San Jose rejects regional broadband plan

The San Jose City Council unanimously rejected the city’s participation -- at least for now -- in a regional broadband system, saying it has been marred by a lack of transparency, unknown costs and other problems.

The "Bay WEB" program, overseen by the Bay Area chapter of a federally-funded security group, would create a regional public-safety broadband system. Motorola Inc. applied for and received a nearly $51 million grant from the U.S. Commerce Department this past September to implement the project. San Jose city officials have said the security group — Urban Area Security Initiative in San Francisco — has not followed standard government contracting methods. Among other things, city officials say neither the group’s staff nor its general manager sought board approval for various decisions, including the reallocation of $2 million that its board — known as the "Approval Authority" — set aside last year for San Jose. That same amount of money was also redirected from the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, also without board approval. The Approval Authority has seven members, including a San Jose assistant fire chief, Oakland's director of emergency services and the San Francisco Fire Department’s deputy chief of administration. Meanwhile, San Jose officials have also noted that some staff members of the security group are former Motorola employees.