 Welcome to the New America Foundation. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Sarah Morris, Senior Policy Council for the Open Technology Institute at New America. New America is a non-partisan think tank and civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity and purpose in the digital age. Our experts work on a wide range of issues from national security to work family balance and of course technology and telecom policy. At the Open Technology Institute, we bring together policy experts, technologists and practitioners to tackle challenges like promoting ubiquitous, safe and affordable access to communications technologies in communities in the United States and around the world. And today's topic is central to that mission of OTI. We're going to talk about broadband access and in particular the role that communities and localities can play in facilitating that access and this comes on the heels of an important paper that the Open Technology Institute released last week with CTC Technology and Energy. One of our panelists on the panel today helped with that report or co-authored the report. And we're going to discuss today the various approaches to local broadband options and we're going to rely on a diverse set of experts in public broadband networks and projects and including the manager of a municipal network in Wilson, North Carolina. So I will leave it to my panelists now. Joining us today we have Chris Mitchell, Director of Community Broadband Networks, Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Joanne Hovis is the President of CTC Technology and Energy. Will Acock is the General Manager of Greenlight in Wilson, North Carolina. And Catherine Rice is the President of Southeast Association of Telecommunications, Officers and Advisors, CTOA. And I will with that turn it over to our first presenter, Chris Mitchell. Hello everyone. I run muninetworks.org and I'm excited today because my mission I think is to really provide an overview of all the different things that have happened. You have to step back for a second and think that for years I was really focused on demonstrating that the communities that had made very significant high risk, high payoff investments in the fiber to the home networks, the ones where they bonded for tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to build, that these investments were working out quite well. And the more we looked into it, the more we found that that tended to be true. But over time we discovered that there's so many other interesting things happening that the whole fiber to the home from the start may not be the interesting thing moving forward, that the incremental approach, a lot of the other kinds of things that local governments can do would be more interesting. And so we're really gonna focus today I think on a range of options that local governments can take and not just focus on the big, high profile fiber to the home networks. Now I'm with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I like coming to DC. We were founded here May 1st, 40 years ago. So it's an exciting time. We still have an office up north of DuPont, work on a lot of issues in Maryland. Even though we were created in DC, we don't really work on federal issues that whole lot, a whole lot. So coming in from Minneapolis, it's always nice to get a sense of what's happening in the composting world in Maryland. It's what I do. So the muninetworks.org, we also just hit an interesting mile post, 100 podcasts yesterday, interviews almost entirely with local government officials that are doing something interesting. We published our 100th one yesterday. And we're tracking over 400 local governments that have made interesting investments with our map. So I just want to go over, for the rest of my presentation, just some of the different ways in which local governments have gotten involved. And I tried to break them down into interesting categories and many of these could actually be broken down into even more categories. But you can look at rural approaches broadly. And we've written about Chinook in Southeastern Kansas, Kutztown in Pennsylvania, one of the first fiber of the home networks in the country, about 4,000 people in the community, Pal, Wyoming. You can look at the more urban networks. We're going to be talking about Wilson today. There's obviously Chattanooga. We see the mayors of Baltimore, New York City and Seattle talking about making some investments in terms of using municipal fiber, municipal conduit to try and encourage better access. We see incremental approaches that don't involve any sort of electric utility from Santa Monica, which we just, our most recent case study is of them. And then a smaller community, Mount Vernon in Washington. Amon, Idaho, which is doing some really interesting things that were spurned off of their water utility initially. And Cortez, Colorado is another example of some of the many communities that don't have any sort of electric municipality, municipal electric that allowed them to make these investments. And that sort of presupposes something that is very stuck in my head, which is that most of the communities that have moved forward historically did have municipal electrics, much like Wilson. There's also been incremental approaches with an electric utility. Auburn, Indiana built a network incrementally without taking out much debt. We've seen a lot of dark fiber approaches from Palo Alto, Burbank. And a lot of the stimulus dollars are turning into interesting dark fiber projects because if you receive stimulus dollars for a project, you have to make the fiber available on reasonable terms. So there's a lot of more dark fiber that's available owned by local governments across the country as a result of those. We have fiber to the business where a community just focuses on really getting business access. So you have a business district and maybe you build a fiber ring out past them. Springfield, Missouri is one of the best examples of that. They've actually returned millions of dollars to the community and brought hundreds of jobs to the community with their approach. We of course have the fiber to the home all at once, which I've written about in Chattanooga, Lafayette and Bristol, Virginia. Congratulations to Lafayette, has just announced they're also gonna be providing a gigabit at $70 a month now moving forward. We see a utility fee approach emerging in Utah with the Utopia Network where everyone will be paying some amount in and everyone will have access to this open access fiber network. We see institutional networks where local governments connect themselves, sometimes moving on to connect others later. Just in this region, we see Washington DC doing that within the municipal government, see Montgomery County doing it and Arlington has done it and is also moving a little bit beyond that to do some dark fiber to businesses. We see communities that have built a network and then lease it out to other providers in the case of Princeton, Illinois and Indianola, Iowa, which is a suburb of Des Moines where in the case of Indianola, they have fiber to everyone and they have a local provider that offers the actual services that you can use over that fiber. In Princeton, it's really focused on the businesses. We have municipal fiber with a non-profit manager, often that was created with the city or by key anchor institutions. We see this in South Bend, in Indiana, most notably and then also in Aurora, Illinois, a rather large city in Illinois, the second largest city in Illinois. We saw some of the first city-wide gigabit offerings in places you may not have heard of even. Telehoma and Morriston, both in Tennessee, had fiber to the home available to everyone and they did gigabit on that before almost any other community had it. And then we have new explorations with the model of gigabit only, not doing television services and that sort of thing in Longmont and a lot of us are really watching to see if that's gonna be something that will pay back in a reasonable time. I think it will. We have open access approaches from UC to B which is the Urbana-Champaign network in Illinois. We've seen it from Shilan and Grant Public Utility Districts in Washington State, some of the first fiber to the home networks in the country again. And we've seen it in Danville and Palm Coast on an incremental basis without taking out any debt. That's where you have a municipality that owns the fiber but has multiple providers that are on it offering services and that sort of thing. And then the one I'm most excited about I'll finish with, which is a municipality that's basically creating a co-op. In Sibley County and Renville County just Southwest of the Metro in Minnesota, real farm territory. They're looking at fiber to the farm. They were gonna do it as a joint powers with all the local towns in the counties, but then they decided that they would do it as a co-op. And so they're creating a co-op with over half of the people that are there in those communities, about 8,000 households in total, about 4,000 are interested in joining right off the bat and they're gonna use an economic development loan from the local governments to harness that local ability to finance something with a co-op, which is something that rural America is very comfortable with. So those are just, it's a pretty good range but there's more approaches as well. You get a sense that there's this gigantic continuum of what local governments can do to try and improve internet access throughout the country. So who is next? Joanne, please come on up. Are we okay with the, I'm too short to stand behind those things. No, I, so can I do something? Okay, I'm not gonna sit, I'll stand, but I, working? Okay, all right, thanks. I'm five three and I've not yet met a podium that was even in heels, that was short enough for me. So thanks Chris and thank you Sarah and Patrick and everyone at New America for your hospitality and having us here today. I am going to I think follow up what Chris talked about by, he's given you a lot of examples of some really interesting projects and I wanna talk about kind of a broad framework about why public broadband, why local government broadband in particular and some of the framework, some of the different categories into which I think many of these projects are falling. Now let me start with the why on local broadband and the answer to that is that local governments around the country were thinking about how to expand broadband service to their anchor institutions, their businesses and their residents 15 years ago. More than that. This was a good decade before Washington discovered