Colo. Lawmakers Vote to Lift Ban on Muni Broadband

Colorado could soon excise its 18-year-old municipal broadband ban. With a 48-14 House vote Tuesday, SB-183 passed the legislature and will go to Gov. Jared Polis (D). State officials and Colorado’s U.S. senators rallied around an effort to connect 100% of the state’s population by 2027 at a partially virtual NTIA internet-for-all event Wednesday.

The Colorado bill would repeal many parts of the 2005 state ban known as SB-152. Although more than half of 217 Colorado municipalities and more than two-thirds of the state’s 64 counties earlier opted out of the ban by conducting votes, the state broadband office and local governments strongly supported the bill at legislative committee hearings this year (see 2303230076). Polis didn’t comment.

The state removing barriers to better internet through local investment “is a good result for people in both rural and urban communities that have been left behind,” Christopher Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks director, emailed. “This is not a rebuke to the big monopolies that lobby to maintain barriers to competition so much as a recognition that achieving universal Internet availability and adoption requires different business models, especially when poverty and historic marginalization are significant factors.”

SB-183 “will increase the ability of local communities in Colorado to access funding for broadband deployment and for the creation of broadband deployment partnerships without the unnecessary step of an election which has only served to increase costs [and] delay local broadband projects,” said the Colorado Communications and Utility Alliance in an emailed statement.

Colorado Broadband Office (CBO) Director Brandy Reitter applauded SB-183’s passage at the state’s Wednesday workshop on incoming NTIA funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Colorado's latest map shows 213,000 households without access, she said. "This is a huge undertaking. … It's going to take all of us to do this.” Colorado is talking about consolidating all broadband activities under the CBO to simplify the effort and increase efficiency, Reitter noted.

Colorado scratched the surface of its broadband access problem with $56 million in state funding, said Chief Information Officer Anthony Neal-Graves. He estimated it will take more than $1 billion to close the state’s divide over the next four to five years.

Passing the IIJA “was the easy part,” said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. in prerecorded remarks. It’s now up to the state to seize the opportunity, he said. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said the U.S. last century connected every home to electricity and “in this century, we’re going to connect every household to high-speed internet.”

The broadband, equity, access and deployment program is different from past government efforts to connect everyone, said Evan Feinman, who leads NTIA’s BEAD program. "This problem has persisted for an incredibly long time in the face of well-intentioned, but ... inadequately structured and inadequately resourced attempts to solve it,” he told the workshop. "The way this program is going to succeed in the way that prior programs didn't is through partnerships.”

NTIA will take a close look at states’ BEAD initial proposals, with close attention to the research and why states chose the particular spots selected in their broadband plans, said Robyn Madison, NTIA Northern Plains regional director. Attention also will be paid to how those initial proposals address issues ranging from climate resilience in areas prone to fires or windstorms to labor standards, she said. “Workforce is going to be a huge issue” both in fiber deployments and in servicing those locations afterward, and there's an emphasis on trying to ensure minority- and women-owned businesses are involved.

State plans involving NTIA digital equity grants need to have measurable objectives, identification of digital equity barriers and a big outreach and engagement component, said Brett Litzler, NTIA digital equity adviser.

With the FCC planning to continue to update its broadband map, it’s "never going to be done -- there’s never going to be a final product,” said FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Deputy Bureau Chief Eduard Bartholme. The challenge process “is proving out this is a pretty good data set,” he said. Challenge outcomes will flow through the amp “up to the 11th hour,” he said, saying some challenges made as recently a week ago have been resolved and already are reflected in the map.

One of the biggest challenges with broadband mapping is that the main source of data is the ISPs, said Megan Gernert, Colorado Broadband office broadband data program manager. “We have to … trust that they’re telling the truth,” though speed tests can be used to verify some data, she said. Asked about the possibility of a universal broadband map that combines FCC and state data sets, Bartholme said the challenge process to the FCC’s broadband map can be a route for layering in outside data such as crowdsourced speed data. That Congress in the Broadband Data Act allows for the public to challenge what providers say indicates it seemingly wants to move toward an authoritative data set, Bartholme said. He said there might be opportunities in the future with the FCC map to layer performance metrics atop advertised speeds.

The FCC’s federal funding map, due to be released by mid-May, will be useful as states start their BEAD planning as they will be able to see where other agencies like USDA have committee funding and thus can ensure there is not overlap, Bartholme said. CBO is processing data now that it received in March from ISPs for the state’s own broadband map, with its eye on publishing the data in May, said Gernert.