First Success

The only business item on the agenda for the Los Alamos County Council meeting on January 12 was “2021 Strategic Priorities Discussion”.  There were no formal motions or votes at the meeting. Councilor Scott will present a summary of the discussions at the January 26 meeting when I believe they will formally adopt priorities. There was consensus that there should be no more than seven priorities and that broadband should be a priority.  At the meeting, Councilor Williams was the strongest advocate for broadband followed by Ryti and Derkacs.  All of the other Councilors agreed that broadband should be a priority.

I made a brief statement at the beginning of the meeting which I will
append to this post.

In addition to apparent success in persuading the Council to take the
first action we suggested in our open letter, I was pleased that the discussion at the Council meeting seemed to recognize that it is a mistake to let an unregulated private enterprise own communication infrastructure that confers a natural monopoly.

Now I’m considering next steps. It seems Council is going to take the first action we suggested in our open letter. Should we continue
organizing and advocating for the other four actions? If you have
ideas, please post them as comments here.

My comments at the 2021-1-12 Los Alamos County Council Meeting:

I own the site blabnow.bolg (Better Los Alamos Broadband NOW). I believe that I’ve written to you three times myself and spoken to you once.

I’m pleased to see that you are going to talk about broadband tonight.  I ask that you make broadband a priority now. I’d like to make two points about timeliness:

1. When the pandemic passes the urgency of broadband will not go back to the status quo ante. We have all learned new habits and skills. I remind you that in his fall presentation Dr. Beierschmitt said that LANL will continue developing support for remote access after the pandemic passes.

2. You should not wait for a second CenturyLink fiber link into the County before planning and acting. That’s just an excuse for delay.

In looking at your attachment H “Broadband Overview”. I suggest that you act on most of the points.

1. I would combine the point on cost estimates with assessment of new technologies

2. I would modify the “Possible survey” point to focus on measuring
and understanding the current technology and business of communication more broadly in the County.