that we had a broadband problem in America and a long time before any of the state legislatures or state capitals did. Local governments closest to the people, closest to the day-to-day issues with elected officials and staff running into people in the grocery store every day saying, I have a problem, I can't get broadband to my business, I can't connect to the internet in the way I need to for my business. We're hearing this message and we're working in this area. Sometimes I think when I say this, people laugh at me but I say it really strongly. It is important to know that local governments were some of the original innovators in broadband. That local governments were the first to offer gigabit services for example between and among schools. The first to offer a hundred megabits and more of commodity internet bandwidth to school districts and to school buildings. Same for libraries, that local governments were the first entities to start building fiber optics using dig once policies that we talk about so much these days as a means of trying to get new infrastructure out there in cost effective ways that takes advantage of construction projects that are underway. And local governments were among the first to try to incent and catalyze private companies to build the kind of infrastructure that we need for the future. That's a really impressive and important track record and I think is important to understand that there are 15 years of projects both on the infrastructure and the adoption side to look back on as we look at public broadband options going forward. I tend to think about some of these public broadband options in two very broad categories. First one is publicly owned networks and that's of the sort that Will's going to talk about when he talks about the initiative in Wilson which is a really extraordinary one and I'm not gonna steal his thunder, I'll let him tell his own story but he is among, he's in very good company with a substantial number of American communities who have taken on considerable risk and considerable effort, an enormous challenge to make this appreciable difference in their communities in terms of the infrastructure that enables economic activity, enables democratic discourse and is essential to the future of these communities. Also in the public ownership, public broadband arena we have many hundreds of projects to go along with the 140 or so that are fiber to the home. We have many additional hundreds of projects also fiber based that have been primarily focused on meeting the needs of government institutions and community anchor institutions and Chris mentioned a number of those but let me give you an example. Mitzi Herrera from Montgomery County, Maryland is here. Montgomery County was one of the pioneers in this area. More than 15 years ago the county developed a long-term strategic plan to build fiber optics to every government facility that it could over time in the most cost effective way possible as part of its public works process and as part of other strategies and over those years the county has cost effectively and steadily built substantial amount of fiber that connects government buildings, connects schools, libraries, senior centers, traffic cameras, public safety facilities and all the key institutions in our communities and as a result the county is able to provide itself with communication services at a very small fraction of the per megabit cost that it would be paying if it were even able to buy the very high bandwidth services from the private sector that it now provides itself. Montgomery County is one of many hundreds of communities that have used that strategy to cost effectively, innovate internally, build infrastructure internally and then operate that infrastructure. A whole new generation of these kinds of projects are emerging now in Will's neighboring community of Holly Springs, North Carolina. The town has made the decision that it wants to own its own infrastructure and be able to manage its costs over time and hedge against uncontrollable increases and costs in the future. So it's building its own fiber infrastructure that will connect all the government facilities, it will provide its own internal communication services and its payback period is eight years. As of eight years from now it will be considerably better off financially than it would be otherwise and in the meantime that's assuming today's pricing by the way and today's needs. Eight years from now it's safe to assume that this town will need far, far greater communication services than now but it's hedging against a rise in prices that would go along with that increase in speeds. That is the framework for public, purely public projects. The second category, Patrick how am I doing for time? Two minutes, okay. Let me know if I'm going over. Let's call the second category a broad framework with regard to partnerships and here we are seeing the same kind of innovation and the same kind of creativity and experimentation which I think is exactly what we want to see. We need new models, we need experimentation and some of them successful, some of them not successful. That's kind of the nature of our system as we try new things and this is how we learn. In the partnership category, we're seeing a range of different kinds of partnerships. Let's call the first one, the first, the full range is very broad but the first part we could say is incremental where a community is able to use some of its capabilities and its assets to incrementally try to improve broadband over time. An example of this would be laying conduit whenever the opportunity presents itself in making that conduit available to the private sector. City of Mesa, Arizona started doing this in 2001, developed a plan to put in conduit wherever it could and lease that conduit to the private sector. Over time it reached a critical mass with conduit and there've been areas where it's had success and other areas where less so, but most recently Mesa credits the fact that it attracted a large Apple facility to the fact that it had conduit. Similarly, dark fiber, same sort of strategy is building dark fiber as a means of trying to enable new investment by private companies. In this case, that's the partnership part by the locality where the locality's contribution is some form of dark fiber. The city of Culver City, California is undertaking this kind of effort right now. It has renovated warehouse areas that are very attractive to high tech businesses but these businesses cannot get the services that they need in order to survive and most importantly to connect to Hollywood. It's IT related entertainment type companies, combination of the two. And so Culver City is putting in dark fiber facilities in order to target key economic development areas like those warehouse districts where there's so much interest by private companies who need very big bandwidth that simply has not emerged because the infrastructure's not there. It's an opportunity for private companies to come in and compete over that fiber to provide the best quality, best cost services to those companies which are to the benefit of everyone. Broadly speaking, Patrick's giving me the word. I'm done and I'm just getting to the really good part. There are a lot of different things in the partnership framework that communities can do and they range from extremely modest and low cost like sharing GIS data that does not have confidentiality elements or doesn't have public safety implications, sharing that with potential private providers so they don't have to reinvent the wheel on mapping and other kinds of data so that they have access to certain kinds of information. As simple as that, all the way over to really aggressively building fiber to try to reduce the total capital cost for a private entrant. All of these processes are extremely helpful. In aggregate, they can make a real difference in this kind of project. One of the reports that I think Patrick had available for all of you as you came in is the Gigabit Communities report that we wrote. And every situation is different, but we posit a hypothetical in the executive summary of that document in which we talk about what kind of a difference these kinds of strategies and assets can make for a private partner. And our conclusion is that in something of a best case scenario, it can bring down the cost of outside plant construction by around 8%. Maybe more depending on how much fiber you have available. And by the way, the availability of fiber and conduit is the most powerful piece of that. Availability of information, permitting, facilitation and so on, also very helpful, but a small part of that 8%. But 8% is pretty substantial and could make the difference between a business case for a private investor and not. But the key thing to think about, and I promise you Patrick, that was my final point, as communities think about these strategies and as they think about their assets and how they can make them available, if what they're seeking as a partner, will say that the most important ingredient in that partnership is a real partner on the other side. And that no matter what you do, no matter how many processes you change and how many assets you put on the table and frankly how much you subsidize, if there's not a partner on the other side who is really interested in investing in your community and making a substantial investment themselves, a lot of this is whistling in the wind. It's great to do, but not necessarily going to make a massive difference. But a real partner on the other side, one that's interested in investing rather than just reducing their cost of doing business, as some incumbents who are already in the community may want to, but don't have any intention of upgrading their networks. When you have a partner who really wants to upgrade or build something substantial that's new, these tools are incredibly helpful in making this an interesting business proposition for them. I'll stop there. Good morning. My name is Will Acock and I'm here representing the city of Wilson, North Carolina and Greenlight Community Broadband. And obviously we're here to talk about our five or two-the-home network that's owned and operated by the city of Wilson. But I thought I'd start by telling you a little bit about the community itself. We are a town of about 50,000 folks located in eastern North Carolina right along the I-95 corridor. Traditionally, we've been known as the world's greatest tobacco market and specifically what that means is is that at one time there were more pounds of bright-leaf tobacco vault and sold in Wilson County than anywhere else in the world. So