Omaha (AP) Mayor Jean Stothert and the Omaha City Council held a joint press conference on Friday to announce that the City of Omaha has agreed in principle to sell the 67-acre Memorial Park to Google. As part of the agreement, Google announced that it will transfer two employees from its Council Bluffs data center to a 172-square-foot office in Omaha.
Councilman Stevens took credit for initiating the deal after he read on the Onion website that the Internet was running out of space due to its explosive growth. He noted, “Memorial Park is the perfect location for the expansion of the Internet. I’m no techie, but I’m pretty sure you could fit two or three million websites in the park, and that’s not even counting blog sites. With so many websites located in Omaha, we’ll quickly surpass Silicon Valley as the center of digital innovation.”
Mayor Stothert agreed, noting that her goal is to make Omaha the ‘most digital city’ in the United States. The mayor indicated that the city will soon be banning analog telephones, paper versions of the yellow pages, and any artwork that is not created by graphics software.
Memorial Park is located in central Omaha and features a large expanse of grass, trees and rose gardens surrounded by houses dating back to the early 1900s. Each year the park is the site of the Bank of the West ‘America Celebrates’ free concert that attracts up to 50,000, and this past summer it was the site of ‘the coolest birthday party ever’ that was organized by two 8-year-old boys from Dundee.
The war memorial dedicated in 1948 will be moved one mile south to another park, Elmwood Park. It will be re-installed next to the Elmwood Park lagoon, with the hopes that it can act as a wind break to reduce the impact of the ‘lake effect’ winds that come off the lagoon. The Ultimate Frisbee games that are a fixture at the Memorial Park green space will be moved to TD Ameritrade Park, which sits empty 330 days per year.
The sale of Memorial Park also means that disaffected teenagers will need to find a new meeting space, shirtless runners can no longer share their bodies with Dodge Street commuters, and two neighboring schools will need to construct 30-foot firewalls to protects their students from restricted websites.
Construction of the websites are scheduled to begin in two months, and traffic delays on Dodge Street are expected for the next five years.
Approximately four hours after this announcement, Mayor Stothert held a press conference to announce the creation of two new jobs for Omaha.
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