I read an article over the weekend that made me realize exactly why average citizens don’t trust this city’s government when it comes to spending their hard earned tax dollars. The city is accepting bids from wireless internet providers and wants to set up a two mile test area to provide laptops and other mobile devices with wireless access points. The ultimate goal would be to have the city wired so that everyone could have access to the World Wide Web. In a city where we have just weathered an election in which we were told that unless we passed a primary property tax our budget would be slashed. We have been warned that Resource Officers will be cut from our schools and that employees would have to be cut and that in order to raise much needed money for our city’s survival we would have to sell bonds. Now I read that for this city in crisis we are accepting bids from content providers in the hope that whenever we leave our front door we can remain connected to the WWW… Now this would be great, for me, but what about those citizens who don’t have access to a laptop or a mobile device? Unless these bids contain statements that the content providers are going to build this network, maintain this network, advertise it and take up the cost of it, I don’t see nor do I understand how a city council can even entertain this concept let alone take bids for it. Being wireless would be nice, but having the police and fire personnel we need as well as roads that are drivable seems a bit more important. Of course that is just my take.
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