GREEN COVE SPRINGS – At the request of council member Steven Kelley, the Green Cove Springs City Council heard the first official proposal for adding a public Wi-Fi network in Spring Park.

“I think it would be really neat for our park to have safe, secure access,” Kelley said. “I’ve seen other municipalities do this in all their parks.”

The proposal would create two separate Wi-Fi hotspots in the park, one at the pool, which is connected to the City Hall network via fiber optic cable. The other would be placed in the gazebo on the opposite side of the park, according to the city’s network administrator Angel Alicea.

Alicea explained to the council Aug. 15 that they could do several things to control the public service, including blocking unwanted content, as well as filtering specific websites out that allow streaming or other online activities that use a significant amount of bandwidth. The city could opt for a splash page that would land those connecting to the Wi-Fi on the city’s website or Facebook page when they first load a web browser, which could create more public engagement.

“From a marketing perspective and from a communications perspective, it has a lot of potential,” Kelley said.

The bandwidth available in the park could also be controlled, which would prevent the internet use in City Hall from being interrupted by public users.

The total cost for the project, including startup costs for the specific Cisco equipment and licensing, is estimated at about $4,700 for the first year and $1,300 each year after that to maintain the licenses on the purchased equipment. This would allow about 200 users on the public Wi-Fi with 500 megabytes per second speed across the system.

No official action was requested during the meeting, but council members did look favorably on the idea, with some reservations coming from Mayor Mitch Timberlake, including a concern that once Wi-Fi is available in Spring Park they may be looking at requests from residents who live near the city’s numerous other parks.

“I’m a little bit on the fence,” Timberlake said. “I think that one of the challenges that we, as a city, are going to face is that as soon as we offer this at Spring Park, somebody is going to want it out on the boat slips, and at Vera Francis and at Augusta Savage and all of a sudden we’re getting much larger than the original scope of this whole project.”

Timberlake did voice his support for the idea, however, and even offered the option for entertaining quotes for adding Wi-Fi to other parks in addition to Spring Park, should the public raise concerns with inclusion of other parks in the initiative.

Other members of the council agreed that they would like to see some alternative proposals, with most agreeing that they would like to see the compared cost of setting up a whole new network through their internet provider that would be specific to the park.

“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t look at the option, and seeing how much it would cost us, to have two separate systems,” council member Pam Lewis said. “I’m wondering, when young people start to realize we have Wi-Fi at the park, if we won’t have young people doing their homework and study groups and things like that.”

Alicea will return to the council with a second proposal before the Sept. 5 meeting. He said that if the council would approve the system, they would look to have it up and running by the end of the year, but could potentially have the system in place within a couple of months.