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 Last month my family had a meal at a family friend’s house in St. Louis Park. It was a warm Minnesota night and the kids played in the yard while Craig and I enjoyed a post-meal cigar. It’s hard to believe it was just a month ago with this morning’s temperatures so frigid. We took a walk for about a block talking the upcoming election, challenges at work and solving all the world’s problems. I noticed an eyesore on the street corner that looked like an 8th grade science project—a large brown pole with a box about 6 feet high with antannae coming out of it, and above that a large solar panel at an angle. What the? I thought.
He quickly jogged my memory when he said the magic words "St Louis Park, city planned, 'green' WiFi network". Oh yes that beast that Chad wrote a bout at Fraters last summer. How was it working out for the people of St. Louis Park? Let's look at the checklist...
—Ugly, check. —Non-functional, Check. —Expensive, check. —Duplicating a service that already functions perfectly in the private sector for more money and against the people's wishes, check. It perfectly meets the benchmarks of bloated government ineficiency. A classic FAIL I noticed in the Strib that this thing had finally died a week ago, and now Freedom Foundation of Minnesota writes their post-mortem: The City of St. Louis Park's experiment with a city-owned solar-powered wireless Internet network has come to an ignominious end. After spending almost two years and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars; after installing eight miles of fiber-optic cable and 490 16-foot-tall poles on which unsightly solar panels and wireless radios were hoisted; and after several delays and countless technical failures, the city is finally abandoning its wireless plans, at least for the foreseeable future. Despite all the effort and money expended, the city never came close to successfully delivering the reliable, citywide "green" wi-fi system it promised to taxpayers.
Since late 2007, St. Louis Park and Arinc, Inc., the firm chosen to install the network, had been engaged in a bitter dispute over the project's numerous delays and technical failures, with both parties eventually suing each other. However, instead of proceeding with legal action before the US District Court, they have now settled out of court. Arinc, Inc. will pay the city a $1.05 million settlement.
Neither party admits any wrongdoing under the settlement.
What remains puzzling to many taxpayers is why the city chose to build a "green" solar-powered network, considering their vendor had never successfully built a network using that technology. In fact, no one had ever built a solar-powered citywide wireless network. St. Louis Park boldly set out to become the first in the nation. And while, as the Star Tribune reports, city staffers still maintain that "the problem was in the implementation" and not in the concept, some city council members remain "concerned, still, about whether solar power is realistic." All things considered, it may have been wise to determine with certainty the viability of the technology before signing on the dotted line, not after.
Shocking that neither the vendor or the city claim any responsibility for this behemoth. That only leaves the citizens as a part of the equation, most of whom I doubt wanted this in the first place.
Here are a few tech posts of things as they started to go south—here, here, here, and here.
FFM goes on to report on another Minnesota city in a similar circumstance with an overreach of services and an under preforming vendor. The City of Moorhead's "GoMoorhead" broadband network has also been an unmitigated disaster. The city sued its broadband consultant and two equipment providers for $2 million after the network experienced serious technical problems immediately upon its debut in 2005. The city has also failed to attract customers to its service. While projecting 4,000 customers by 2006, they have come nowhere near meeting the goal; today, the service has just 2,800 subscribers, not nearly enough to even break even. And to subsidize the broadband network, the city has raised its electric rates - 10 percent in 2008 and a proposed 12 percent in 2009 - forcing nearly every taxpayer to subsidize the few who actually use the network.
FFM has a summary graph that I could not put better myself: The simple lesson: All taxpayers are put at extraordinary risk when local government gets involved in these risky projects.
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