, then we need to figure out and find out who can build it with us," he said. "Our commitment should be, let's build a hospital and let's not have any preconceived ideas that we have to do it this way or the way we have been doing it."
Mr. Miranda mentioned the possibility of future construction being handled by the State Facilities Development Corporation, which built Lincoln and Woodhull Hospitals for the city in the late 1970's. But Woodhull, in northern Brooklyn, opened a decade late and tens of millions of dollars over budget because of problems attributed to mismanagement.
The city agency's admission of mismanagement drew outraged protests from black political leaders in central Brooklyn, who suggested that Mr. Miranda made the admission to justify the moratorium and eventually end the reconstruction project.
"One of the best ways to kill a project is to stop it, let it lay dormant for a while, and then never start it again because it looks too expensive," said Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., who represents the area in the State Assembly and is the Brooklyn Democratic leader. "This statement sounds to me like nonsense, a subterfuge for what they really want to do, which is kill it."
Mr. Norman and several City Council members from the area accused Mr. Giuliani of trying to kill the new hospital because much of the largely black section of central Brooklyn voted for Mayor David N. Dinkins in the November mayoral election.
To Review the Project
But Mr. Miranda insisted yesterday that a new hospital would be built, though he declined to say whether it would be as large or fully equipped as residents have requested. He said the new hospitals corporation board would correct the management problems and proceed with the project, but he added that the construction manager, Turner/Santa Fe Joint Venture, might have to be replaced "if they are not up to the job." He appointed a senior director of the hospitals agency to review the project and recommend ways to get it started, and he said that from now on, the hospital would be the first item on the agenda of every meeting of the capital ommittee of the corporation's board.
Mr. Miranda did not specify the precise nature of the troubles afflicting the project, singling out only his agency and the staff of Turner/Santa Fe, which he criticized for not producing an independent audit of its work that was promised to the board 16 months ago. If the company does not produce the audit, he said, he "will ask the board to dump them."
Officials at Turner/Santa Fe, a joint venture of the Turner Construction Company and the Santa Fe Construction Company, did not return telephone messages yesterday.
But interviews with other city officials, as well as hospital and community leaders, described a decade of bureaucratic bungling and clashing political goals that virtually guaranteed the project would be delayed and over budget.
Two city officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that to begin with, the design of the project proved far more difficult than expected. The existing hospital buildings, most of which were completed in 1932, sit on an L-shaped 44-acre site at Clarkson and New York Avenues in Flatbush. Hospitals corporation planners and outside designers spent several years trying to find the right location for the new buildings, trying to work around ancient utility lines and support buildings.
Disputes Within Staff
The pre-construction stage, planned for two years, grew to five. As part of this phase, the contractors had to build new space for the hospital's administrative staff and the food service department so that their existing buildings could be demolished for more construction. Those buildings, completed in 1991, were not occupied until a year later because of disputes within the staff over who would move into them, officials said.
Just before the initial excavation for the main building was scheduled in the spring of 1992, a lengthy dispute broke out over awarding of a contract to an excavation company after a rejected company sued the city. As a result, excavation on the main building never began.
Problems involving the construction manager, Turner/Santa Fe, first came to light in March 1992 when Coopers & Lybrand, an independent auditing firm, wrote the hospitals corporation that the contractor was not properly discharging its responsibilities. But despite the audit report, which warned the agency that the project was in jeopardy, the agency's board approved Turner/Santa Fe's request for $16 million on top of the $19 million it bid to be construction manager for the project.
Mr. Miranda, the agency chairman, said yesterday that the joint venture had recently requested $24 million more for the project, a request he said he did not intend to grant.
Several city officials said one reason for the delay and cost overruns was the area's insistence that much of the construction work go to small, minority-owned companies. Because many such companies were not large enough to be principal contractors in areas like air-conditioning, plumbing or electrical work for the entire building, the project was subdivided into scores of smaller jobs.
But hospital officials and community leaders said the additional contractors had nothing to do with the delays.
Councilwoman Una Clarke, who represents the hospital district, said residents had insisted on minority participation from the beginning.
"This is the first time in central Brooklyn that minority contractors have been able to help create some employment," she said. "The cost to the city will eventually be much higher if they can't create some economic stability in this area."
