GONZALES — The City of Gonzales continues to search for a way to provide a bundle broadband service to its residents, as the City Council decided to reject all the broadband requests for quotes on Feb. 5.
“Staff was priding ourselves on trying to go out and connect the community for free,” said Public Works Director Harold Wolgamott. “We went out to bid and thought we were going to get some reasonable bids from reasonable companies.”
According to Wolgamott, the city did receive four bids with the basis of the City of Gonzales building a new building for the city. Wolgamott said the build would have cost over $1 million per year for a 10-year period.
“We were hoping for one of our current people who have systems in town to be able to let us use that and pay down for our customers,” he said. “The two landline providers and the wireless didn’t have those.”
The City Council was given the option to allow City Manager Rene Mendez to speak with broadband providers to move toward getting broadband service to all the residents of Gonzales.
Currently there is a wait for residents to get connected to Wi-Fi Internet and there is a discounted rate for those that qualify.
“The idea here was that the City of Gonzales could provide basic service to all users because it’s so critical now for doing business and everything we do,” Mendez said. “It didn’t quite work the way we thought it was going to work.”
