Tax rollbacks could endanger city Wi-Fi
A hotly contested partisan effort to roll back property taxes in Florida is putting all local non-essential services on the line. That could spell trouble for muni-wireless networks there, including highly rated St. Cloud’s.
Florida city governments are fighting the proposal but it appears to have momentum in the state legislature. St. Cloud Mayor Donna Hart mentioned the situation in a post on Muniwireless.com a while back and I caught up with her this week to discuss its impact on St. Cloud.
The city council, she says, is awaiting word of how sizeable the impact will be but any significant loss of revenue would put all non-essential city services on the line. That includes CyberSpot, the city-owned Wi-Fi Internet access service St. Cloud offers free to residents.
“Things that are not absolutely necessary would have to be considered first so CyberSpot would be one of those,” Mayor Hart told me. “Would we be cutting the service? No, but maintenance and support might be an area we would cut.”
The network is presently operated and maintained by Hewlett-Packard under a contract with the city that the mayor estimates costs about $400,000 per year. Support and maintenance, she says, remain a point of contention among residents despite accumulating industry statistics on the network’s high rate of acceptance and superior performance.
The service is “very good in some areas. In some areas it’s more like dialup. Of course, we never said the service was going to be high-speed Internet,” she told me. Most of the complaints, she said, relate to technical support. “I don’t think the public is very patient on those items and I’m the one who gets those calls. I’m hearing a lot of frustration in town.”
The city’s fast growth adds to her concerns about future costs associated with the network. The city’s policy of extending service to newly annexed properties, the mayor said, should also be examined. Fees paid by developers offset the city’s cost of extending CyberSpot service to newly built residences. But the city has shouldered the cost of extending service to existing homes in newly annexed subdivisions. Hart estimates those build-outs have added $1 million to the cost of the network.
The city, she said, has not made extensive use of the network to support city services although it is testing public safety applications .”If they can save us some money, it would be wonderful.”
It seems to me, there are several issues here.
One is determining the true value of a network so that fair assessments can be made regarding its future. Jonathan Kleier, the project manager of Portland’s municipal wireless project, and I have had several recent discussions abut this. Portland has developed a set of metrics to monetize the cost savings to residents using the free network. Of course, this doesn’t put to rest complaints from unhappy customers. Providing technical support is no small matter in your average small business. Servicing tens of thousands of users across a municipality only magnifies the challenge.
There are issues of politics–at every level. Municipal budgets are subject to the vagaries of state and federal funding initiatives. As in Florida, politically motivated tax and spending cuts play havoc with the cities that must make difficult choices to cope with them. Changes at the local level , too, impact the perception and operation of the network; San Francisco demonstrated just how heated perceptual battles can get. Over time, it is likely that those who make serious decisions about the future of muni networks will be those who did not deploy them and who will pose serious questions about their continued operation. Upfront planning with sufficient public input will make that choice easier.
Finally, there’s the issue of municipal applications. Cities such as Riverside, Ca., have focused the priorities for their network on reducing costs and enhancing city services (such as public safety, meter reading, etc.) while addressing the digital divide and using excess capacity to provide service to residents. A number of consultants I spoke with at our recent conference in Dallas said that municipal applications are rapidly emerging as the most compelling motivation for deploying muni wireless networks.
As the backbone for those applications, the network is not a non-essential service but an indispensible part of the municipal infrastructure.
I invite your comments.
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Here in Providence, as in Riverside, CA, we are focusing on reducing costs and enhancing city services: first, public safety and later, public works and building code enforcement. ‚ÄúThe most fundamental responsibility of government is the safety of our residents,‚Äù says our Mayor, David Cicilline, and the development and application of the city’s border-to-border, mobile broadband data network aligns with this priority. Although the network has been operational for less than a year, the police department already views it as an essential element of the municipal infrastructure.
Providence has no plans to use this network to facilitate public access. This was a decision we made early in the program, primarily because we needed to expedite the availability of the network to support public safety. We wished to avoid stirring up the many constituencies that would need to be heard if we included public access in the mix. In addition, we knew we were unqualfied to run such a business. Although the idea might be popular with a large bloc of voters, the actual execution might well be a different story.
We now know, based on our experience to date, several things. First, there has been no political backlash because the leaders chose to duck the digital inclusion issue and concentrate on delivering the primary mission of government. Second, operating this network is a challenge even with a small, closed group of demanding users, never mind several thousand constituents. Third, the impact on city operations grabs no headlines but is truly impressive nevertheless.
The public expects local government to operate efficiently and to be as reliable and easy to use as an ATM. If the government promises low-cost broadband public access, whether provided directly or through a third party, the service level had better be at least as good as what the local cell phone company provides. Failure to provide responsive, effective tech support when things go wrong will quickly alienate the customer, and addressing the failure will seriously distract government leaders from assuring provision of services that everyone views as essential.
I’m confused. The MuniWireless story in early March and comments by the project consultant suggested fairly strongly that St Cloud’s operating costs were being paid for through municipal savings. (Tuesday, Mar 6, 2007 a 2:30 pm Jonathan Baltuch says:
The Capital expense was funded through the local economic development fund. The annual operational expenses are funded through the internal savings to City operations, which exceed the annual cost of operations.
This story suggests just the opposite: ‘The city, she [Mayor Hart] said, has not made extensive use of the network to support city services although it is testing public safety applications .”If they can save us some money, it would be wonderful.” ‘
Of course, even if St Cloud is breaking even, a tax rollback would still be a problem, but most recent story suggests that operating costs are not in fact being offset by municipal savings. Or am I missing something here?
What lengths politicians go to to justify those telco/cableco campaign donations. Shut down, delay or cripple the service and the lolly rolls in.
The following article defines the actual cost of service at $30 one time and $1 a month.
http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/5785/1/4/
Considering muniwireless should allow cellular and telephone service using a SIP service or Skype as well as internet, the average user should save almost $100 a month, for the price of a $30 up front payment.
A municipal government can overlay the wireless network with a combined cat6/fiber/powerline networks running up to 1 GigE at an additional $100 one time charge. This is especially effective with apartment/business complexes. Municipal meter reading equipment,in its simplest form a web cam, works very well with wired systems.
Myself I’d be happy to pay a $200 service charge so I could get 1 GigE service and save $100 a month.
The problem lies with corrupt municipal politicians who trade their oath of office for a few bucks in campaign donations.