We'd actually take it a step beyond and include (in season) the Cub League ball diamonds, the softball complex and the soccer facility.
Today, access to the internet is seen as almost a sacred right, an essential enabler of the citizenry's exercise of its guaranteed free speech — even if that exercise is nothing more prosaic than a citizen sharing a selfie of he and his dog.
The real value of free public access to the internet is how it could provide students the wherewithal to actually read up on the First Amendment, even while taking the family pooch for a walk in the park.
Internet access is vital to education today.
We read a story recently about how a northern Indiana school corporation has outfitted its buses to make them hotspots, both to allow students to do their homework while they ride, but also (as was the case recently) for the corporation to strategically locate those buses in underserved areas on days when the weather prevented holding classes.
So many households don't have access — or have access that is too slow or too weak to handle the kind of school work the students were being required to do on those “e-learning days.”
From what we've been told, locally the case is quite similar: many local students don't have internet at home or have a low-cost (slow) service, which while it is the best their parents can afford it just doesn't meet students' needs.
And it's not just youngsters who would benefit from public access areas but their parents as well, as so many adults are now “going back to school” online.
So the more access in public areas the city can provide to high-speed internet the better.
And it has to be high-speed service.
To invest tax dollars in providing internet service that's too slow for practical use is just wasting the money; rather than sacrifice speed, we'd prefer the city opt for a gradual rollout of the service, say Gregg Park first, to be followed as the money became available by the other parks, one by one, and then on to the Riverwalk.
It would be better to do it right in a small area than go big but sacrifice overall quality because of price.
Where we part company with the mayor is in providing free public access to the internet along downtown Main Street.
If the city were to provide such access to shoppers downtown, it seems to us that it should also make similar access available to shoppers at Kimmell Crossing and the Vincennes and Knox plazas as well.
Really, at any concentration of retail commerce within the city.
Putting public money to private use is always an uneasy practice, and should be done only in the most extraordinary of situations.
We understand the desire to attract shoppers downtown, and providing them free internet would probably serve that end, although probably not to the extent expected.
Still, with that kind of taxpayer subsidy, the city would be giving an unfair advantage to downtown businesses — a benefit enjoyed from using tax revenues collected, in part, from businesses outside of downtown that could lose sales, from the taxes paid by workers who could end up losing their jobs if enough sales shifted away from their places of employment as shoppers were attracted by the advantage of free internet downtown.