By Mollee Francisco 

It’s been a difficult 18 months for the city’s wireless Internet service.

“We’ve had a tough staffing cycle,” City Administrator David Pokorney told the Chaska City Council at a work session Monday night.

Since losing Brad Mayer, the city’s go-to Internet guy, the city has been hard-pressed to find and keep quality replacements for chaska.net. Pokorney said that some hires had been lured away by other Internet companies, while another had a problem with a work visa.

“We’ve only been able to maintain (service),” said Pokorney. “We haven’t been able to take it to the next level.”

To date, about a quarter of the city is signed up with Chaska.net. That’s around 2,300 customers. The city hopes to work out some more bugs and then begin an aggressive marketing campaign to reach their target penetration of 40 percent by 2013.

But for now, they’re willing to admit that the system isn’t perfect.

“We clearly have places in town that have better service than others,” said Pokorney. “Some we may never be able to solve without major capital improvements.”

Pokorney pointed to the Brandondale neighborhood as a perfect example of one of their problem areas. But giving up on certain areas wasn’t an option in Councilor Jay Rohe’s mind.

“Why wouldn’t we fix this?” he asked. “We should make this right. We should strive to be able to give access to everyone.”

“There’s not one silver bullet out there that’s going to make this great,” said Pokorney.

Finishing the first phase of the city’s fiber network, along the western border, should help, Pokorney said. They have attempted to work out deals with the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and the city of St. Louis Park that would have helped that reach that goal, but none panned out. Now Pokorney is hopeful that the approximately $250,000 project will be completed when the BioTech Center begins to develop.

Setting up business customers on the fiber network could generate annual revenues of more than $130,000, Pokorney said. They hope to see that develop over the next four years.

Though there was some disappointment with the performance and consistency of the wireless service expressed by the council, Administrative Services Director Noel Graczyk pointed out that they have had a lot of success to date.

“Staff has worked very hard over the last three years,” he said. “And you have to remember that this is still very leading edge technology. We’re working to improve it, but we’ve had a lot of success as well.”