Durel Focuses on Fiber

If you had three goals you want your administration to accomplish before the end of 2007, what would those be?

There’s no doubt, and it’s kind of out of our control, because it’s occupied so much of our time, energy and vision of our future, is that we’d be in the process of getting fiber-to-the-home.

That’s the way that the Durel interview in this week’s Independent begins. Before anything else Durel wants to get the fiber to the home project going. He goes on to tell editor Scott Jordan that Michael Dell’s recent attempts to chivvy the telecoms into building fiber to the home networks providing at least 100 megs of connectivity validates Lafayette’s plan. (See LPF’s recent take on Dell’s remarks for a little background on that point.)

Down the page we get this note about the Supreme Court case currently holding up the fiber plan:

If the Supreme Court rules in your favor regarding the fiber-to-the-home project, do you think that will be the last legal challenge?

What I have been told is that if the Supreme Court rules in our favor, there are no more legal challenges available to stop the project. We expect, after a year or so of doing fiber, that there will be those that will still try to give us headaches and challenge things. But there should be nothing else that can stop the project from moving forward.

If the Supreme Court rules against you, what next?

We’ve already had discussions about that. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Finally, Jordan asks him about the recent WiFi RFP:

You just put out RFPs for a wireless network. Is this the first step toward building a wireless network in Lafayette that the public could tap into?

The RFPs that went out are to ramp up communications for LUS. I think that the very next step for us is get that up and running for LUS and make sure it’s working properly and get the bugs out of it. Then the next step will be to make that available to our emergency services personnel — policemen, firemen. We’ll see from there. The good news is that the infrastructure is going to start getting into place.

On that score LPF has its own take on the Wireless RFP…take a gander.

There’s more of course (some people are actually interested in things like roads and crime) so take a look at the full story.