we have a very long and proud agricultural heritage and a lot of that based around tobacco and tobacco industry. Agriculture is still hugely important in our community. My family is still engaged in production agriculture. We're still tobacco farmers and my family. But clearly the economy has evolved. That industry has evolved and our community has evolved. We now have more than 20 industries employing over 100 people in the community. That includes pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, banking, many other types of industries. So we've evolved over time. But one thing that's been really consistent through that evolution is our elected leaders. And they understand and believe and are committed to the fact that infrastructure, locally-owned infrastructure is essential to evolving healthy local economies. They know that as a community, we have to invest in the infrastructure we need. And I think there's a recent example that highlights this ethic. It was Buckhorn Reservoir, which was built back in the early 90s. It was a water reservoir. Over the past decade or so, there have been many instances of extended drought conditions in North Carolina. Because our elected leaders had the foresight, the vision to construct this reservoir, I think the lowest we ever got down to was about one year's worth of water supply when the communities around us were down to weeks, if not days, of available water supply. So obviously, that has put our community in an enviable position. So much so that we actually have been able to interconnect to other surrounding communities and have the possibility of providing them water now should they get back into situations where they have a reduced water supply. And that ethic, I think applies very much to our fiber network. Now, our leaders understood and continue to know that broadband, next generation broadband access is an essential infrastructure. It's required for us to be healthy as a community. Now, when we first started talking about this, and I think the conversation did start as far back as the late 90s, the desire was not to get directly into operating this network ourselves. That was not what the community set out to do. The initial goal was to find a private partner to come in and invest with us to bring this infrastructure to our citizens. Unfortunately, we were unable to find anyone at that time who was interested in that partnership. So back in 2007, our council voted to construct the network. We built about 350 miles of fiber plant in about 18 months. We've been operating since 2008. So we're basically six years old now. We have about 7,000, what I call external customers connected to the network. And that's residential, small office, major employers, all the community anchor institutions. We have a gig-back bonering built for the school system, supporting the hospital, supporting libraries. So pretty much across the gamut of our community, we're providing services. We also have about 5,000 facilities and devices that are city-owned connected to the network. People talk about the internet of things and we've sort of been keeping pace with that, connecting utility infrastructure, surveillance cameras, mobile emergency command centers for public safety folks. So just this wide array of devices and facilities across the community that are being connected into the network. The purpose for which our network was built a really three-fold, the sort of mandate we were given by our elected officials is to support the economic health of our community, help enhance the quality of life for our citizens and improve the delivery of city services. And I think we are achieving those goals in many ways. But I would say that there's sort of an over-arching benefit to the community that most other benefits fall under and that is local control of the infrastructure. We live in the community. We go to church with these people. We go stand on the soccer field when our kids are playing beside one another. We know what's going on in the community. We know what the needs are. We're easily accessible to the citizens and for that reason, we can be very responsive. We can leverage these assets that the community owns to best meet the needs of our community. And with that, I'm not sure how I'm doing on time, but hopefully we'll have some time to get in and talk about that in a bit more detail, but I think Catherine Rice is up next. Well, I've decided to use PowerPoint. Much more interesting to look at than me. Hi, I'm Catherine Rice and I'm the president of Sotoa, the Southeast Association of Telecommunication Officers and Advisors, which is the southeastern chapter of Natoa, the National Association of Telecommunication Officers and Advisors. We cover North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee and our membership consists of local government employees who are into broadband planning and actually the folks in your local communities that program cable channels with public educational and government programming. And I am here today to first qualify my presence. I am not a national expert on state legislation across the country. My experience is devoted just to South, the southeastern region of the country, which I can talk to, but Chris and also Jim Baller, who's not here today, can probably answer questions about really what's going on with state legislation across the country. But my point of reference is the Southeast and I was asked to come here today if I can make this work, to talk about the challenges local networks have faced. What are the obstacles to local choice? How can Catherine be a buzzkill? And I thought about this for probably a long two seconds to figure out the answer. And the answer that came to mind right away was of course it's the incumbents. What we've seen when we did our research for Wilson before they got started and also in some communities in Florida to get a sense of what the community might experience if they decided to exercise their local choice and build their own broadband networks were six tactics that patterns that we'd actually seen occur across the country by the incumbents. And I'll just refer to these quickly. The tactics that are used are typically based on how much of a threat they really think you are. The first thing we saw is that they go and they talk to your local officials can be with former local officials or some of the current local officials to try to convince your electeds that this is way too complex for communities who often provide water. But this is way too complex for them and they should just forget about it. If that doesn't work, then we see the disinformation campaigns begin which are pretty extraordinary. Op ads done by professors of economics explaining why this is just a high risk thing that shouldn't be done. Full page ads I think in the Tri-Cities in Illinois there were 26 full page ads taken out by the incumbents in the first week. They do push surveys which I'm sure you all know about but these are survey calls that are made to your residents where they ask questions like do you support your community investing in community broadband when it means that the schools are going to be defunded? Not true of course but they're saying it. We see flyers, we've seen door to door visits, we've seen fake consumer groups called AstroTurf groups that pretend like groups like citizens for real choice that are out there saying that this is a misuse of taxpayer money and shouldn't be done and we've seen whisper campaigns. So I had mentioned the flyers and for you all this just looks like bullet points on a page but this stuff is very much real and pretty extraordinary and when I was going through my files I found this flyer which I don't know if you can see this but in the corner here this was sent by Comcast the return address is by Comcast and this was one of many flyers that were sent out in the Tri-City area. They were trying to go through their second referendum to get authority to build out a broadband system. The referendum was going to take place two days after Halloween and so all of a sudden all the subscribers started getting these extraordinary flyers, ghost, goblins, witches, a municipal broadband utility, very scary stuff. Sometimes the facts are scary. This is real, I mean this is comical but this is very real and it may make you laugh but notice here the stories, excuse me, the stories went too far on Lebanon. They're piling in facts here that aren't true so they get people's attention with this amazing picture and then they lie about Lebanon. Lebanon is not a failure. Lebanon actually did extremely well. Time order went to the state legislature and got a law that prohibited them from building beyond their county and because they couldn't expand the way they really need to after about I think 12 years they sold to Cincinnati Bell. So it was not a failure by any means at all. If the disinformation campaigns don't work the next thing you can maybe anticipate is that they're gonna try to intervene in your local elections and we saw this happen in Lebanon, Ohio where there was not only an election which changed out a couple of the elected officials who were gonna vote for the system but then the first ever recall on an election the final vote was in favor of going forward with the community broadband system. If that doesn't work something we all know go to the state legislature. We have 19 states now that have some form of a barrier to community broadband. If that doesn't work the bill is not the one they want. They go to the courts like in Lafayette delayed the project three years Jim knows all about that until they were able to win. And if the court situation doesn't go their way then they actually try to compete and that gets to be quite interesting. You see things like predatory pricing which we saw in Wilson where they'll drop their rates below cost to try to drive the city out of business and we've actually heard about them threatening the suppliers and the contractors that the cities are using. You do business with them, you don't do it with us. I've been asked to address specifically some of the issues regarding state legislation and I'll mention it quickly because I think we wanna get into more detail in the question and answer on this please do not underestimate the importance of your state legislatures. The equation for the incumbents is very simple. Are they going to spend the money to upgrade their infrastructure or are they gonna hire lobbyists? And the cost of one lobbyist, the copy, the cost of five lobbyists, the cost of 10 lobbyists is much less than upgrading their infrastructure so they will hire the lobbyists. The advice I give to