I come to you today with 90% good news. In the end, I will ask you to please contact the PUD and the Port in support of county-wide fiber.

We've made progress on several fronts. I want to express my sincere thanks to the Whatcom PUD for allowing me to speak yesterday at their special meeting. I think the Port, PUD and County are looking at a very productive fiber partnership and I will keep you posted. The devil will be in the details. The meeting was recorded. This is truly good news because between the two organizations they have jurisdiction over the entire county, including the COB. It may allow us to by-pass the anti-community leadership we've seen at the COB, especially out of COB Public Works and IT. 

The other good news is that your libraries are doing everything they can to help get people connected. I am very thankful to them for all they're doing and look forward to working with them in the future. They are looking into broadband lending solutions and other equipment lendings. They are beefing up their wi-fi at library locations and looking to get more involved and be a central part of the solution. I am happy to say that I retested the Central and Fairhaven branches and found the wi-fi to be much better than when I tested it a few weeks ago. They are largely doing this with support from the Friends of the Library, and potential state funding. Sadly, it seems like COB Public Works and COB IT don't want to get too involved with helping out the libraries beyond a few connections set up many years ago, but fortunately, the community, state, and the libraries are stepping up regardless. So, on the whole, this is also very good news.

Sadly the 10% of bad news I have is from the City, and as usual, was delivered by our pro-big telecom public works director. He said literally the same things again that he said over 4 years ago when we first started talking to the city about this. They have intentionally made virtually no progress in that time.  

Still, why can't we ever get a better response from the COB?! It's starting to look like their expertise is not in Public Works or IT, but in excuse peddling and, pardon my french, bullshit artistry. I remind everyone that the combined total of the salaries of Public Works and IT high-level workers is close to $1 million annually and they have millions in specialized equipment and staff that could be putting infrastructure in. For example, the COB is fortunate enough to have a dedicated fiber installer and wireless staff member on top of large IT and Public Works departments and an existing network that covers most of the city. They have more than enough staff to administer an OpenAccess network tomorrow if they wanted to and they can start with the existing network. All are well paid and have good benefits and what is the point of letting existing resources sit around underutilized and unused?    

While there were some hints that our efforts haven't gone unnoticed and that we may finally be looking at a Citizen Tech Advisory committee, near the end of the call Eric pretended again to only be hearing about this issue for the first time and alluded to providers that were "using the network without the COBs knowledge that needed to get off it." None of this is true of course, and the only reason the COB wasn't aware of what was going on on our network is because of the incompetence of our high-level staff who refused to monitor the network and keep adequate records. Just think about the security implications of that. The public network they're referring to is the network that serves our police stations, fire stations, schools and libraries. This means the COB intentionally didn't even try to figure out what was going on on their network until we started pushing for it over 4 years ago. So for at least 4 years, the data the police, EMTs, and fire stations had on people traveled on a largely unmonitored network, according to Eric's admission yesterday anyway. There are many simple solutions to correct for this error. Yet if you ask COB IT to help implement one they tell you, "don't ask us, the fiber network is Public Works' problem", if you as PW they tell you, "we're aren't even good at it, and don't really monitor it all of the time." Isn't that the kind of thing most of the rest of us in IT/tech would be fired for?

Their solution is to do even less for you, even during the pandemic and to give us a hard time when it comes to getting records as usual. Oh and to pretend that the big telecoms are meeting your needs, which we know they're not. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear.  

In the meantime, the COB recently put the paperwork together to allow big telecoms to lease our public infrastructure, as they do at the Sehome Hill tower, so Eric could have only have been referring to a local net-neutral provider that he personally seems to dislike and Eric is again abusing his position to edge out in favor of big telecom when we should be strengthening our relationships with them and other local, net-neutral providers for many reasons. Like how they're net-neutral, keep and create good jobs in our community, provide us with actual choice and more. But, Public Works has proven many times that they don't want actual choice and don't care about the needs of small businesses. They want to molly-coddle multi-billion dollar big telecoms and give them virtual monopolies and corporate welfare deals. Because, I guess according to the COB, a company that's worth about $205 Billion, like Comcast, just can't afford to do infrastructure upgrades on their own. They really are struggling and really do need to be allowed to virtually steal from us even though they provide inadequate services, at high prices, as the pandemic has proven. 

So while the rest of the county is moving ahead and trying to do the right thing, Public Works is still trying to make sure the COB doesn't participate in any meaningful way in addressing our broadband needs during the pandemic or making our community capable of competing in a modern economy. Eric referred to our existing network as, "geographically small" even though it covers most of the city. Really, he will say anything to protect big telecom. For example, he only showed 1 of 2 existing maps to the PUD yesterday and stacked the numbers as much as possible in favor of big telecom. Still, I think our officials are starting to figure it out, so I'm mostly optimistic. Most still can't understand why Mayor Fleetwood made Eric Public Works Director with his long history of anti-community behavior and more. Thank God for the PUD and the Port. Please contact them in support of County-Wide fiber.