Ok, so let me start with the good news. I met with Pinky Vargas at a local high tech business known as Best Buds Gaming Lounge. I believe that meeting with her in a setting where she could really see the benefits of public fiber to a small business, that has no real good choices in broadband, helped. Small interenet based businesses are the largest growth sector in the economy right now and they all need inexpensive fiber connections. The less expensive the better. This is something we all know only public infrastructure can do for our city and county.  

Overall, she definitely backs a real Dig Once Policy. Not the one that the city kind-of-sort of produced that resulted in this article. https://salishseagazette.org/cob-produces-elementary-school-level-dig-once-draft , but one like the community supplied the COB with that is based on over 12 other policies, primarily the Mount Vernon Conduit Ordinance and the San Francisco Dig Once Policies. She thought it was odd that the current, poorly written, COB policy draft only includes private companies as potential lessors and no co-ops or non-profits. We both talked about the need for a real low-income provider and the need for the policy to allow non-profits and co-ops, if not the city itself, as providers to meet those needs. She also confirmed that TAG is largely supporting the big telecoms in the background. This is sad, because a properly purposed TAG could be of great benefit to the community. Anyway, I feel like Pinky now has the info she needs to ask the right questions of city staff and other experts. For example, after Michael Lilliquist back-pedaled on one of the most important social justice issues of our time as I wrote about recently (the Digital Divide), he mentioned he know the schools are well connected but then used no data to backup his claim. I work with students, and others, at those schools who confirm that this is NOT so. So Pinky and I talked about the importance of getting real numbers when talking about broadband. If a school has a 100 MBits connection but 150 students connect at the same time, then they they all have less than 1Mbit to use. So, no schools that has less than 1 Gigabit should be considered well connected. We should demand real numbers when our candidates talk about tech. In Chatanooga, TN students are connecting to remote 4K microscopes via public fiber. Our students, well need I say more. 

Onto the COB. They have confirmed that they have not bothered to work on their Dig Once Draft in almost 9 months and provided no reason for doing so and no reason why they are not accepting input from experts in the community. They say they will not even revisit it until after the inventory is complete. Pinky and I also talked about the need for a proper tech committee to be involved in tech decisions that effect the whole town and the problems just about everyone seems to have when dealing with with public works. I believe she is thinking about all of this. 

The COB did release partial data in the form of a spreadsheet for existing infrastructure. I may just post the sheet, but before I do I'd like to take a crack on putting the data on a map. They say all of the data will be available once the inventory is completed, they hope by March 29th. However, we have heard this before. I will keep my fingers crossed and hope for no more delays.