you is no two states are alike North Carolina and Georgia, both majority controlled by the Republicans. North Carolina, the bill ripped through after a four year battle. Georgia in the last two years, they've beat the Ann Amuni Broadband Bill twice. The most recent bill was a bipartisan majority against the bill. So know your legislature, educate early. Don't wait until the last minute. Go find a champion in the legislature, find someone who understands the value of economic development in your local communities. Someone who understands the value of these gigabit networks to your kids. Work with them, they'll tell you how to get a bill through or how to stop a bill. Go to the leadership in the legislature if you can quickly and explain to them the economic development value and the value of these networks to the private sector because these guys are the ones who decide whether or not which committee it's gonna go to and whether or not it's even gonna get voted on. Keep your message simple. The way that Georgia was able to garner a bipartisan majority against an Ann Amuni bill was two themes, local control. We should have local control over the decisions which determine our economic future along with rural economic development. They pulled the Tea Party together with the urban Democrats. Give the bill sponsors credit for what they've introduced, whether it's good or bad. Legislators don't like having their names on bills if they're bad bills. Don't count on press coverage, okay? In North Carolina, the Raleigh News and Observer, we couldn't get one article. Time Warner had taken out tons of advertising. They wouldn't touch the issue. We use Twitter, we use emails, and we brought cameras into the committee rooms every time even if there wasn't any film in them. That makes the legislators a tad more accountable. And also remember, all politics is local. Get your local businesses to call their legislators. It makes a difference. Get your educators to call their legislators. Get your universities to call the businesses they work with to call the legislators. And I think that's it, and I hope we get questions. Thank you, Will, Joanne, Chris, and Catherine. Those are tremendously interesting presentations, and I'm excited to dig into these issues in a bit more depth now. And of course, we'll leave time for audience questions, ample audience questions at the end, so save those questions. Also, something I forgot to mention at the start, which is if you're watching us online or even if you're in the room with your laptop or smartphone connected to Twitter, you can join the conversation online using the hashtag broadband options. So feel free to join in the conversation there as well. So I wanna just dig in a little bit, Catherine, since you just finished your presentation on the challenges that communities face in terms of municipal network bans and some of the arguments that we tend to, the critics of public broadband networks tend to make that states or municipalities shouldn't be subsidizing networks that are already being built by private investment that there is a risk of overbuilding in communities, that there were duplicating infrastructure and really we should let the people who have spent time doing this, the companies that have traditionally been network managers and operators that we should let them continue investing. So just given those are some of the things that we hear a lot when this issue comes up, I'd like to give the panelists an opportunity to sort of respond or unpack those issues a bit. Well, I think my first response would be that the incumbents are not building and that's what we're hearing from our local communities is that these networks are no longer modern. If they were providing the kind of capacity that our school kids needed to go home and do their homework, it wouldn't be an issue. But this is a market that has failed and it has failed because there are not competitive choices and that's why communities have stepped in, not because they wanna compete with the time-warners of the world or the Comcasts of the world. It's because it's an infrastructure that they know they need for their community to be competitive in what is now a world market. Yeah, I think one of the... You have to sort of separate out different areas and so when you look at the very rural areas, I was just recently speaking with people from Southwestern Minnesota and I found out that they had built a wireless system 10 years ago to connect a lot of their communities in this area around Lake. I mean, we're talking less than 1,000 people in any one of these three towns in this area and I was trying to get a sense of what had happened because there's no documentation that this had even happened and it turns out that they had gone to Century Tell and said, hey, we saw that you're bringing DSL to some of the bigger towns, when can we get it? And they were honest to this town and they said, never. Don't hold your breath, we're not gonna invest in you, you're too small. Now that's a town of less than 1,000 people so they had nothing. They built their own wireless system now. Some people would counsel them to wait, eventually the market will come around in 10 or 15 years after nobody lives there, presumably there will be great access. So there's a major problem there. If you go into the larger towns that got DSL then, the best they can do now is seven megabits per second or 12, depending on the town, if you live on top of the central office, you can get seven or 10 down, seven to 12 down and almost one up. Now this is more than 10 years after, these areas we're told don't do anything yourself because we're gonna come invest in you. And so when you get out of the metro areas, it's very clear there's gonna be no investment. In the metro areas, you're looking at a cable system indefinitely, unless you win the Google lottery or there's some really interesting local provider which doesn't include most of us, you're not gonna have anyone that's gonna challenge the big dominant cable company and that's gonna be more true as they get bigger and bigger, which just very quickly I wanna say that I'm very excited to be here at the New America Foundation which does great work with OTI and Barry Lynn, the anti-monopoly expert, is tremendous here and I think his work is gonna be so important for us moving forward. The story Chris tells about these communities in Minnesota is I think a very common one. I have never been involved in a project in 15 years where the community did not first reach out to its incumbent providers, any potential select in the community and anyone else that could possibly think of including companies who were not located there asking them to please come and invest and asking what can we do to help? How can we make this easier and facilitate? How can we encourage you, make the investment more interesting for you? And the answer is generally either complete silence or a reasonably polite no. It's just that is where our companies are. That's not a slam against them. I understand what the investment incentives are and it's a pretty tough thing to make a lot of money in and the money's going to go where, what the investment money's gonna go where the return is going to be greatest. But at the end of the day, assuming that somehow there is an inevitable private sector solution here and that therefore localities should stop or be precluded or doing something that is somehow unjust or unfair is really problematic. Who's going to decide the economic destiny of our communities, the elected leadership and the people who live in the communities or a company that's located nine states away? I can say I think there's a few fundamental questions. One is broadband access, a critical infrastructure. Another question is shouldn't local communities be able to define what critical infrastructure means within their community? And then lastly, if a community defines it as critical infrastructure, should they not have a say in what level of that infrastructure is appropriate for their community? And if you answer those questions, then I think it leads to the point that critical infrastructure at a certain level is required in the community. If the local governments have a role, there are many models, but local governments have a definite role and stake in those decisions. Thank you. And Joanne, you bring up an interesting point that there is an investment challenge here, right? Convincing a private entity to invest in many of these communities. Given that investment challenge, if I'm a local leader and I'm looking to say build fiber to every home in my relatively small community, but perhaps geographically large and not densely populated community and building that fiber to the home starts to look insurmountable or too challenging. Is that the starting point? Do I need to suddenly, as a local leader, be looking at this as literal door-to-door connections or are there interim steps, ways in which you can start to build and invest in infrastructure in a more modest way to get to that end down the road? That's a great question. And by the way, I think this is the great opportunity and the new frontier in community-driven broadband is these incremental steps. And I referred to them a little bit in my initial presentation, but there are so many things that communities can do to just put more branches on their future decision tree. They have all kinds of controls now that don't necessarily make a transformative difference tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but that give them more options down the road. And that can be as simple as robust dig once policies where the elected leadership tells all the agencies to work together to make sure that anytime a road or a sidewalk is open, they're putting in conduit. Whether the construction is taking place as a public matter or through a private company, that is an opportunity to put in conduit at a cost that really does not even register relative to the larger cost of the construction. And that infrastructure will grow over time and will reach critical mass, as in my example of Mesa, Arizona. That's an incredibly powerful tool. Building fiber wherever possible, same thing. Leveraging existing fiber and making sure that it is built in the best possible way. So many communities, for example, build fiber optics for traffic management purposes. It's public safety matter. It's a standard process in so many American communities. That infrastructure can at the same time be used and extra capacity put in for long-term economic development opportunities. It's just different strategies for opening up options. You may not use it anytime