Hello everyone, I hope you're well :). Several months ago Michael Lilliquist requested that Mark Gardner, a talented policy analyst for the COB, prepare a report on Public Broadband. This petition helped Michael to justify that request. However, a lot has happened recently and Mark was held up on preparing the report while he worked on matters like immigration. He is now ready to start preparing the report. I will be meeting with him in April, but now would be a great time to your council members about public fiber. We should stress the need for more local providers to give us real choice, make us more self-reliant, take care of some of our social issues, and grow our economy. We should also stress how having a public option increases the level of services overall by changing the behavior of private providers for the better, although we obviously would like to see public fiber be the dominant connection method that Bellingham and Whatcom County Residents use in the near future. Since the Santa Monica Case Study shows us that properly installed networks can pay for themselves, and since the COB released their fiber map showing that they have already installed a lot of fiber for themselves which reaches a large portion of the city and its annexes, there really is no downside to a public option. It would just be really good for our community. I would be interested in any replies you receive from them as well :). Here are the contact pages: City: https://www.cob.org/gov/council/pages/contacts-bios.aspx County: http://www.co.whatcom.wa.us/268/County-Council