Access to technology, and removing impediments to that access, should not be partisan issues. Last week, though, Colorado’s Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee killed, on a party-line vote, a bill that would have removed a barrier to broadband access in rural areas of the state.
The failure of this bill will not affect most communities in Southwest Colorado, because they have already opted out of the provisions of 2005 legislation, Senate Bill 152, that requires local governments for voter approval to establish broadband infrastructure in the absence of a private provider. The ability to opt would appear to make the failed Senate Bill 42 unnecessary, but there’s a little more to the issue.
Ballot issues are expensive, and that cost is borne by constituents, who have already stated clearly that they don’t want their local governments to be restricted in helping build broadband networks. This past November alone, voters approved opt-outs in 24 elections, including in conservative Montezuma County. In 2015, the number was 44, including La Plata County. The total now is nearly 100, and those measures routinely receive more than 70 percent of the vote.
How many municipalities and counties have to pay for individual ballot issues before the legislature hears what the voters are saying and does away with the costly requirement?
The purpose of the 2005 law was to prevent governments from spending taxpayer funds to do what private industry could do on its own. That makes sense, or at least it did in 2005. What doesn’t make any sense at all is waiting for more than a decade for private firms to step up while rural areas of the state languish without adequate Internet service. They’ve had plenty of chances.
Fast, reliable connectivity is essential to economic development, but providing that service profitably requires a certain density of population that large swaths of rural Colorado do not have. As the distance between those potential customers and large population centers increase, so does the cost. Simply put, without assistance from government, residents of some parts of Colorado will not have high-speed Internet. The profit just isn’t there.
A representative for the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association said the recent bill would have given the government “unchecked ability to act any way it wants in a competitive marketplace.” The markets most affected by the 2005 legislation, though, are in no way competitive, because no one wants to compete there.
Local governments are still controlled by their constituents. Most sparsely populated, lower-income regions of the state—those areas not already served by broadband providers—are strongly conservative. County commissioners and municipal council representatives there aren’t going to vote to challenge private businesses. If they did, they wouldn’t hold those seats for long. Even in small towns, money talks.
Those towns might have more money, and more businesses, without the competitive disadvantage of having slow, undependable Internet service. They might have faster growth. And even if that proves not to be true, their residents want to be able to send emails, read the news and stream movies. This far into the 21st century, those aren’t unreasonable demands.
Protecting businesses from unfair, taxpayer-subsidized competition is one thing. Protecting them at the expense of Colorado’s rural citizens is something else—and it’s not even good for business. SB42 was a good bill whose time had come.