soon, but someday you will. Sarah, if I can just, I think to some extent it's a really hard question to answer in the abstract because every community is so different. And fundamentally, that's why laws that create a one-size-fits-all kind of regulation or barrier or prohibition, whatever it is, are so troubling because what's true for Moultrie, Georgia, is not true for Atlanta, Georgia, is not true for the suburbs of Atlanta region. And so it's really important that we look at these. And if you try to answer what you can do in the abstract, I don't think we have a good general answer except for to go out and look at a number of different things because each community has different assets. They have different challenges. They have a different mix of providers. They have a different mix of local entrepreneurs who might do different things. And so I think it's really important to just recognize that when it comes down to something that's very so much from community to community, the decisions should be made by that community as to what's best for them. And if for no other reason than the fact that they have to live with the consequences both of either action or inaction. It's not for us really to say that other community over there, they should not be doing that. It's for them to decide because fundamentally, if they do something stupid, they're the ones that are gonna have to deal with it. It's only the most far-reaching horrible thing that could go wrong that we have not seen yet that would actually impact other people in surrounding communities in a negative way. But on the positive side, I think Will, you started to touch on this in your presentation, what we call benefits beyond the balance sheet I think in our paper and this idea that not only do the one size fits all bands sort of create negative externalities for communities, but there's positive externalities that can result from community controlled infrastructure. And so I wanted to see if you could tease that out a little bit and articulate what those externalities look like. Sure. So one of the things that leaves to mind is that we're seeing in migration of folks into the community. We in particular, brawl band is an essential infrastructure but upload is really important for creative class folks. People that are creating and authoring content wanna be able to share it quickly and efficiently. And so what we've seen is people moving to Wilson because of the network. And that's sort of an off balance sheet if you will, multiplier inside of the community. In addition to that, when you talk about the, say 5,000 devices that we've got connected to our fiber network supporting city operations, those connections would simply not be there if we did not own the network. By having local control, by having the crews, the splicers, the network engineers, when departments have needs, we're able to respond quickly and go out and meet those needs. And that helps with public safety. It helps with smart grid. It helps with every area of our operation. And so again, sort of off balance sheet, this flexibility you get as a local community. And another aspect that we'll touch on very quickly is also just the simple connectivity that we have to the community. There is a lot to having a service provider that is truly there in the community, available 24-7, dedicated to trying to serve the citizens. And so all those things I think add up. Thank you. Anyone else? Anything to add? Katherine, you were kind of weaning in. I didn't know if you were. Well, no, it just keeps going and going. Every time I visit Wilson, it just strikes me how extraordinary it is what it means to really have a locally owned system when you, I mean, Will says it in passing, but when you have people that you live with in your community running what is essential infrastructure, where you can run into them in the grocery store and say thanks, or hey, my internet was down for just a little bit, that's immediate responsiveness versus making a phone call, sitting for a half hour getting nobody at the other end of the line who can really speak English and then getting your call hung up on, so. Off balance sheet benefits. Sarah, if I can also on the topic of benefits beyond the balance sheet or beyond the financial statements, the things that are not an inducement to a private provider to invest because they will never show up on their financial statements, but that are so intrinsic to government. Broadband is all about education and it's all about healthcare and it's all about the democratic discourse and civic engagement in the community and this is the lifeblood of communities and this is the business of local government and I think that really relates to this question of is it unfair competition or should local government stay out of it? How can local government stay out of the infrastructure that is the foundation of our economy and our democracy and our education system increasingly in our healthcare system and so on? It is the province of local government, if it so chooses. And I should give a few examples of being responsive as a local provider. For one thing, we have upgraded our tiers of service several times over the last six years that we've been doing business. The costs of bandwidth decrease over time as you buy more, as you use more capacity, your costs of goods sold go down. And so, in essence, there's little additional cost and we're able to hear our customers saying they want more bandwidth and make upgrades over time to provide more bandwidth into the community. We've also opened up our own network bandwidth so any two locations that are connected to the fiber network are not getting the speed that they pay for out to the internet, they're actually getting the full capacity available on the internet, on the network at that point in time. So for instance, if you are a doctor working from home transferring files back to your medical office, you may pay for a 20 by 20 internet connection, but you could get depending on the equipment, you know, up to 100 meg or up to a gig of transmission there on the network. Well, and that's, I know I'm supposed to be moderating and not in interjecting, but that certainly has played out in the research that the Open Technology Institute's policy team has done on the costs and relative service value that we see in cities in the United States compared to cities and countries around the world. And that is traditionally, generally speaking, we tend to pay more for lower quality service, but that the reports have demonstrated that there are notable exceptions to that trend and the notable exceptions tend to be municipal networks. So, Will has another example. I think a lot of our North Carolina communities starting in 2008 were losing all the young people. They'd graduate and go off to college and never come home. And I think what you're seeing in Wilson is you're actually attracting young people back. Absolutely, back in the young people into the community. One of the folks that talked about who moved to Wilson because the BAM was called us one day for technical support and it just so happened that he was a web developer and he kind of jokingly, he was working freelance from home, said, hey, you guys aren't hiring, are you? And so it turns out that the network recruited one of our future employees into the community just to move there because of the BAM was available. That's fantastic. I wanna talk a little bit about another aspect of the paper that OTI and CTC worked on and that's sort of the mechanics of how this all plays out. If you're a community that wants to start considering investing in infrastructure and building a network, the types of things that you'd wanna think about and the approach outlined in the paper was one that sort of balanced or considered control, risk, and reward over the course of a network project. And Joanne, I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit and the different dynamics that would impact sort of those different levers. Of course, thanks Sarah. These I think for most communities that start thinking about how they should approach broadband issues, these are three of the key, the different pieces that they have to fit together and they involve trade-offs. The variables will interplay differently depending on how you approach it. And this is very much a local decision having to do with local feeling toward these three things, control, risk, and reward. Control is what they have accomplished in Wilson. They have enormous control over their economic future, they have control over the network, the kinds of services they offer, the way in which they think about the pricing on the network, all of those elements, they are undertaking considerable risk because of that, but they're also seeing extraordinary reward as the stories we just heard document. There are many communities who have chosen to undertake somewhat less risk, considerably less risk in many cases, but are commensurate with that, less control and less reward. So I have worked on a project recently and it's not public yet, but will be shortly of a partnership in which the community has invested significantly less on a proportional basis than Wilson and its counterparts have and has attracted a private provider and the private provider is going to build the infrastructure and that community will be well served by the infrastructure, but will not control the infrastructure, will not own it, will not determine what the services are, will not determine what the pricing is, but there's considerable reward to having that infrastructure there. They just had to pick between these things. It's very hard to imagine having all three of them and the local process of determining what the need for control is versus the tolerance for risk and how much reward is likely to flow from it is the sort of essential first step for the community to undertake as it thinks about what its future is. And I wanna sort of expand the, to take us up to the higher space overlooking this from a policy perspective more generally. So there's a lot happening in the telecom policy space these days. We've got mergers and we've got this thing called net neutrality and from your presentations, I gather that a lot of the challenges and the sort of political fights that are happening are happening at the local level, but I wanted to pose the question to the panel as to what do you see, not even just the fights, but the policy discussions that are happening at the federal level and how those might impact the viability of municipal networks and also just the future and value of these networks going forward. So are there policy debates on the horizon