In late 2015, city Economic Development officials and Santa Cruz-based internet service provider Cruzio aired details of a plan for the city to own a cutting-edge “gigabit” internet infrastructure as a public utility that Cruzio would operate. Cruzio would have repaid city bond revenue to install the wiring using customer subscription fees, under early discussions of the “Santa Cruz Fiber” proposal.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to strike a mutually agreeable contract, but we’ve shifted from there,” city Economic Development Manager J Guevara told the Santa Cruz City Council on Tuesday. When Councilman Chris Krohn asked for clarification on the areas of disagreement, Guevara provided few additional details, other than stating that the city will continue to support Cruzio’s service downtown expansion efforts. Though the city favored working with the local partner on a ubiquitous fiber network, City Manager Martín Bernal said, the idea could still come to fruition in the future.
“We have received proposals for doing that, unsolicited proposals for doing that, and that’s something that we would like to continue to look at in terms of being able to accomplish that moving forward,” Bernal said.
With Cruzio, an early sign of a negotiation slow-down came in July, when the internet service provider announced its intentions to independently move ahead on installing a piece of the fiber network downtown. A Santa Cruz-Cruzio August negotiation deadline came and went with no deal.
If nothing else, the proposed city-Cruzio partnership discussion served as a learning experience and positively impacted market conditions for Santa Cruz customers, Guevara and Cruzio co-founder and CEO Peggy Dolgenos said separately Tuesday. Fellow internet service provider Comcast Xfinity offered increased internet speed packages in 2015 and AT&T applied last spring to install hardware to offer gigabit-speed access to the city’s Eastside.
“Just through this process of finding the best policies to encourage private-sector development, we’re seeing three significant private-sector responses to bring competition, faster, more affordable internet to our community,” Guevara said.
During the meeting, Guevara also shared details of an ongoing financial feasibility study to update the city’s broadband master plan. Santa Cruz’s long-term internet service agreement with Comcast, keeping city internet access costs nearly free, expires in 2021, prompting the city to weigh investing about $2.2 million in building its own fiber optic network to city facilities. The so-called “I-Net” strategy update, referring to the city’s institutional internet network, remains in draft form.
The council also unanimously approved a new citywide “dig once” policy, which aims to reduce the number of times public rights-of-way are dug up for new infrastructure installation by inviting all area telecommunication and public utility service providers to access construction sites within the same time frame.
©2017 the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Scotts Valley, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
