Publication

In 2011, Sly James won election to his first term as mayor of Kansas City, Mo. Within roughly 48 hours of his victory, he was swept into a meeting room to close a long anticipated deal: the approval of an agreement to make the City of Fountains the site of the first Google Fiber ultra-highspeed broadband network.

But, while the award of Google Fiber represented a unique civic opportunity, it could not change a basic fact: Kansas City was an aging Midwestern metropolis with a lot of very typical urban challenges, including worn-out infrastructure and tightly constrained public budgets.