From Council member Laurin Easthom’s ‘blog The Easthom Page:
At our last council meeting, I read the above history of wireless in town, and gave our new town manager, Roger Stancil, the opportunity to begin a process. He appointed a staff committee headed by Flo Miller to keep the process alive in exploring a municipal wireless system within the context of a technology master plan. Additionally at that meeting, when the Town was discussing the timing of the fiber optic traffic signal system, Kevin Foy reminded David Bonk of our desire to study and consider the laying of fiber along with our upgraded system (for a possible future municipal broadband network backbone.) Now we have a council discussion of wireless and our master technology plan scheduled to be on our agenda at our next council meeting.
Phew! After a recent discussion with some local citizens about the majority of Council’s rather tepid and slow response to reconstituting the municipal networking initiative, I was ready to join with Laurin and start beating the drum for both a exploratory task force and a renewed effort to implement a strategic technology plan for our town.
Looks like Laurin went ahead without me 😉
She also reports that Mayor Foy hasn’t forgotten our strategic opportunity to “tag-a-long” with NC-DOT’s efforts to lay fibre to each of our nearly 100 signalized intersections. This community-owned high-speed networking loop would thread its way through every commercial district, lie along almost every University boundary and penetrate deeply into several underserved residential areas.
Long time followers of my efforts to promote municipal networking will remember that former town Technology Board member Terri Buckner and I focused attention on this once in decades opportunity nearly 3 years ago.
Thank you Laurin for keeping hope alive.
Monday’s agenda will be published here.