A big thank you to Indivisible Bellingham for allowing me to present to them last night and for agreeing to really get the word out about public fiber and it's many benefits to our community including allowing us to use local, net-neutral providers with excellent speeds. Also, a big thank you to all of your for your support. We are almost at 1,000 signatures. I also promised that in my next update I'd share the news I received from the City about the benefits we did NOT receive from the CenturyLink franchise deal that the city pushed so hard over the last year, concluding with a unanimous vote to approve the franchise on 7/24 by the council. While a handful of people are able to get some new services from CenturyLink (yet another anti-net neutral company) CenturyLink confirmed that they will NOT be bringing new services into the county and that the new services they will bring into the city will only be done under very specific circumstances in areas with updated infrastructure. CenturyLink only offered the City Cable TV services under very specific infrastructure guidelines but NOT any gratuitous internet services to our schools, fire stations, police, other public services, or anything else. Meaning that this actually strengthens the argument for a better municipal fiber network since we have no other real solutions for our basic services and need to keep expanding our own publicly owned fiber capacity as well. Since, like Comcast, their internet services are carried over the same cabling as their TV services there was some hope that they would be smart enough to provide some of those services to some of our public buildings at very low cost or as part of the deal, but in the end they are not. This is one of the biggest arguments for publicly owned services. Publicly owned services can be used by any licensed ISP, including many local providers. Recall that Mount Vernon has 9 providers on its network. Local providers aren't just usually net-neutral, they also live in and actually care about our communities. CenturyLink has said they will probably pull out if they don't have a 20% share withing 5 years and that they won't even give us a real local office unless they have 30%. It doesn't matter how fast your connection is if, when it's broken, you can't get it repaired.