Chicago: Mayor Daley, in conjunction with the Mayor's Council of Techonology 
Advisors, recently announced plans to creat a public/private network to 
ensure access to high performance, fiber optic, telecommunications services 
to every residence, business and institution in the city.  The plan, known as 
CivicNet,  will use 1,600 existing locations of government and education as 
"anchor tenants" and then use this backbone to build out to the rest of the 
city.

The RFI lays out 6 guidelines for the service structure: equal access; open 
platform; abundant bandwidth; network availability throughout the city; low 
environmental impact; and, network characteristics tailore to accommodate 
future growth and change.

The city of offering access to right-of-way and other resources to facilitate 
the timely and efficient build-out.

The city also envisions a public/private consortium for funding, planning, 
implementing and managing the project. 

An extensive RFI has been issued in which the city asks for a broad range of 
ideas and suggestions for how it should proceeed.  Responses are due January 
19, 2001.  The city believes a contract could be awarded before the end of 
2001. 

(CivicNet members include: City of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago 
Housing Authority, City Colleges of Chicago, Chicago Transit Authority, 
Chicago Public Libraries and Chicago Park District.)


Cleveland, Ohio: The City of Cleveland was the last of 83 Ohio municipalities 
to approve Adelphia Communications' purchase of Cablevision Systems.  As part 
of the deal, Adelphia guaranteed that it will upgrade cable lines throughout 
the city to be "state of the art" by June 1, 2003.  With the upgrade Adelphia 
plans to offer more stations, long-distance and high speed internet 
connections.   The company also agreed to provide free, high speed internet 
access to every public and private school in the city along with some 
libraries and community centers by the end of 2003.  Adelphia also will 
donate $3 million to start computer training centers throughout the city for 
residents. 


Ohio: PUCO Chairman Alan Schriber believes that the competitive market is not 
providing high speed access to meet consumer demand and that the only way to 
get this done is through the ILECs.  In a rule that is expected out next year 
the chairman plans to freeze basic local exchange service excluding the data 
services portion of local service.  The quid pro quo between the commission 
and ILECs is that the ILECs will build high speed internet access.  However, 
the chairman is not going to impose specific orders in terms of how fast to 
do it or where to do it.

A few weeks ago I forward to Sue N, Sue L., and Scott Bolton draft 
legislation that would have placed the freeze in statute.  CLECs are opposing 
the legislation and so the chairman has backed off of it for the lame duck 
session.  If he can take care of the freeze in a rule next year, he will 
forego seeking legislative remedy.


I have not found any other proposals at the state or local level.  If I do, I 
will pass them along.  Please let me know if you want  me to take a closer 
into Chicago, Cleveland, the state of Ohio or any other efforts.