Tucson Standard

Hundreds of Tucson households access the internet through the city's network, thanks to federal COVID-19 relief funds, an area newspaper recently reported.

It's the $7 million spent during the pandemic to connect the fewer than 1,000 households, as well as the possible continued cost to taxpayers, that is causing city officials to rethink the project, the Arizona Daily Star said in a news story.

"I think we blew it when we invested several million dollars and connected 1,000 homes," Tucson Councilman Steve Kozachik said in the news story. "That's indefensible. It's certainly not something that any of us in the city should be proud of. Any of us."

There are more than 215,000 households in Tucson, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Almost 93% of Tucson households had a computer between 2016 and 2020 and more than 86% of those households subscribed to a broadband internet service during that time.

Tucson's pilot Community Wireless Program was paid for with coronavirus relief fund money to support telework, remote learning and access to virtual services. The intent was to come up with broadband services similar to existing area internet providers and provide free access for area low-income residents. The idea also was to close the relatively small gap between the majority with broadband and the relatively small percentage that did not during the pandemic, when many depended on internet access for work and school.

The project was never supposed to be a full solution, Councilwoman Nikki Lee said in the news story.

"This wireless project was really just meant to be a quick temporary solution to keep people in school during that time immediately when the pandemic started," Lee said.

It was, after all, an emergency.

"There was a huge concern that these families, these kids, would start to fall behind academically and financially if they couldn’t work (online)," Lee said. "We heard instances of families having to sit in McDonald's parking lots to use their free Wi-Fi and realized that we had to do something in the immediate time frame to alleviate that situation."

After dismissing low-price plans from at least one private area internet service provider as "very slow," the council moved forward with the city's own network, according to the news story.

"One of the focal points early on from the council was making sure that we provide the service not only in an affordable way but also at a high-speed rate," City Manager Michael Ortega said. "The actual access speeds for downloading (on the private provider's plan), we had gotten complaints that they were very slow."

The city council was also making assumptions.

"When we started the program we made some assumptions about the number of users, not factoring in at the time that the school districts also had similar programs that took a lot of the users who were able to use the school’s infrastructure as opposed to the city's," Ortega said. "It gave the user an opportunity to choose. They chose the schools."

Fast forward to now and the council has plans to spend another $3.2 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds, this time from the American Rescue Plan Act, on digital literacy and access programs. However, given how poorly the city's Community Wireless Program worked out, council members are considering another look at those plans.

"We need to have a conversation about where that's going," Kozachik said during the city council's meeting Tuesday, May 3. "Our first attempt at that did not generate a tremendous return on investment. Before we just go and allocate those dollars out to whoever is going to get them, we should have that conversation."

That conversation will take a bit, Ortega said.

"Part of the plan has always been to analyze and make sure that the ongoing costs make sense," Ortega said in the news story. "That is something that is ongoing and I'll have more information probably in the next three months to really dissect that investment going forward."