An upgrade to New York's 911 emergency communications system is 10 years behind schedule and almost $900 million over budget, the city's official watchdog organization determined, according to the New York Daily News.

The Department of Investigation found the administration of Michael Bloomberg for years mismanaged the overhaul. It accused aides of the former mayor to have buried more than $200 million of overruns in the budgets of other agencies.

City officials pressured managers to "sanitize" and "soften" negative news and "to improve the spin" on the 911 project's progress. They also rewrote monthly reports, and during one 18-month period, City Hall kept canceling meetings of the interagency group nominally in charge of supervising the overhaul.

The project lacked a central decision maker to ensure all agencies involved were "on the same page," Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters told CBS News.

"The people in charge of running the project failed to properly manage on a real close level the contractors and consultants they hired," Peters said. "And there was a real lack of transparency -- we didn't have accurate reports on how the project was going and how much it was costing."

The original plan to create a single unified dispatch system for police, fire and ambulances was eventually abandoned by City Hall because of fierce resistance by the police and fire departments. The agencies refused to give up control of their separate computer networks and dispatch systems.

"As a consequence ... the (New York Police Department's) and (Fire Department of New York's) upgrades have been managed on different tracks, with the NYPD upgrade completed in May 2013 and the FDNY's upgrade still not scheduled to be completed for several more years," Peters wrote.

Mincing no words, the commissioner insisted the delay had "serious (and) potentially life-threatening consequences."

Bloomberg officials, though, have described the overhaul as "an overwhelming success," the Wall Street Journal noted.

"It works," said former Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway, who oversaw the project at City Hall.

"It is faster, has more capacity, new backup infrastructure, and is more stable and reliable than ever before," Holloway said. "As a result, emergency response times are faster -- and measured more accurately -- than ever before."

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