Staff Writer

Both the redesign of St. Cloud’s Web site and maintenance of the city’s public WiFi CyberSpot will be up for grabs after the City Council decided last week to solicit bids for both projects in hopes of finding solutions among local entities.

The council decided the city’s Web site needed an upgrade during a meeting last month, complaining that the site, www.stcloud.org, isn’t updated enough and doesn’t represent the city to outsiders well. Since that meeting, interest among local Web designers has been piqued, City Manager Tom Hurt said.

“It’s my understanding that there are some local folks that would like to bid on this,” Hurt said during the April 8 council meeting.

City staff initially proposed the city hire CivicPlus, the company currently maintaining the city’s site, for the redesign at $11,500. However, Councilman Jay Polachek said the council should entertain other options and even a higher price tag, especially after reviewing examples of other governmental sites CivicPlus has designed.

“They’re all pretty, but they all look exactly the same,” he said. “I think if you’re going to get a Web site that’s dynamic and individual, it’s going to cost a little more money, but it’s certainly worth it.”

Councilman Tom Griffin said a local design company would know St. Cloud and know what people would expect from a Web site about the city.

“But the question will be: can they meet the criteria?” Mayor Donna Hart said.

The city will request bids for the project that will then come before the council for approval. Funds for the unbudgeted expense will come from the council’s contingency fund.

A private partnership to run CyberSpot

Since the City Council voted against the annual expense for maintaining the public WiFi service last year, it has considered several other possibilities for reopening CyberSpot for public use. Polachek initially proposed creating a private-public partnership that would keep the financial burden of maintenance off the city’s shoulders.

The biggest obstacle to creating such a partnership is a Florida law that is “designed to protect private providers and to not really make it easy for public entities like governments to get in the business and compete with them,” City Attorney Dan Mantzaris told the council last week.

The law requires government entities to go through a specific procedure, including a series of advertised public hearings and workshops that would present the specifics of the system operation, the entities involved and what the end user fee would be.

 “It’s not an insurmountable burden,” Mantzaris said, explaining that the council would have to have the specifics figured out before it could start the public hearing process.

Hurt brought up several other considerations that come with charging for the previously free WiFi service. The county tax collector and property appraiser agreed that the entire infrastructure for CyberSpot would be taxable if any revenue is generated from it, Hurt said. The city then had to answer who would be responsible for those taxes, the city that would still own the infrastructure or the private entity running the service, Hurt added.

Also, the city’s utility provider, OUC, currently allows the transmitters for CyberSpot to be attached to its utility poles for free, an agreement that would be nullified if the service collects money from its customers, Hurt said.

Finally, there is the upcoming referendum asking city residents if they would be willing to pay for CyberSpot, possibly through dedicated funding. Hart said the council should pursue the private partnership option while it waits for the results of the referendum, which residents won’t weigh in on until Aug. 24.

Hart said she thought the city should make a request for proposals and see who expresses interest. Once the council picks the best bid, the city would start the public hearing process before the referendum, she said.

“We can be doing all that during that interim between now and then and maybe, be ready to go once we know what the public has to say,” Hart said.

In 2005, the City Council decided to take CyberSpot citywide, eventually spending more than $2.5 million in initial setup costs. The infrastructure was paid using the general fund without any specific bonding or borrowing, Mantzaris said.

The council agreed to make the request for proposals and “see what we come up with,” Hurt said.