POULSBO — After four years of working on a lasting and cost-effective technology solution for city business, Central Services Manager Dennis Bouffiou said he’s now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“This is good for not only now but many years into the future,” said Bouffiou of a new proposal on the table.
The long-awaited plan that would make Poulsbo the first of the last mile solutions for the Kitsap County Public Utilities District (KPUD) will come before the city council for approval at its March 5 meeting. A Wide Area Network (WAN) proposal between the city and the KPUD has been in the works since last summer when Poulsbo City Council members gave Bouffiou the go ahead to explore the option of partnering with the utility.
For years, Poulsbo has struggled with the combination of disconnected city buildings and too-slow technology. Bouffiou gave the example that the city uses a handful of Web-based programs to order supplies, which with current City Hall technology are, “slow and slower.”
Another big need has to do with access to the city’s financial server in order for departments to have up-to-date information on their budgets. Currently, departments outside of City Hall have to call the Finance Department and have a report run and put in their boxes in lieu of being able to view the files on a computer.
“With this, they’ll be able to get up to the minute information, which will be very beneficial in the city’s budgeting process,” Bouffiou explained.
As Poulsbo was struggling with spotty telecommunication services it began hosting meetings with other local jurisdictions having the same problems, to talk about possible solutions. It was the large attendance and interest in these meetings that swayed the KPUD to build a fiber-optic backbone, a link to the Bonneville Power Administration fiber optic network, through Kitsap County.
In August, the KPUD’s fiber-optic backbone was the lowest cost alternative out of seven WAN bids from six entities that Poulsbo received. A final proposal, which was reviewed by the Finance Administration Committee Feb. 12 and will be reviewed by the Public Works Committee Feb. 19, has been in the works ever since.
Under the document, which the full council will see on March 5, the city would pay an estimated $6,300 in start up costs and about $880 per month.
For these costs the city would receive:
•A 100 Meg port and Internet access point at City Hall
•A 40 Meg port for Public Works
•A 40 Meg port for Parks and Recreation
•A 20 Meg port for the Police Department
•1 Meg of Internet bandwidth
Bouffiou explained that a Meg is a unit of measurement in bandwidth, comparable to the number of lanes in a highway.
“In essence what (the plan is) going to do, if council approves it, the city in the foreseeable future will not have to build another “highway” again,” Bouffiou said.
“You’re opening a floodgate of bandwidth for your WAN and that will change the paradigm of the way you do business here in the city,” commented Brad Camp of Sprint at the Feb. 12 Finance and Administration Committee meeting.
The estimated monthly cost of about $880 ($800 with an estimated 10 percent mark up from an Internet service provider) is a special “pilot program” price that will be good for six months, or until the end of 2003, whichever is longer. David Jones, KPUD director said the pilot program price was offered to Poulsbo because it will be the first city to hook to the backbone in Kitsap County.
“This is a marketing effort and we’re using you as a model and we’ve never done this before so you may feel some pain we didn’t see was coming, but hopefully not,” Jones told the city’s Finance and Administration Committee Feb. 12.
After the pilot program has ended, the monthly cost to Poulsbo will be $1,500, which Bouffiou said is “very” affordable.
If the city council approves the WAN proposal on March 5, the proposal will then go to the next meeting of the KPUD for approval.
As the city council is being asked to ponder its first ever WAN proposal, staff are also exploring the possibility of partnerships with other jurisdictions. In late 2002, the city sent a survey to local government and tribal entities to determine how many may be interested in cost-sharing with Poulsbo in using the backbone’s fiber. By the January deadline the city received 19 responses from interested entities and a meeting is scheduled for Feb. 27. Bouffiou said while partnerships may be an option, there is still a lot of work to be done before this can begin to take shape.
“Whoever’s connected to the backbone can participate, the rest won’t want to for now, so my estimate is that at first we’ll probably be out on our own,” Bouffiou told the Finance Administration Committee Feb. 12. “At (the Feb. 27) meeting we’re basically going to let these people know where we’re at and what we’ll do if a co-op is formed.”
