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02/13/2007Why Minneapolis Settled on a Public-Private Partnership
Bill Beck, Deputy CIO of the City of Minneapolis, participated at the 4th Service-Provider Executives and Local-Government CIOs Roundtable and the RFP Town Hall Meeting at the Digital Cities Convention in Philadelphia (Dec. 5–6, 2006). He spoke with W2i at the event.
Q: What were the early drivers behind Minneapolis’s effort to aim for a metro-scale Wi-Fi network?
A: We began looking at wireless in the spring of 2004, and it was primarily driven by two things. One was our close neighbor in the small city of Chaska, getting $16-per-month broadband service, and the number of constituents in the city who were starting to apply pressure to the council members to have the same kind of service in Minneapolis.
The second reason is that we were facing some major investments to build our institutional network up to a point where we had full coverage in the city to meet the institutional needs. Quite honestly, many cities are in a financially distressed situation and couldn’t afford to do that.
We were also experiencing tremendous growth in our mobile workforce, on the cellular technologies. The bandwidth on the cellular technologies wasn’t sufficient to support the growing needs, and the cost was very significant in terms of providing those services to all our mobile workforce (police, fire, emergency services) as well as our other organizational requirements (public works, regulatory services for inspectors) and so on. So those were really the driving forces behind moving us in this direction.
Q: How did you settle on the model that you did? The city was beset with controversy for a while amid an outcry for public ownership of the network. A: We brought stakeholders to the table through a process of developing a comprehensive business case…and then ultimately we engaged over 140 people from every organization in the city, in actually developing and producing the RFP. So everybody had a stake in the game, so to speak.
The controversy over public ownership began early in this process, before we issued the RFP. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is a national organization that promotes public ownership of utilities, was really advocating very strongly for a public ownership model. And we made it very clear: We weren’t opposing a public-ownership model, but quite honestly the city could not afford one. We were facing a $20–25 million investment in building this network, which would have been our entire capital budget for the year. So that means we would have had to set aside improvements in public utilities — streets, roads, sewers, water systems — for a wireless network, and that was not going to be even considered by the policy makers at that point.
So we’ve never really opposed public ownership. In some ways we really advocate it because it eliminates a lot of the problems related to universal access for every person in the city, and the city controls how the network is used. But in reality, it was neither financially practical to do that. When we consider the cost of managing an emerging technology, it isn’t just a $25 million investment up front. In four years, we would have had to invest another $10–15 million and, even beyond that, another $10-15 million in another three to four years. The city wasn’t even capable of taking on that kind of a burden.
Q: A big part of the Minneapolis agreement is the emphasis on digital inclusion. Can you explain how this became part of the mode?
A: The digital-divide challenge was very important to us. While we didn’t really address it until we were beyond the RFP stage, and into the vendor selection process, we knew ultimately it would be a critical success factor to the program.
And the way we addressed it was to engage the community at several levels. We set up over 40 community meetings where we did educational sessions with constituents. We engaged the community in the pilot programs, and a number of community centers were actively involved in bringing people in to exercise the pilot technology. And lastly, we created a digital-inclusion task force that included community organizations, nonprofits, foundations, and individuals within the organizations active in computer-literacy programs. They produced a community benefits agreement that addressed all aspects of a community technology agenda for the city. We then took that community benefits agreement, and incorporated over 90% of those recommendations into the contract.
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