or happening now that you see as particularly relevant? Yeah, I think the issue with, I'm so passionate about this. I mean, everyone plays called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and we care a lot about community networks, but really what we care about is scale because when you're Comcast, you fundamentally cannot do a good job. I think the evidence suggests that Brian Roberts is an exceptionally capable CEO who makes very smart decisions in terms of guiding that company. That company, when you break into it and you look at how their systems work, they're an amalgamation of, I'm gonna guess, many tens, probably hundreds of cable companies on diverse systems that don't talk well to each other. The reason you get bad customer service from Comcast is not because they don't care about customer service, but because when you're serving over 20 million subscribers, you cannot do a good job, I would argue. It's just not going to happen. And so when we look at these sort of this consolidation and all this coming together, this is what's driving everything. It's driving network neutrality. It's driving the discussion of the Netflix Level 3 Comcast peering discussions. Everything is coming out of scale because if I'm an ISP serving 10,000 subscribers and I go to Netflix and I'm like, ha, ha, ha, you can only get to my subscribers if you pay me extra, Netflix is gonna say, see you later or they're not gonna return my phone call. It's just not gonna be a discussion. If you're Comcast with 20 million subscribers, they have to play ball, that's what we're seeing. And so on all of these issues, I think the big issue is consolidation and the massive power that Comcast has. Comcast is coming into DC right now and hiring every last major lobbying firm and law firm and everything else to work on their side to make sure that nobody can be hired to even work against it. This is a threat to our democracy. And so our solution for this, one of the things is local governments because local governments have, in most cases, authority, they have access to capital. They can build networks that will chip away at the monopoly power that Comcast has. Not just over the short term by building a quick network but over by five, 10 years by making sure there's no fiber scarcity, right? And these are the sorts of things that we really get into with the great work that Joanne and CTC, Joanne with CTC and OTI have done with this paper, which is strategies so that in 10 years there's no excuse if you have fiber scarcity in your community. It should not be an issue. We should be making investments now to make sure we don't have monopolies in the future. So I hope that's not too rambling. In my mind, it all fits together but I spent years trying to piece it all together. Yeah, I think if it is a problem if the critical infrastructure of the century for the economy, our economy and our democracy is controlled by a small handful of parties, this incomplete agreement about that. This is critical infrastructure. This is the national interest and to let three companies determine what that future is is very troubling. And a small part of the solution could be local initiatives and local public-private partnerships. I'm not sure that it's the entire solution by any means. I think there are a lot of other things that are necessary for us to have the kind of robust competitive environment that we need and there are a number of discussions and debates underway here in Washington that relate to it. I think most immediately important for purposes of what we're talking about today is that Chairman Wheeler to his credit has on multiple occasions now said that he, I'm paraphrasing, I hope I'm getting this right, that it is not good for competition to prohibit localities from building networks or from working with private partners to incent private investment in networks and that he intends to act to make sure that anti-competition legislation that is counter to the intent of the Communications Act is preempted. I applaud him for that and I certainly hope that he and his colleagues will act along those lines. It's important to know that these so-called anti-immunity bills, and they are anti-immunity, that Catherine talked about, are not just about public infrastructure, they're about all kinds of competition. They are about stopping competition in our local communities. Many of them are quite simply targeted at private sector competition. So as an example, there was a bill that hopefully did not make it through the Indiana legislature this past session that would have stopped local governments from using a particular tax mechanism that is traditionally used in economic development contexts. It would have stopped them from using it to attract fiber to the home providers. They could still use it to attract Walmart and Target and to attract other kinds of businesses, but they couldn't use it in communications. That's private investment with local facilitation through traditional economic mechanisms that would have been precluded by state legislation that was pushed by one particular company, the bill written by that company. That's about competition. That's not about public competition. That's just about stopping competition, period. And so that discussion happening to some degree in the state legislatures and happening here in Washington, thanks to Chairman Wheeler, I think has enormous potential consequences above and beyond the communities who will build their own networks, but very importantly for the ones who are seeking private partners. Just to put a little bit more meat on that bone. In North Carolina, there's a bill that passed, became law called H44, where the legislature has announced its intent to stop printing, to stop funding printed school books after 2016. So if you don't have internet at home and you do have a kid at home, you are sat out of luck. In that context, we have areas like Wilson that serve five counties with their electric service area, but because of our H129, can only service one of those counties. Surrounding Wilson in those other four counties are a lot of rural school children who right now have underperforming if any internet service. Wilson cannot reach out and serve them right now. That's just wrong. And in this light, I really have to congratulate Chairman Wheeler because it's just not right that a state law written by a multi-billion dollar corporation will stop the school children in our rural areas from getting internet. So these are the kind of policy issues that are really important right now. I think an important flip side of that too is ensuring that other federal programs like the E-Rate program, both accommodate municipal network and local networks and also sort of leverage the benefits that we've all discussed today and ensuring that those benefits translate into a more effective program overall. And so I think that there's both ways to encourage school connectivity through proactive programs, but also ensuring that the political state of play doesn't preclude that build out from happening as well. And with that, I'd like to open it up to audience questions if anyone has any. Don't be shy. Hi, I'm Jeff Marks from Alcatel Lucent and we're a company that has built a number of networks that have been successful in the municipal broadband and state broadband place. What I wanted to know is to what extent you just raised this issue, do federal programs add incentive or make business cases for, you know, tip the balance of scales, I guess, and in particular, is there excitement about the broadband experiments program where you had quite a bit of initial interest and I wanna know if you see fruit coming from that. Well, I should say thank you to Alcatel Lucent for being a great supporter of community broadband for many years. Company has been great. The answer is yes, absolutely. The rural broadband trial proposition, which is something that's before, that the FCC is considering right now, is getting enormous amounts of attention at the local level and is inspiring all kinds of new creativity, I think. And what that is is that the commission is considering taking some of the funds in the Connect America Fund that were allocated for construction of broadband in areas that are almost entirely unserved. They were allocated for phone companies, they were declined by the phone companies because it just wasn't interesting from an investment standpoint. The commission is considering opening that funding up on presumably some kind of competitive basis, we don't know what the rules are yet, to a wide range of alternative providers including CLEX, local governments, municipal electrics, co-ops, all kinds of different entities who have a significant interest locally. And I think even the prospect of that has set off an extraordinary level of interest. The commission got a thousand expressions of interest from a wide range of different kinds of entities ranging from state governments all the way to local nonprofits. And the key insight here is just the idea that the money is not exclusively available to one entity who doesn't have to compete on any basis whether for service or for the money. The idea is that when there's competition in that program we hopefully get more efficiency, better services, better options, all the things that come from competition. And I think the point about competition in federal funding programs was really beautifully proven out through the Recovery Act programs BTOP and BIP which were administered by the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture respectively in that these were open competitive processes and the list of eligible entities was very broad. It was not just regulated phone or cable companies and that made all the difference because there was an enormous amount of creativity, idea generation, new partnering and what I would consider to be extremely successful programs in terms of getting new infrastructure out into our communities. When it's been about a month or two since Education Superhighway released a really significant analysis of the E-Ray program, found that overwhelmingly self provisioning was the best way to cost affordably get high capacity connections to schools and libraries. I don't think Will will be at all surprised at that. I think if you spend these federal dollars on projects that are owned with nonprofit business models owned locally within the community those dollars are gonna go far further and it's gonna take some stress off of the long-term costs because you're gonna have to spend less to get better connections in the future. Yeah, I mean as someone who has worked on these issues in the