The local business journal reports the city council wants to review the public/private partnership: The plan calls for a city franchised fiber/Wi-Fi network in which the city contributes no capital, but provides telecom business to the winner provider. A local Minneapolis group has pushed the notion that the city should own and operate the network itself, although that group isn't mentioned here. The council has delayed acting on the finalists' bids for the network to review whether that course of action makes sense.
You can hear from several sides of this issue in a December Minnesota Public Radio report that includes Becca Vargo Daggett of the Institute for Self-Reliance, the local president of Qwest, and Minneapolis's Bill Beck, deputy CIO.
Update on Feb. 24: The council decides against ownership, and moves to authorize pilot projects by EarthLink and US Internet.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been advocating that Minneapolis evaluate public ownership of the network for months.
But at Tuesday's meeting, it came down to the fact that the business case staff offered to justify their "public/private partnership model" was embarassingly inadequate. No thinking council person could have voted to approve it in good conscience.
It's posted on our site at
http://www.newrules.org/info/minneapolis
One example: the pie graph labled "Financial Summary" on page 45 includes only costs, no revenues. There's some mysterious figure of $12 million in first year losses, in addition to all capital costs, that is not explained.
Also on our site is ILSR's financial analysis, which uses the City's own numbers to that publicly owned, open access infrastructure would be a good investment for Minneapolis. The numbers are rough, but they are more in-depth than anything the City has provided to date.
The issue will be taken up again at today's Committee of the Whole meeting.