News from
City Hall may pull plug on LinkNYC owner
over missing kiosks — and $75M owed
A LinkNYC terminal in Manhattan, Dec. 5, 2019. PHOTO: BEN FRACTENBERG/THE CITY
BY REUVEN BLAU
AND GABRIEL SANDOVAL
THE CITY
A tech consortium brought in by the
de Blasio administration hasn’t
installed hundreds of promised
public Wi-Fi kiosks since fall 2018 and
owes the city nearly $75 million, the city’s
top tech official testified during a City
Council hearing Tuesday.
What wasn’t mentioned at the hearing
is that city officials are considering terminating
their contract with the group that
runs LinkNYC — and allowing its lenders
to take over the operation, according to a
high-ranking source at the Department of
Information Technology & Telecommunications
(DoITT).
“We are prepared to exercise every
right under the franchise agreement,”
DoITT Commissioner Jessica Tisch told
the Council’s Committees on Land Use
and Technology.
“What we have is a contract,” she added.
“One of the means is to pursue enforcement.
Our patience is up.”
The LinkNYC consortium, known as
CityBridge, paid the city just $2.6 million
of $32.3 million owed in fiscal year 2019,
Tisch told the committee. It has given zero
of $43.7 million owed in the current fiscal
year ending in June, she added.
Over the past 18 months, CityBridge has
reported $105 million in ad revenue tied to
LinkNYC, she testified.
The consortium, which includes Intersection,
an advertising firm partly funded
by Google’s parent company, is “crying
poverty,” Tisch said.
“That’s absurd!” said City Councilmember
Robert Holden (D-Queens), who chairs
the Committee on Technology. “New Yorkers
are being shortchanged.”
Promises Not Kept
In 2014, CityBridge signed a franchise
agreement that said it would install 7,500
operational kiosks within a decade.
But the company has installed just 1,816
of the 2,353 kiosks that were supposed to
be up and running by July 2019, according
to the city’s Preliminary Mayor’s Management
Report.
“We have not gotten CityBridge to make
any progress,” Tisch said, noting the majority
of those 537 kiosks yet to be activated
“are in underserved areas in boroughs
other than Manhattan.”
“New Yorkers who would benefit most
from this service are not getting it … because
CityBridge is delinquent,” she said.
Tisch’s testimony came a month after
THE CITY reported that dozens of
LinkNYC kiosks, including some installed
as far back as 2017, have not been activated.
A CityBridge spokesperson said unexpected
infrastructure issues have created
the ongoing problems.
“What DoITT presented at the City
Council was a fictional narrative that
ignores the City’s responsibility for the current
state of affairs,” said the spokesperson,
Dan Levitan.
“While the public’s use of LinkNYC’s
free services has far exceeded expectations,
installing Links has proven more difficult
and costly than expected, largely due to
the city’s own rules and bureaucracy,” he
added.
In 2016, LinkNYC’s then-general
manager, Jen Hensley, told the Committee
on Technology that restrictions imposed
by Verizon, which controls access to the
underground conduit of fiber optic cables
the kiosks connect to, impeded kiosk installations
in parts of the city.
‘No Patience’
On Tuesday, Tisch said she was tired of
excuses.
“The time for talking about obstacles is
up,” she said, noting the city renegotiated
the franchise agreement in 2018 to give
CityBridge more time.
“I believe the city has bent over
backwards to amend the franchise agreement,”
she said. “I can’t speak for them why
they haven’t paid. I have no patience for it.”
The city fined CityBridge $142,000 for
kiosks’ phones and phone components that
weren’t working or maintained in the last
two fiscal years.
CityBridge also owes DoITT $1 million
in liquidated damages for failing to deploy
kiosks.
The CityBridge consortium includes
Qualcomm, a telecommunications equipment
company; Intersection; and CIVIQ,
which specializes in “smart cities” planning.
When it landed the franchise contract
from the city, CityBridge promised the
kiosks would offer the public free Wi-Fi,
domestic phone calls and a tablet touchscreen
that could connect users to various
services via 311.
Officials said the kiosks would be paid
for by revenue from the advertisements on
them while bringing in $500 million for the
city over the span of the contract, which
was initially 12 years.
This story was originally published
on March 3, 2020 by THE CITY, an independent,
nonprofit news organization
dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that
serves the people of New York. Read more
at THECITY.nyc.
Schneps Media March 5, 2020 13