Establishing priorities on Patton Street

Danville City Council showed some welcome financial restraint this week when it delayed bringing its nDanville service to a city neighborhood.

The plan was to begin offering the high-speed Internet connection to an area where the residents would be most likely to sign up. Initially, that meant the area around Averett University.

That, in turn, was supposed to create enough money to finance the extension of nDanville to other parts of Danville.

But Danville City Council didn’t believe that first market had enough customers.

"It’s a good project; I just don’t think now is the time," Councilman Buddy Rawley said.

Danville is attempting to split the tricky distance between "if you build it, they will come" and "if we don’t build it, we’ll never get it."

It will most likely take some combination of a change in federal broadband policy and new Internet delivery technology to ensure that all Americans have relatively equal access to the same data pipeline for about the same price. In this country, we already do that for electrical service and landline telephones.

In the meantime, the city should continue to expand nDanville for large commerical customers. That effort has already resulted in the development of the White Mill property.

On another issue, City Council needs to crunch the numbers on a new fire station, fire department headquarters and 911 center. Danville needs the project but City Council members don’t want to raise taxes to build it.

Considering the importance of fire protection and 911 — public safety is a core government function — and the decayed condition of the Bridge Street fire station, the voters might be willing to approve higher property taxes to pay for this particular project.

But if there’s another way to pay for the new fire station, we’d like to hear about it.

Today, Danville’s fire department is headquartered in a building that’s so weak it can barely support the weight of the department’s fire trucks.

Whatever can be done to get the firefighters out of that building — and soon — has to be one of City Council’s top priorities this year.

If the members of Danville City Council don’t want to raise taxes to build the project, here’s a suggestion: Look at what the city government spends money on. And then ask, "Is this as important — or more important — than having a new fire station?"