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San Francisco Chronicle
Editorial Originally Published July 10, 2007
The long, winding and sadly, whinging road toward bringing free citywide wireless to San Francisco may finally be approaching the finish line this week. We’d like to applaud Supervisor Aaron Peskin for being one of the few board members to show some actual leadership. He has countered the mayor’s agreement with providers Google and EarthLink with a compromise that deserves support from all parties.
The mayor’s plan would grant Google the option to provide a free citywide network at speeds of 300 kilobits per second and EarthLink the option to charge $20 per month for a faster service of 1 megabit per second. Peskin’s counterproposal would ask Google to increase the speed to 500 kilobits per second and both parties to halve the contract length to 8 years from 16. These changes won’t thrill Google and Earthlink, but they’ll be a lot less thrilled if the plan doesn’t pass at all.
The plan faces two votes this week. The first is on a challenge from the San Francisco Antenna Free Union (the apt acronym is SNAFU). SNAFU is upset because the Planning Department decided to waive the Environmental Impact Review for this project. The waiver — which is apt, considering that building the network won’t damage anything natural or man-made and that the antenna frequencies fall within acceptable federal guidelines — also eliminates the need for a yearlong wait. The board should reject SNAFU’s request.
On Wednesday, the supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the agreement. Here, too, Peskin’s leadership has been admirable, in that he kicked Supervisor Chris Daly off of the committee. That would’ve been a wise move even without this wireless debate — Daly’s spending plans only reflect how small his understanding of the word budget is. Now that he, and his obstructionism, is gone — Daly has made it quite clear that he will do anything, short of finding an actual candidate to run against the mayor, to prevent him from achieving an election-year success — the decks are clear for a sensible decision.
The supervisors should move forward quickly. It’s absurd that San Francisco, so uniquely positioned to benefit from technology, doesn’t have citywide wireless access already. We can get on the right path this week.
- : 1.0
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July 12th, 2007 at 10:43 am
It is very pleasing to hear that Peskin is a reasonable man and working with the Mayor on this. Kudos to this Supervisor! It is good to see that maybe this board is going to start to work with the Mayor instead of being in battle all the time. That was getting old and stupid!
If only all the other supervisors were this agreeable!
It is also refreshing that it has been so quite lately without all the antics from that crazy man, Chris Daly. Hope he keeps up the good work too and keeps his mouth shut from now on!
P. Fitzgerald