According to Wikipedia, Austin is 10x larger than Kansas City, KS. Google is planning on jumping into this with a test group of over 100,000 people, which is ambitious. It's likely that Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach to this, like they are so famous for doing with all their products.
If Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach with this, then why did they even bother asking communities if they wanted this? According to http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/list#KS Kansas City didn't even bother responding.
