The City Council established a new ad hoc task force at its March 20 meeting to study the status of the community’s public and private communications infrastructure. The task force, which is called the Community Technology Task Force, is going to study three key questions as it pertains to this infrastructure:
1. What do we have?
2. What do we need?
3. How do we get it?
The City’s Economic Development Manager, David Lindahl, is going to be shepherding this task force. He is working right now to attract volunteers to help with this project. Most of the work will be done by a consulting firm, but the citizen task force is very important to insure that we are addressing our local conditions and to get the owners of private sector infrastructure to participate in our process by sharing information, etc. David has identified the following segments of the community from which we want to draw volunteers:
Chamber of Commerce
Large, medium, small and home-based businesses
School District
Colleges (HTC, Rassmussen, ITT)
Home Owners Associations
Library
Youth
Seniors
The objective of this task force process is to put into place here in Eden Prairie the very best communications infrastructure available. We want to do that because it’s good for our residents and good for our business community to have dependable reasonably priced access to high quality communications infrastructure. We are using a strategy of engaging private citizens and city government together to work, primarily, with the private companies (Comcast, Qwest, etc.) that own the communications infrastructure that we all depend on in Eden Prairie.
We hope to get this task force up and running in May with a final report to the Council in September. And, hopefully, with faster broadband Internet speeds to you soon.
