Racial & Economic Justice

Tomorrow night the Chapel Hill Town Council will hear a staff proposal for a WiFi pilot project. This project has been a long time coming. One of the first reasons it was proposed in 2005 was to increase equal access to the Internet for all citizens. Former Council Member Edith Wiggins made it clear that if WiFi were to be offered to any part of the community it should include Pine Knolls and Northside. Here is a video of all five locations that will be proposed. None of them are in Northside or Pine Knolls, none will be available indoors, and three of them are in parking lots.

I was casually watching tonight's Chapel Hill Town Council meeting when Councilmember Jim Ward called out an item on the consent agenda that would grant expedited review to the proposed Eubanks Road waste transfer station. This is hardly a noncontroversial issue. In fact, the transfer station has been widely opposed.

I would like to know on earth this got on the consent agenda. When the mayor called for a motion for the resolution by itself, not a single Council Member would even make the motion! It died for lack of a mover. As Councilmember Mark Kleinschmidt noted, that is definition of what does not belong on the consent agenda.

Ran into Bob Avery, the Town's IT Director, on Franklin St. today. Turns out he's surveying Downtown with an eye towards deploying a small pilot program of free Internet hot spots in the near future. The pilot would use Clearwire as the high-speed wireless backhaul. The only resources needed are power and location.

I cautioned Bob not to limit his planning to publicly owned infrastructure like the old Townhall. Over the last four years I've spoken with more than a few Downtown business and building owners willing to provide a small chunk of space and the minimal juice for access point deployments. BrianR and I have explored using solar-powered, weather-hardened rigs, strategically meshed to cover a wide area. If the Town used this environmentally sound and quite economical approach, the only remaining requirement is a decent position to throw signal.