To put things in perspective, the city of San Jose, CA is currently doing a similar upgrade to the city's traffic signals and controllers at a cost of ~25 million dollars. While it is expected to save money in the long run, that's a serious chunk of change. The project (as government contract jobs tend to do) has also gone several years past its due date.
Also the cost of the infrastructure financing and depreciation - which I would imagine would be significant. But maybe not? Does anyone know what something like this would cost? I'm imagining A LOT.
Repaid over twenty years, as I understand it: "A 20-year debt structure would require annual payments of $1.1 million from the city, according to staff estimates. That could be supplemented with money from the city's general fund and, perhaps, revenue generated by early customers of the fiber network." Though there is some math discrepancy since that would not cover the $140 million. Nonetheless, as a Boulderite, I am happy to finally see this happening.
It doesn't say how much this actually cost but, as a taxpayer, I'm happy to see this development. One can only hope for more of this plus a combination of services of those that actually need the help. I think SF is far more complicated than other cities and, for once, would love to see money going into the root of the problem instead of simple finger pointing from both sides of the aisle without any action.
How did they reach that figure? $1.4 billion dollars seems like far too much.
Edit: Interesting. Their methodology talks about rewriting all the state's public-facing server side applications to be open source. (Hence the cost.)
I thought the bill was just requiring that the public be able to use libre browsers and apps on their own devices to access state services, not that the state's server code had to be open source.
I would also love to know this. Where did the money go? In an era where infrastructure cost is cheap, the big expense should be labor. But seriously, $41m?
Those $900k are not staying within "the government", they are being spent in salaries, machines, services or whatever. Total government spending would be $1.9mn in that case, $1mn with the contractor option.
Not sure a $1B street update (literally 2 miles of street in a city with thousands of miles) could be regarded as "affordable" with a $12.6B city budget.
It already costs the city 70k per person per year to go through a recovery program, this reduced it to 40k the first year then 0 the second year -- netting large municipal and state savings.
Saving a city the size of philly a million dollars doesn't sound like very much to me. How was the million saved? Is that accounting for the time and energy spent installing and maintaining these?
reply