So, I wrote a short video game adventure outlining our struggle with the mayor, city council, and big telecoms for public fiber. I should note that since the point of the game is to get the public fiber message across, the information screens in the game are on long 20 second timers. You can skip these screen by pressing space, but I recommend that you read them at least once :).

In recent developments, after raising our property taxes, already having taxed us on Greenways and then diverted 50% of the funding to the Waterfront, and a myriad of other new taxes, the upper echelon has voted on a housing resolution that also will raise your taxes again under the guise of helping you with little definite benefits to the public and no mention of broadband.

Exactly how does this relate to broadband? While this bill  will double tax you for Greenways, for example (which there should be enough funding for already since you're already paying taxes for it), it includes no funding for public infrastructure for broadband in the form of a Dig Once Policy or opening up existing resources even though it greenlights lots of new developments that will require lots of excavation.

As an aside, it also includes no funding for public housing, or anything else that will actually control the cost of necessities for the bottom 90% of us. It, disturbingly, refers to housing for non-Bellinghammers that sounds a lot like company town housing in the coal mining era, referred to as "Workforce Housing."None of these new developments are going to be hooked up to good broadband for sure. There is simply no plan for it, even as millions are being spent on other things.

Remember, in South Korea FTTH (Fiber to the Home) connections of 1 gigabit are $24/month, real low-income connections are $10 a month in other parts of the country that have already done this and they are 50 times faster down and almost 100 times faster up than the garbage low-income connections that CenturyLink and Comcast say they provide here. A better term for these CenturyLink/Comcast low-income connections would be virtually worthless connections. Wireless options are not only unreliable, but are so expensive that they are making the digital divide worse. Yet, again, the landlord/developer cartel found a way to take money from us, without decreasing the cost of the necessity of broadband or challenging the big telecom virtual monopolies.

To add insult to injury, the resolution was voted on in a "pay to get in" voter suppression session last night during working hours for most of us that make less than 6 figures a year. Sure, the resolution sounds good, if you read it too fast, but if you read the fine print it only accomplishes giving your money to the private sector. The same people that caused our problems in the first place. It definitely benefits the landlords on your councils, who also go out of their way to protect the big telecoms.

I am contacting the mayoral candidates and will give you an update on their responses to public broadband. So far, it looks like you can't vote for any of the current members of either of the councils if you want progress on this, or for most people in Bellingham in most areas. Hopefully, that will change. Please remember that the Port and PUD are working on this too. Remember, we're after real change and real results.