Universal Service Fund context I think that it's important and this is, I hope echoing what Joanne and Chris just said it's important that the programs provide flexibility for communities and for the options. In the same way that municipal network bands sort of put in place a blanket one size fits all prohibition it's important that federal policies don't sort of prohibit participation by community networks and they afford communities the flexibility to utilize the support from those programs in different ways. More questions? I saw other hands. Hi, I'm Alyssa Clemson with Utilities Telecom Council. I just kind of want to weigh in on the expressions of interest and kind of the discussion that you're having. It's a discussion that we're continuing to have with our electric utility members. We have investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives that are part of our coalition and what I'm hearing from you all is you're saying the same thing that I'm saying to my members and we're continuing to have these discussions. You know that the boogeyman is out the bigs have taken notice there were a thousand expressions of interest about 200 of which were our members and one of the things that we're also doing is kind of changing the ground game. We can't compete monetarily. We can't compete on the hill with lobbyists. We really have no desire to fight a battle. We can't win. So we've taken it local call to action, getting community leaders to stand up and organize. I guess what I would say is, do you think there is a way, there are so many small groups like you, like me, like Shelby, that are out there talking about these issues. Is there a way that we can find our commonalities, join hands and say we're here and together we have more power because I think that really is how we win this battle is changing the ground game, finding commonalities and uniting together. Yes. I mean, it's not really a question. It's how do we get to that point where we're more effective in that way? And I think we're in that point of building the ground game still. We're getting these local solutions. Four years ago, trying to get Will on a call or to do something was impossible because he was building a utility that's incredibly difficult. Now he has all this free time on his hands. But actually, I would be curious. I mean, there's what about four years sort of where you just can't do anything. And then after that, I think you have more standing with which to stand up and say, listen to me, I know what I'm talking about. Well, to kind of take that comment in a little bit different direction, I guess. I think that the collaboration and the banding together comes naturally to municipalities and I have a thought it also comes somewhat naturally to co-ops. So I think when you look at your constituent members, we're already there. And that's really, I think, a big part of the value and one of the big lessons learned for others. There are so many successful models out there, so many successful networks and most all of us are happy to collaborate and share and coordinate and, you know. So at the operational level, that's happening all the time. And I think that from the perspective of some of the industry groups and the advocates and the councils and that, you know, they almost need to piggyback on the sort of natural cooperation with them municipalities and build that up to have a more unified presence. I guess what I would follow up with this is we're seeing that in the muni world. Our munis are very tightly connected. We're seeing it in the cooperative world. Our world, electric cooperatives, are very tightly connected. What I'm talking about is building that bridge between those two groups that historically, you know, touch but don't overlap and don't really communicate on a daily or even an infrequent basis. I can speak for us to say that we have developed some relationships with some of the co-ops in our region. So we would definitely support that idea and I think many others will as well. I'd like to add also that I think there's some coalition building efforts underway and we'll hear more about them in a reasonable period of time. But it's important to note in my experience and I'm on the road almost five days a week, but in any community in which I work, the partnership is not just the local government, it's the local chamber of commerce. It's the community banks. It is the entity that represents agricultural interests. It's the Boys and Girls Club. There is such, through most of America, I think there is a growing understanding of how important this infrastructure is to our future, locally, regionally and nationally and there's a growing sense of we may need to do something locally and we need to be sure that we have the right to do that thing. And that coalition is enormous. It's incredibly broad. The coalition of entities saying local communities shouldn't have a say in their economic future is actually remarkably small. It's just particularly loud here in Washington. So thank you for your challenge to build that coalition more broadly. Hi, Matt Starr from CompTIA. I had a question particularly for Catherine. So the arguments against the Muni networks are largely unconvincing, but you said that there are 19 states out there that do have laws preventing municipalities from building these networks. How are these states being convinced by the lobbyists? Like what particularly is convincing them to pass these laws and how are the states themselves justifying it? I'm just curious, because it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. It helps if you have deep pockets and you can fund campaigns and not only state legislative campaigns, but higher office promises of going beyond your current state job and offers of going to say Senate, the U.S. Senate. As far as pack- I'd like to tell us the person running in North Carolina. I can say it because I'm not from there, but the person most responsible for that ban in North Carolina is running for Senate against Kay Hagan. He should get full credit for his legislation and it was pretty clear at the time that he had been offered a higher office or funding for a higher office. But as far as packaging goes, I think they're getting away with saying that this is an abuse of taxpayer money, this is the big one, that we need to protect cities from themselves. They're gonna waste your money for things that you don't need. And convincing legislators that there's plenty of bandwidth out there already. Our biggest problem in North Carolina was a lot of the guys didn't even have a computer. And thankfully that's changing and there's another youthful element coming through. But there's a lot of education, there's a lot of learning curve about what's the difference between a gig and a meg. So just on the taxpayer issue alone, I think in talking to other Republicans, that's where they were able to justify their vote. We all know why they were really voting the way they were. Their leadership told them to. But they went back home and said we don't wanna waste taxpayer money. Of course we kept saying there's no taxpayer money being involved in funding these systems, but there you have it. Yeah, I would just like to add a little bit. The money is corrupting in multiple ways, but it's also just the way the process works, not in the sense that I'm going to give you money and you're gonna vote this way. It's in the sense that on the day that George's legislation, the legislature was ending the session, they had like 40 lobbyists for the incumbent telecom providers. And then there's the municipal league of cities is the only one representing the sort of interest that we're discussing here. And they're split among many different issues. And they've got maybe what, two or three. And so it's someone like Catherine here who's covering four states who's working with maybe a handful of other people to try and work and make sure that none of these legislatures remove this local authority. And she's going up against tens of lobbyists on the other side who are former legislators who know the people who have long, decades long relationships with them. And so it's not just something that's so simple. And you didn't describe it this way, but it's sometimes people might think, oh, it's just campaign contributions. It's really much deeper and more systematic than that. And the flip side of it is, there's nobody on the other side. There's just no one out there. To some extent, I try to reach out. I'm from Minnesota. You can imagine how great it is for me to try and call up a North Carolina legislator and say, this is how it is. It doesn't really work that well. But this is to the point about all politics being local, that the key to success for Georgia, two years in a row with full Republican majorities where they went local. And they had a, the Georgia Municipal League, they worked it in the trenches. But all their local communities went to the local businesses who will definitely suffer if these Georgia broadband providers are not able to provide them service. Their rates are gonna go up for a lot less capacity. So they had their businesses calling their legislators and that was hugely impactful. So it's not really, it's not something that can't be won. And that's a really important message because this is about local economic development. This is, we were saying last night, this is kind of a boring topic. This is just about economic development and creating businesses. It's not some art project here. So overall, the fact that the incumbents can get away with what they're saying is kind of remarkable because it's not like it's a Republican Democratic issue. It's very much a nonpartisan issue. We all need jobs and we all need the infrastructure to compete in what is a world economy. Hi, I'm Mike Wansner from the Alliance for Community Media. I just wanna buttress something that you're saying and go a little step farther to underscore the idea that this is a systematic campaign that has also been buttressed by education of policy makers. And while you're talking about long-term relationships being key in terms of lobbying work, there, when you look at a state legislature or alternatively a city council, there aren't a whole lot of telecom experts, right? Who are long-term legislators or long-term city council members. They're very much reliant upon industry advice. You see this time and time again and we've seen this in the battles over state franchising that occurred over the course of the last 15 years. I think we'll hand in hand with the battles over unicontrol that you're talking about that occurred in North Carolina and other states. So the question