Who should bear the cost of maintaining the Metronet?

In the wake of several outages to the Metronet, Winneshiek County supervisor Dean Thompson on Monday asked whether the county is subsidizing the maintenance of the fiber optic network through the amount of time its IT employees are spending on the network.

The cost of building the Metronet was shared equally between six governmental and non-profit organizations.  Thompson on Monday said now that the system has been built and must be maintained, "I'm not sure it's shared to an equal extent."

Decorah City Manager Chad Bird said IT workers from the city, county, Decorah schools and Luther College responded to a recent outage.  Bird said maintaining the Metronet is a "shared responsibility" between the six organizations.  Bird said Metronet could pay someone to provide technical support, but that cost then would have to be paid by the six organizations.  County/city IT worker Chopper Albert said he has been working on systems to monitor the performance of the Metronet and alert people in the case of problems.  Bird said a feasibility study of the future of the Metronet--due in two or three months--would also provide guidance to the six organizations.