Yesterday, I attended both council meetings. I also spoke during the public comment period. At both meetings public broadband was a featured topic. At the 1pm meeting the council met with Christopher Mitchell of Community Broadband Networks via Skype. It was the first time the city has ever had a Skype meeting in the Council Chambers. Two important decisions were made last night, which the council was pretty much unanimously supportive of. Michael Lilliquist, of course, led the way. Mark Gardner presented his report to the council. I'd like to thank Michael and Mark specifically for all of their hard work. 1. The city has committed to completing a full inventory of all existing publicly owned infrastructure including the missing fiber mentioned in a previous post. 2. The city has committed to doing an investigation into implementing a Dig Once Policy in Bellingham. (This is the policy that would establish installation of conduit whenever a repair is done, new development put up, etc.) However, this is far from over. Someone will ultimately have to implement it and the Public Works Director seemed less than enthusiastic to do so. So while I'm working on spelling out a Dig Once policy for the city in my "spare time" we need to keep the pressure up and get More Signatures! I know, I sound like a broken record. You guys are awesome. I've put a link here to the videos from yesterday's meetings. https://www.cob.org/gov/Pages/meeting-materials.aspx (Note: The COBs format is too old for Change.org to make a nice looking link from this.) On a personal note, I rode the bus back and forth to the events yesterday and, while doing so, got to meet a lot of our citizens that were really hurting. I was reminded again of all of the services and opportunities many of us have that we take for granted on a daily basis, and how it is easy to forget that others do not have it so good, especially in relation to technology that can change their lives for the better like broadband. One of the individuals I had the privilege of speaking to was a former Army Ranger who also loves motorcycles :).