I have for all of you really is this question of how you can systematically better educate policy makers at the local level to be able to enable the type of action that you're talking about. Because that will be both the wellspring for this question in those 19 states that have preempted local action but then will also empower policy makers in small towns around America to be able to do what's right by their constituents. I would put a plug in that the paper that OTI and CTC just released is intended to be a starting point for that. Certainly a policy paper isn't sufficient to move that type of educational campaign forward but we hope that local communities across the country can use it as a tool. And Joanne, you referenced Holly Spring and how the numbers speak for themselves. I think once, I think this happens actually very organically at the local level. Not in the state legislatures which are far less connected to their local communities and are an entirely different animal but at the local level, I am constantly amazed when I meet with local elected officials by how aware they are of technology and broadband in particular and how important it is. They're frequently not sure what they can do and they're sometimes entirely overwhelmed by the enormity of it. But they understand why it's so important and I've been feeling that for a long time. I go places where I meet people who will pull out Susan Crawford's book about the cable monopoly. I've had this conversation a hundred times with local elected officials who just read that book or read an article about that book and say, this is really a problem from an economic standpoint. In past years, it used to be Tom Friedman's book, The Earth is Flat. I can't tell you how many people read that book and it changed their thinking about what they needed to do locally. I think so much of this conversation is already happening at the local level and freeing localities from the constraints imposed by state legislators who don't understand the economic implications or don't care and giving them some tools and opening up FCC funding mechanisms so there's competition. So they're available to everyone so that the tools that the industry has traditionally had to be able to address rural in the past phone service now broadband are available to everyone and they can compete for it and there's a way forward where they see some mechanisms. I think that's going to do wonders. I would first like to point out, obviously, our council was aware of this issue many years before I even came to work for the city. So I think we're very blessed and wholesome by that. I'll also point out as far as sort of what we're doing, pretty much all of the state representatives, state senators, everyone who represents our community is a customer on our network and they have been since day one. Most of them, before they actually were elected to office and that's from every single aspect of the sort of spectrum of point of view, I guess you would say. So it's really not a partisan issue. And it is something that the first hand experience within the community, I think, sort of gives them the education, the awareness of the issue. And I think that that helps actually seeing it firsthand and experiencing it and of course supporting us by being members. Let me add one more thing if I may. The elected officials are also being educated by their constituents and this is not everywhere but in recent months I have traveled to multiple places and met with elected officials who say, hands down the most common email call and other communication they get from constituents is about when are we gonna get fiber and what are you doing about it? That's not happening everywhere but the fact that it's happening some places is pretty stunning. The public awareness of the importance of this infrastructure is at an all time high and that will have a big impact also. Can I just very briefly say that this is a non-partisan issue in the sense that people who vote Republican feel the same way as people who vote Democratic. However, the talking points that industry uses are crafted to appeal to Republicans and it's Republican legislatures overwhelmingly that have been moving forward with this. In North Carolina for four years they thought about this bill, they decided not to do it. It was only after Art Pope took over the legislation, the legislature with a particular type of Republican that wasn't interested in local issues that was more interested in the sort of issues that Art Pope cares about. Google it if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about. The point is that it's not totally non-partisan when you look at the state level and the elected officials but on the ground and polling and in community after community you see people who vote Republican feel the exact same way as people who vote Democratic on this issue that the community itself should make up its mind. And just as a final point that I was mentioning I said Holly Springs, North Carolina. Holly Springs, North Carolina is a pretty conservative place and they wanted to know what the numbers were right away and the numbers are extraordinary and Joanne you've talked a little bit about that but it's just like in Raleigh if you really are responsible with taxpayer money you don't have a choice on this one because the cost of leasing these lines from the historical incumbents are going up and they are not giving you more capacity for it. So even with conservative councils the numbers are speaking for themselves and I would say that's a great point of entry. Building a community broadband network is a very conservative thing to do. It's a very conservative choice and I am a very conservative person and I'm a big advocate. I think we have time for one more question. Hi, Mitzi Herrera from Montgomery County, Maryland. Thanks for the shout out. I wanted to actually thank everybody up here for writing the papers and encourage people to read them. I'd also encourage you as a panelist if you could create one pagers that have highlights of the really cool quotes studies you're citing in there it makes it a lot easier for people who are trying to lobby people who don't have time to read a lot of things to make that case. But the question, so bringing this back I guess in closing is looking at building the business case beyond the balance sheet. Regardless of how different we are I think the commonality that local governments have is you have to justify the investment. You have to build a business case. So beyond which is nice, Chris and I had a conversation yesterday beyond the sort of initial well how can we pay back the cost of building out the network. It's those other things that are more difficult to quantify. So can you talk about either any types of surveys beyond the things that you have in your paper and footnotes 28 through 31 on page 10? I should be clear, it's a very fantastic paper from my colleagues. I only played a very modest support. What I wanna look at is to the extent that people talk about having higher speeds, more capacity, more reliability that attracts business. It doesn't require necessarily extending the network out that by me being able to get better speeds at competitive prices meant that I expanded the number of people that I'm hired. That having access in the home from my workers so that they could do more telecommuting or we do remote medical studies or people running those results. Can you just, if you are aware of any kinds of studies out there that are really building that business case of this is how you attract and retain jobs? Or if you're not aware of that study, are there key components or lessons learned that you would see in that kind of study? Well just briefly, and I hope you don't get mad at me for not mentioning it yesterday, but Michael Curry with SNG Strategic Networks Group or some, I don't know what's plural in that. They've done this work. They recently released a comparison in Minnesota of two counties, one that has fiber everywhere and one that doesn't. And they have a significant database of metrics that they do a comparison to. So, and they've done an extension work in North Carolina, I know. So that's the first place I would go to look for that specific business case. But the advice that I gave you yesterday, I'll just repeat briefly and that's that if you're gonna make an investment how are you gonna know in three or four years that it's succeeded? Because in three or four years it's gonna be judged by whether or not it's making money, whether it's in the red or in the black. But you need to have a sense before then of whether it's successful is that if that's the only criteria or if it's that you've lowered the cost of connectivity in the community by a certain amount or that you've brought new jobs to the community or that you've done X, Y, and Z, but you need to establish the criteria of success as you're making the investment. Otherwise it will only ever be judged by whether it's in the red or the black. And nobody's going to this effort just to figure out if it's gonna be in the black and by how much. There's Joey Durell, Mayor of Lafayette, I think it was, or maybe it was, was it you who talked about, yeah, we're just gonna give you a talking point about if you wanna make money as a city, don't do it by building a network? Well, I was gonna say something similar to that, but if that's your, I got it from him. Yeah, you know, if that's your metric of success, whether you're making money or not after three or five years, don't build a network at all. Because you're going to, you're starting the process for entirely the wrong reason, you know? It's about serving the community, it's about infrastructure, it's about the value you bring. You have to make these things self-sufficient over time, but if that's your metric for success, there's no point in even starting the conversation. Because why would we be doing it if the only purpose was making money? It's not what local governments do. Well, we were in Raleigh. I thought you had good advice. Maybe it wasn't you. It was someone who said, if you just wanna make money, go build a landfill. That came from the School of Government, actually. Okay, so the point is just to make sure you know why you're doing something and make sure that that's an evaluative criteria down the line. Building landfills, noted. I think that that's a fantastic place to stop. And I do just wanna thank my panel, the panelists who joined us today for your incredibly thoughtful and articulate conversation about this very important topic. And thanks to the audience for your good questions and for your attention today. Thank you.