[Davisgig] Municipal Fiber Update -- Meetings with City Manager Mike Webb

Tue Jul 23 11:20:11 PDT 2019

My apologies to everyone for the delay in posting this update.  I had a little life detour that required inserting a Pacemaker for my heart.  The update below has been reviewed with City Manager Mike Webb, who in the spirit of transparency is copied on this e-mail, so that the information reported to the community is mutually agreed to, and contains "no surprises."  If you personally want to contribute to the continuing effort by the City to give serious consideration to municipal fiber, be sure to read all the way to the last paragraph below, or feel free to read that last paragraph first, and then read the rest of the update, with the contents of that last paragraph in mind.  If you have any questions please ask them here, or feel free to call me at 530-297-6237.
Thank you for your continuing support of better telecommunications in Davis.  All my best.  Matt

JanTroost and Matt Williams met with Mike Webb on Thursday, June 20th.  

We started our meeting with a question, What is Mike's plan fordelivering what Council has asked for?

Mike’s answer focused on developing a Scope of Work (SOW) for theFinancial and Technical/Staging next steps components.  He expressed confidence in the ability of staffto accomplish that task. He included himself as part of the staff team.   We discussed the skills and experience neededto accomplish that SOW development task.
He believes that Finance Director, Nitish Sharma will be able toput together the Financial portion of the SOW, which will have two key components,funding and financing, plus both revenue and cost input from the Technical/StagingSOW.  
We raised the question about the City’s ability to work with LoriRaineri on the financial component.  He clearlystated that there isn't anyone currently on staff who has worked with Lori in thepast.  As a result, there is “caution of theunknown” on the part of staff regarding Lori. Mike definitively committed to reaching out to Lori himself to meet withher and get to know her qualifications.  Sincethe meeting, Mike and Diane Parro have met with Lori. Results of that meeting arereported below. 

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Mike sees Diane Parro's role as shepherding the combined SOW process rather than owning either the financial or technical specifics.

The discussion of the Technical/Staging portion of the SOW began with a review of the technical skills and expertise needed for the more in-depth steps of this next phase.  Mike showed a willingness to reach out to technical experts in the community for those portions of the SOW that IT Director Jason Best doesn't have experience in; however, he made no specific commitment for how to do that.

We used the graphic to the right as a tool to talk with Mike about the importance of GIS in both portions of the SOW, specifically as a revenue modeling tool. 
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We explainedhow the City can model revenue scenarios in a much more informative manner thanhad been done in the Feasibility Study, by loading Business License data into theCity’s GIS system as shape files, and then bringing that data together with theCore Ring and Secondary Ring GIS shape files provided by the consultant as partof the Feasibility Study.  We were very clearthat the City's GIS expert, TJ Crowder is an excellent resource for accomplishingthat GIS work quickly and efficiently.

We explainedto Mike that it was a reasonable assumption that each business license locationhas a high probability of being:

   - The location of a current Internet (and other services) customer, 
   - And that each of those Internet customers is paying monthly fees for that internet access, The initial GIS shape files would not include the level of service, from whom, or how much the customer is paying, but reasonable assumptions about the minimum amount for each customer could be made.  The individual assumptions could then be aggregated along the Core Ring and Secondary Ring routes.

We alsomade the Economic Development point that loading City Zoning information intothe GIS system could mean the (A) the GIS system could display theundeveloped/vacant parcels around the city, and possibly even current vacanciesin office space if real estate listing information can be loaded as well, and (B)through a Municipal Fiber deployment avoid repeating painful (and non-responsive)scenarios like the one David Waggoner and Superior Farms went through when dealingwith the monopoly telecommunications providers. Mike appeared to understand the threat to economic development that poses,most immediately in the case of the current vacancies.

Indiscussing the Technical/Phasing portion of the Scope of Work, Mike was/is not opposedto resident feedback at any time on things that the City should consider includingin the Scope(s) of Work.  The direction fromthe City Council is for staff to develop a draft SOW and return to Council withthe draft to ensure we are seeking the right analysis BEFORE finalizing the SOWand putting out an RFP(s). When the draft SOW is published in the City Council agendapacket it will be available for anyone to review and to provide suggestions viaemail or public comment to staff and the City Council.  In the meantime if citizens and otherinterested parties have suggestions for the SOW that they feel should be considered,they are welcome to email staff with those. 

There willprobably be multiple RFPs, because there likely will be separate ones for the Financialand the Technical/Phasing components, and in addition, now that staff has met withLori Mike suspects there may be a Part A and a Part B for the fiscal.  Part A being a fairly quick direct pro bono contractwith Lori to help illustrate the basic municipal model to help “show the math” forhow it would work at a fairly high level and to provide a basis upon which staffcan validate key assumptions with Nitish and City legal counsel. If Part A provesout that a municipal model can work at the conceptual level, then a Part B mighttake things to a higher level of detail and sensitivity testing.   

On the technical/phasingside, a quality assurance review of the RFP will almost surely have to happen becauseof the difference between the currently available inhouse skills and experienceversus the contractually-needed skills and experience the RFP will be describing.  How that review process will happen was not describedby Mike.  It also was not clear what levelof CC approval will be sought.

Follow-upwith Mike will be very important to be sure the SOW creation process does not runinto avoidable delays.  Mike noted that aspecific timeline was not directed by Council and that this work will occur in thecontext of other priorities that the City is working on in any given day.

The graphicon the first page should be helpful in directing our follow-up efforts.  The dashed lines to the three Possible Components/Partsof the Tech/Staging portion of the SOW are intended to: 

(1)   Visually identify parts ofthe SOW creation process that are in need of further description.

(2)   Provide the community witha visual representation of areas where the City’s current resources do not havethe requisite skills and experience to avoid creating a Scope of Work that leavesthe City in a position where there are important unanswered questions either aboutthe technical issues or the phasing issues or both. 

(3)   Be a vehicle for followingup with Mike.  If he sees himself as the processowner, as Jan and I strongly encouraged him to be, then having citizen experts providehim with useful/valuable input for that process should be a positive. 
We wouldlike to suggest that citizen experts, in a coordinated way, try and articulate whatthe actual Components/Parts of the Tech/Staging portion of the SOW are likelyto be.  That would effectively transform thedashed lines into solid lines.  The next stepsprocess will be much clearer if those Tech/Staging components are clearly identified... both for communicating to the general public and for interacting/sharing withMike.  We also think it will help us organizethe information that we provide the process in a more effective/targeted way aswell.
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