Tuesday at the Full Board meeting, after an impassioned speech by Supervisor McGoldrick and Daly requesting a simple continuance on their cosponsored (also Ammiano and Mirkarimi) legislation which asks for serious consideration of Nonprofit or Municipally owned WiFi solutions by the IT Department, the Board of Supervisors (in a vote that is seen as an indication of how the board will vote on the EarthLink WiFi contract) approved on a 6-5 count McGoldrick's request to continue the resolution to March 20th. During the debate, Supervisor Daly, Chair of the Budget and Finance committee, asked the Budget Analyst to prepare a $10M budget supplemental for a City WiFi solution. The EarthLink Google camp in conjunction with DTIS (IT Department) pushed to have the vote today in hopes of shutting considerations down the Municipal/Nonprofits options. Significant backing for alternatives was provided by the independent Budget Analyst's Fiscal Feasibility of Municipal WiFi report which had raised many concerns about the consideration of all options, quality of the digital inclusion coverage of the EarthLink solution, privacy, conflicts of interest, parity of deal compared with what other cities are receiving and the potential for a 17-year defacto Franchise with little Board of Supervisor's governance. With Community Choice Aggregation (Public Power) in the air, the recently released draft municipal fiber study and the continued bad feelings over the extension of the Comcast Franchise, voices concerned about ongoing privatization of city functions and assets have been given a loudspeaker. McGoldrick announced plans to draft additional legislation on this matter and there will be hearings on the basket of Budget supplementals in Daly's Budget and Finance committee. Lastly, the independent Budget Analyst will be preparing a detailed analysis of the EarthLink contract on it's merits before consideration by the full board. Independent Budget Analyst's study for Feasibility of Municipal WiFi - and preliminary analysis of the EarthLink contract (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/2v7bf6 Draft Fiber study (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/yu5wjh EarthLink Contract with San Francisco (pdf): http://tinyurl.com/yosuab Windows Streaming Video of BOS meeting (will be posted by end of day Wednesday), click on item 9: http://tinyurl.com/yru77x Speech excerpts and more details will be sent out Wednesday.
-- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
