Why Google picked Kansas City (KS) for Google Fiber

This article in the Kansas City Star provides some background on the Google Fiber for Communities deal with Kansas City (KS):

• "The local electric provider — a key player in sharing utility poles and buried conduit — is publicly owned".
• The deal was closed "between the megacorporation, the Unified Government and the Board of Public Utilities".
• Google will get a “single point of contact”.
• "The plan could mean tens of millions of dollars invested in Kansas City, Kan., by the company, and without any of the usual corporate demands for tax breaks".
• "We felt we could offer a track record of showing how that idea of public-private partnerships can become reality".
• "For a city of 150,000, we’re very diverse, physically, economically and racially,” he said. “We talked about the Kansas City, Kansas, schools and their reform efforts and their willingness to adopt technology to address education, their laptop program where every high school student gets a laptop".
• "Kansas City has long been a railroad hub. And rail right-of-ways have been prime places for running fiber-optic wire".
• "Wyandotte County also still counts on the trusty old utility pole. While more vulnerable to bad weather, it’s also cheaper and quicker to tie another line to a telephone pole than to bury the lines underground".
• "We were interested in going somewhere we could build quickly".