The future of the proposed municipal Wi-Fi network in Toledo, Ohio, is on hold pending the city’s ability to produce a financial plan to justify its deployment. One exists but it’s been sucked into the swirl of politics and ego surrounding last week’s departure of the city’s IT director.The future of the proposed municipal Wi-Fi network in Toledo, Ohio, is on hold pending the city’s ability to produce a financial plan to justify its deployment. One exists but it’s been sucked into the swirl of politics and ego surrounding last week’s departure of the city’s IT director.
The Toledo city council was scheduled this week to review a five-year $2.16 million contract with MetroFi to deploy and operate the city’s proposed Wi-Fi network. The vote was delayed to July 11 after city officials were unable to produce a financial plan to demonstrate that the contract was revenue-neutral and would require no new spending on the part of the city.
The sad irony here is that the financial plan does exist. “I have it,” Dr. Patsy Scott told me in an interview today. Scott, former director of Information Services for Toledo, developed the plan for the city. In fact, in recent months she has worked on little else. It’s locked away on her computer, as much a victim of last week’s angry exchange with the mayor as she was.
The Toledo deployment has been accompanied by needless controversy for some time. Last month, Scott summarized the financial plan for MuniWireless. (You can click here to read about and the controversy du jour back then; this is not the first time that the revenue-neutrality of the deployment has been challenged).
Scott, who very much believes in the cost-savings and economic health muni Wi-Fi will bring to the city says she is willing to work for the city council or for MetroFi as a consultant to bring the network to fruition. She says she is also eager to present the financial plan to the council if issues surrounding her retirement can be resolved.
“This project is very important to this region,” she told me. “I truly believe in it. It’s a tremendous asset for public safety, for starters. But it’s also a technology that could make the field employees much more productive than they are now. It is a way of improving services to the city at no cost.”
Those efficiencies, she said, cannot happen if the network is not deployed as they involved “the redirection of city expenses that cannot be redirected unless we have WiFi.”
At Monday’s city council meeting, a representative of Buckeye Cable Systems, the incumbent cable provider in the city, presented a list of issues aimed at torpedoing the project, including the belief that the city’s future would be better served by fiber cable which Buckeye happens to sell. These include many of the traditional saws incumbents raise to block muni deployments. With the vacuum of leadership in the Toledo IT office right now, they may succeed.
If that weren’t enough, The Toledo Blade reports that some members of the city council are balking at the deployment for fear of a citizens’ suit against the city, saying that the proposed contract does not deliver the promise of free service that was promised when the network was proposed. Actually it does. A free advertising-support tier of service is built into the plan that Scott developed but…oh yea…they wouldn’t know because the plan is still on the computer. Considering what’s at stake, one would think Toledo city officials would work with Scott to see that it’s delivered.
This has become the most egregious case I’ve seen yet of political egos and incumbent intransigience throwing roadblocks in front of a deployment.
Click here to read The Toledo Blade story on this week’s council meeting.
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