Voters from a half dozen Colorado cities and towns — Firestone, Frisco, Lake City, Limon, Lyons, and Severance — went to the ballot box Tuesday to decide whether to cast off a 2005 state law that restricts municipal governments from providing broadband internet service.
Final results from the election were still being compiled Tuesday night.
If the vote goes as expected — 86 cities and towns and more than 30 counties have already overturned the law in just the past decade — it will mean more options for deploying a service that many now equate to water and electricity in terms of its critical role in economic vitality.
“If an area doesn’t have reliable, good broadband access and availability, that area is not going to thrive,” said Jud Hollingsworth, a town trustee with Lake City, a mountain town of several hundred residents that is among the most remote in Colorado. “Residents here are saying if they could have some competition in that area, they would welcome that.”
Across the state in Limon, town manager Dave Stone said residents in his eastern plains community have been less than pleased with the internet service they get now.
“We continually hear from people who have difficulty getting the broadband service they need,” he said. “They certainly feel there’s a need for competition in town.”
How that competition might play out in Lake City and Limon is something neither Hollingsworth nor Stone would venture to guess, but they know their residents want more ways to widen the pipe to the online world. Examples of cities and counties taking different approaches to expanding broadband opportunities abound in Colorado.
Several, including Fort Morgan and Wray, are teaming up with the private sector, like local telephone providers, to get people hooked up to high-speed internet service. Others, like Longmont and Rio Blanco County, have taken a more autonomous approach to providing robust speeds that can reach a blazing fast 1 gigabit per second.
Tony Neal-Graves, executive director of the Colorado Broadband Office, said the state still has a goal of providing 85 percent of Colorado’s rural areas with broadband internet access by the end of the year. The coverage is currently at 77 percent.
One thing that will help, Neal-Graves said, is the bill that was signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper on Monday.
Senate Bill 2 will take money collected from fees levied on phone lines and divert it toward building broadband service that operates at a minimum 10 megabits per second. In 2019, 60 percent of the money will go toward broadband, with that portion increasing in 2023 to 100 percent, or roughly $27 million a year, according to a legislative analysis.
“The good news is that everybody gets the fact that broadband is essentially like water and electricity,” Neal-Graves said.
The American Civil Liberties Union last week released a report urging cities and towns to provide internet service “as a utility.” The basis for the organization’s report: the Federal Communications Commission’s recent rollback of net neutrality rules.
“Municipal governments still have the option of providing broadband service themselves and implementing the net neutrality and privacy protections that are no longer required of private companies by federal policies,” the ACLU said in a news release last week.
Neal-Graves said some municipal leaders in Colorado were “spooked” by the FCC’s December ruling and want to make sure they have more than just one choice of internet provider, no matter where they might be located in the state.
©2018 The Denver Post Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
