Guest commentary: El Dorado County should lease rights of way to fiber-optic cable companies to ease shortfall

El Dorado County is facing a projected $15.6 million budget deficit in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

One potential revenue source that county officials should look into is leasing some of its highway and road rights of way to a company with expertise in installing and operating fiberoptic telecommunications cable.

The company could in turn sell space or "bandwidth" on the cable to various providers of telecommunications and information services in what is known as an open access system. The fiber would provide a telecommunications backbone, operating like a water main serving neighborhood "nodes" accessible to neighborhood residences and businesses. Fiber is nearly future-proof, providing tremendous carrying capacity to replace the county's aged, deteriorating and overtaxed copper cable-based telecommunications infrastructure that can barely handle current needs.

It would also provide more expansion options for the county's locally owned and operated wireless Internet service providers to serve larger areas with higher speeds and more services. As the need for broadband access increases, large portions of El Dorado County have been left off the information highway, relegated to dial-up Internet access that was stateof- the-art technology when Bill Clinton was beginning his first term as president. For people living and working in these areas, the only other option is typically technologically inferior and costly low-value satellite-based Internet service.

More than five dozen El Dorado County communities were identified as being in this predicament in a report issued in January by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Broadband Task Force. They include Coloma, Garden Valley, Kelsey and the southern county communities of Mount Aukum, Omo Ranch and Fair Play.

Not mentioned in the task force report are large sections of the county near Highway 50 and in the Tahoe basin, where broadband infrastructure has been only partially deployed. The task force report correctly views broadband as vital form of infrastructure. "Just as California has invested in other critical infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and water, the CBTF believes that the state must seize the opportunity to promote private-sector investment, leverage public-private partnerships and lead the effort to increase broadband availability and adoption," it states.

The county also stands to gain additional revenues though the stimulation of commerce and jobs that come with robust broadband access. In November, the Sacramento Regional Research Institute found California stands to gain 1.8 million jobs and $132 billion of new payroll over the next 10 years with a mere 3.8 percent increase in the utilization of wire line-based broadband Internet services. The positive economic implications of improved broadband access are not lost on Sam Driggers, El Dorado County's economic development director.

"People want to live in quality-of-life areas, but they also want to work," Driggers told county supervisors last October in a report on the county's economy. "It's in tandem, and Internet access is key. If you don't have broadband, you don't have access to the world."

Driggers also implicitly recognizes that working shouldn't necessarily have to involve commuting, which over the long run is an economic minus for the county since it means more trips "down the hill" and more wear and tear on roads and highways and vehicle emissions.

A resident of Camino, Pilot has drafted a petition to the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors, calling on them to direct county staff and retain necessary outside consultants to establish a public private partnership with fiber optic telecommunications vendors to utilize county rights to way to construct open access fiber to the node/neighborhood (FTTN) infrastructure to serve the current and future telecommunications needs of residents and businesses situated within unincorporated El Dorado County. The petition is located at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/eldoopenaccessfiber/ Pilot can be reached at fpilot@dreaminglucid.net or by calling (530) 295-1473. (An earlier version incorrectly identified to whom Pilot has drafted his petition.)