There is just no pleasing some people: “Mayor Mike McGinn’s Failed Broadband Promise,” groused the Seattle Times editorial board yesterday. (Visit PubliCola to read what McGinn was actually saying at the time.)
Anyway, what is the problem, again? Rather than create a public utility to deliver fiber-optic internet to city residences, McGinn has instead chosen to pursue a public-private partnership that has customers across the country drooling over its $80-per-month rate for gigabit speed, upstream and down. Roll-out is coming astonishingly quickly, if, say, you’re comparing it to the wait for faster DSL.
But, complains the editorial board, the plan “cherry-picks affluent areas — South Lake Union, Laurelhurst, Ballard — that are hardly underserved now, as well as a few poorer neighborhoods.” The cherry-picking, of course, is the result of feedback from residents saying they’d kill for the service. Surveys helped determine where demand was highest, without excluding densely populated but lower-income areas. (In fairness, it has likely been some time since the Times editorial board has had to cope with the concept of pent-up market demand.)
Though the Times mentions three neighborhoods by name, there are actually 14 in total, to start with. Also, there’s this:
To provide initial coverage beyond those 14 demonstration neighborhoods, a gigabit broadband wireless umbrella will be built to cover the City providing point-to-point wireless access up to a gigabit. This wireless coverage will provide network and Internet services to customers that don’t have immediate access to fiber anywhere in the City.
Still in search of some kind of failure, then, you come to the contention that “the fact at least three companies already provide ultrafast service.” The Times isn’t outright lying to you, but this is like saying that Tesla’s $100,000 roadster has rendered Metro buses unnecessary.
Condointernet, for instance, is available to condominium and apartment buildings, not your average Ballard bungalow, because of the costs of “last-mile” service to single family homes, which is partly why, one imagines, penny-pinching Mayor McGinn decided not to put the city on the hook for it. Otherwise, you can find gigabit service quoted for $500 per month, or $6,000 per year. Comcast, which has announced its subscribers don’t need gigabit service, tops out at one-tenth the speed for $115 per month.
Maladroit in its specifics, the editorial speaks to a larger incomprehension of urban needs that is all-too-typical of a stodgy print newspaper. Tech, and companies that rely heavily on technology, are the forces behind Seattle’s recent boom. Gigabit broadband, for those who get it first, represents a competitive advantage, so speed matters twice. A lot is riding on Gigabit Seattle here, but that risk has to do with execution, not public process, which the creation of a public utility would inevitably be snared in.
As a club to batter McGinn with, this is weak, weak tea. (I’m assuming the Times is hoping to rerun its Joni Balter article of 2009, “Sen. Ed Murray for mayor? Let’s hope so for Seattle’s sake,” very soon.) Their antipathy to McGinn seems genuine, but the intellectual bankruptcy here approaches parody.
Manufactured upset may be all they have left, though. Back in October of 2009, the Seattle Times endorsed Joe Mallahan in the race for mayor, saying:
Seattle is in a funk. Businesses are struggling. Unemployment is too high. The city budget needs a trim. An urban center long admired because it worked so well has become a place that can’t deliver basic services.
Four years later, Seattle’s unemployment rate was a startlingly-low 5.1 percent (revised) in April. That’s a volatile figure, of course, and it’s also true that the healthy job market seems to encompass King County as a whole, not just the city of Seattle. But in February, Seattle’s hiring also made the short list at Forbes: “The fastest-growing city for good jobs outside of Texas was another tech capital, Seattle, which is expected to add 136,000 jobs over the next five years.” (Even with the addition of thousands of new apartments, rental prices haven’t slipped, and housing remains tight.)
In March, Global Traveler rhapsodized about Seattle’s business climate:
With Fortune 500 behemoths like Amazon.com and the Microsoft Corp. headquartered in the region, it’s no surprise more than 200,000 people are currently working in the city’s high-tech sector. In addition, Bay Area companies like Facebook and Google are expanding offices in the area (Facebook’s largest workplace outside of California is located in Seattle), while Twitter recently opened a new office near Pike Place Market.
Meanwhile, the city closed the books on 2012 with a $9.2-million budget surplus, and began adding to its Rainy Day Fund again. In the teeth of the recession, Mayor McGinn actually proposed deeper cuts than the City Council was willing to brook. The general fund budget for 2011 — the general fund is where the city has the most discretion over expenses — lopped one percent off the 2010 budget.
Basic services? That was code for the botched snowstorm response that, some believe, did in former mayor Greg Nickels. In January 2012, Crosscut dubbed the mayor “Mighty McGinn the Snow Fighter,” quoting the Seattle Times:
“That chill in Mayor Mike McGinn’s office this week may have been the somewhat recent memory of his predecessor’s famous bungling of a 2008 snowstorm, the Seattle Times‘ Emily Heffter writes. “But as snow turned to slush Wednesday afternoon with no major problems, McGinn was doing what he does best: chatting it up with a team of staffers.”
To what extent can a mayor take credit for any of this? That’s a good question. But the Times endorsement’s premise is that a mayor can be beat up for any of it going south on you. That not being the case, apparently making sound strategic decisions on how best to deploy some of the fastest internet in the U.S. is enough to brand you as “untrustworthy.”
I don’t mean to dismiss the fact that a good chunk of Seattle viscerally dislikes McGinn, for various reasons, some inane. He has displayed a tendency in public toward “Ready, fire, aim!” and an alarming talent for feuding. But even so this is not where any of his detractors predicted, in 2009, that the city would be in 2013, by a comically long shot. That’s why Seattle Transit Blog’s endorsement and the dual endorsement from the 37th District Democrats recognize the bike-riding mayor’s accomplishments with overtones of FDR’s “but he’s our son of a bitch.”
The Seattle Times editorial board seems to think McGinn’s behavior matters more. Yet when that wireless umbrella appears, I tend to think Seattle Times staff — some of whom ride bikes — will be using it to better do their jobs. I guess that’s the reward of public service.
