Sorry to follow up on my own post.
There was just a piece on the news tonight about communities that are setting up free wi-fi. The initial cost for Alexandria VA was around $20K for a city of around 130,000 people. This is "naked" access, no e-mail, VPN, etc, so the monthly cost to maintain the network is low. Typically, a city of that population would have about 40,000 people with high speed connections. At an average cost of $30 per month, they would be spending $1.2 million/month on access.
They had a spokesperson for the cable and DSL coalition that is fighting municipal WiFi, and he was pretty weak, with the opposition centering around fire and police services being negatively impacted by the money being spent on WiFi.