About 7 years ago when I started this journey I presented the City Council, County Council, PUD and Port with a policy called a Dig Once Policy and met with just about every candidate about it. They all agreed that it made sense. In fact, few policies that make as much sense have been presented to our public institutions. 
A Dig Once policy simply states that we will do as much work as possible whenever excavation work is done. This will include the installation of telecommunications infrastructure including inexpensive 2" conduit to carry at least 144 strands of fiber. This policy saves 90% of the cost of installing infrastructure down the road and is good for the environment too since it makes sure that we perform as few excavations as possible. Every successful city, telecom wise, has a Dig Once Policy. For more information, please see the link provided with this update.
Right now this popular policy is getting a lot of attention. Even some public officials that sat on their hands and blocked it are starting to bring it up again. However, they are also pretending like they never heard about it before now and reinventing the wheel. What this means is that while they have many policies to work from, and are aware of them, they are still years away from developing a real policy. In politician speak this might actually mean decades away. After all, talking about something is very far away from making a real commitment to it. Remember how they said we need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050? Well at the rate we’re going they’ll be saying we need to reach it by 2080 by the time 2050 comes around. Pretending to care is how they keep us voting for them when no real progress is made and we really need them to make actual progress.
More than likely, now that the idea is popular again, they simply want to pretend like they came up with it and take all of the credit for it. I've never had a problem with that as I actually care about what the communities needs and don't need to be praised as long as we finally get the policies we need and our community gets the network it deserves and needs to move forward.
Still, politicians often lie and back down from even the most common-sense policies, so I want to tell you a bit about what has happened over the last 7 years since we still have no real commitments. Historically, here have been the reactions of the various organizations to this common-sense policy.
City: City Council has mostly stonewalled on the issue. When public pressure was put on them they had public works director Johnston and councilmember Lilliquist write a fake conduit ordinance to try and fool the public with as I wrote about here https://nwcitizen.com/entry/updated-conduit-policy-worthless
This was, of course, only after they pulled public broadband advocates in a closed door meeting and threatened them on behalf of big telecom. Big telecom providers AT&T and T-Mobile still have exclusive access to the existing public fiber-optic network we paid for. The same public network they refused to let the public use during the pandemic and continue to sit on. They refuse access to local net-neutral providers to use the network too even though Mount Vernon has been leasing out their public Open Access network for decades and making money off of it. The Mount Vernon network pays for its own expansion.  
County: Kaylee Galloway and Tyler Byrd continue to engage the community on broadband issues. The other council members don’t seem to care at all. Kaylee supports Dig Once but her fellow corporate Democrats, Donovan and Frazey, keep blocking progress along with the other council members. The County Executive, Satpal Sidhu, blocks progress on all broadband projects except those linked to his private big wireless donors. In short, we need to vote out unresponsive council members and politicians. We also need to support the ones fighting on our behalf.
PUD: Some PUD commissioners say they support Dig Once, however Commissioner Grant insisted on recently hiring a new General Manager who told me flat out that he doesn't support Dig Once. Sadly, the other commissioners let him get away with it. Why they hired a new GM that doesn't believe in Dig Once is baffling and probably has something to do with the fact that virtually all of our politicians have received contributions from local big telecom investors.  
When approached about the issue recently Grant let us know that she will pass any considerations about broadband documents through her anti Dig Once, anti PUD as ISP manager. So while they may say they support it in public, they seem to intend to tank it in private. Again, they just want to pretend to care while keeping their big telecom donors happy. After all, every year is an election year.
Port: Is hell-bent on going all aerial although there are many issues with that. For example, we live in a high-wind area with many trees and squirrels like to eat aerial cabling. So aerial cabling doesn't last very long here and outages are almost always caused by trees falling on aerial cabling.
It is pennywise and pound foolish to go aerial most of the time. Originally Port staff member Gina Stark recommended Dig Once, but now all we hear out of them is about half-assed projects and aerial only deployments since the project was passed off to an economist, Rob Fix, who has little experience in broadband instead of left in the capable hands of Stark who has researched the issue. Stark’s original plan, which was much better than what the Port is doing now, was presented before the pandemic. Had they gotten to work they would be at least one-third done by now.
So let’s be clear, no clear commitment has been made to a county-wide network. In fact, the new PUD GM also refuses to compete with big telecom and refuses to commit to any performance standard for the connections they are installing.
Specifically, they are installing some fixed wireless dishes that are being hooked up to fiber and running some of that to unserved areas. While this is better than nothing, it is a far cry from a commitment to a county-wide network.
I am sure they are saying different in public, sometimes, but that's what's actually going on in the background. So I need to ask you again to write to them and demand that they adopt a real Dig Once Policy.
Here is the contact info:
City: ccmail@cob.org
County: council@co.whatcom.wa.us
PUD: Christine Grant <christinegrant@pudwhatcom.org>,
Atul Deshmane <atuldeshmane@pudwhatcom.org>,
Mike Murphy <mikemurphy@pudwhatcom.org>,
Andrew Entrikin <andrewentrikin@pudwhatcom.org>,
Port: "Stark, Gina" <ginas@portofbellingham.com>,
"Bell, Ken" <kenb@portofbellingham.com>,
"Shepard, Michael" <michaels@portofbellingham.com>,
"Briscoe, Bobby" <bobbyb@portofbellingham.com>
Remember, our politicians are very good at pretending like they're going to do something and then doing nothing. We need real commitments and results. I am also always interested in their responses.