Westlake Won’t Dive Off the Deep End in Google Bid

While some town are going off the wire in their attempts to attract Google since it announced it would install an ultra-high-speed broadband network for one or more lucky communities, officials in both Ventura and Westlake Village said that they wouldn’t do anything outlandish to secure the network—even though they were very interested in it.

Google announced earlier that it plans to build a free-of-charge network for customers in one or more cities in the U.S. with populations of 50,000 to 500,000. The company anticipates that hundreds of cities will apply by Friday’s deadline, prompting some cities to draw attention to their bids by staging silly stunts—like the Sarasota, FL, mayor who jumped into a tank full of bonnethead sharks and the Duluth, MN, mayor who donned nothing but shorts and T-shirt before plunging into icy Lake Superior and announcing at a mock news conference that all male children born in the city would be named “Google Fiber.”

Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton and the presidents of Community Memorial Hospital and Ventura College do, however, fully support the city’s bid to secure the fiber-optic broadband network. Ventura has almost 110,000 residents, and a 2008 survey found that more than 80% of homes had computers with high-speed cable or DSL Internet access. Westlake Village has also applied for the network. Google will likely make its announcement regarding the winning city by the end of the year.