Thanks again for your support. You are all amazing people :). I wanted to address some of the inaccurate, biased information that is out there about this idea being provided by trolls. I am working on this as a volunteer. Since I have worked hard to be very competent in this field, I have been offered work throughout this process but have turned it down so I can't be considered biased. I love Bellingham and Whatcom County and really do want what is best for it. This is the greatest place to live anywhere :)! So: At certain points in civilization technological innovations become so key to the fabric of the culture that everyone needs to have good access to them. In 1936 this was the Rural Electrification Act, In 1956 this was the Highway Act, the list goes on. Opponents of the Electrification Act said, "I have candles, I don't need electricity." Yet can anyone imagine a modern farm without electricity? Agriculture is an amazing field that becomes more and more automated all of the time. We literally could not sustain our population without it. Yes, this is a publicly owned network proposal. So yes, we can be compassionate and help the poor have proper access to information which is crucial for their development. That is compassion, not socialism. The strongest people are compassionate. From the business point of view, this is the only option that will give us true competition. Trolls against this idea have said that bringing private companies in will give us competition, but looking at decades of data has shown me that that simply is not true. Google already turned the city down leaving us with very expensive private fiber options, monopolies and virtual monopolies, and low-income access that is a joke at best. Plus, even if they did a good job, what happens at the next crossroads? Do we have to beg them again to give us better access? Will only a handful truly have good access, like in the CenturyLink deal the COB is closing this month? This network combines the best of both worlds. We can be compassionate and do what truly great people do and take care of the less fortunate in our society by giving them a chance. Private providers can ask for leases on the network and we will end up with more providers than ever before. These providers will actually have to be competent because jumping providers will be easy if they're not. Mount Vernon has 9 providers, Burlington 3, the list goes on. Canada is not a socialist country. It is a democracy with some good rights in place for all citizens, like health-care. Now they're taking the next step and providing all of their citizens with useable internet access. That's not socialism, it just makes sense. With that said, I am proud to be an American. We are the most adaptive, most accomplished, greatest people in the world. Yet we are at a crossroads. Will we become a force for good in the world or...? The first thing those in power do when they want to control the population is control their access to information. It is vital to our way of life that all Americans have excellent access to information. It literally helps us stave off fascism. We need to get past the Red Scare mentality of the 50's and provide access to information to all Americans. We can only do that if we own the infrastructure. Also, this is hardly expensive. Please see the Santa Monica case study, posted here before, for how we can go about this without it costing us much of anything.