The COVID shutdowns, these past few months, were slightly more bearable if you happened to have Internet access at home, especially if your kids were engaged in online ‘distance learning’ this past spring… or your employer expected you to work from home… or you were self-employed…
Or if you were just simply bored, with nothing to do.
On the flip side, if you had no Internet service at your house, you may have felt yourself a victim of the “digital divide”, when public access points — the Ruby Sisson Library, the Community Center, coffee shops, and other free WIFI locations — closed their doors in March.
The increased Internet use here in our rural community also put a strain on service providers, leading to fluctuating connection speeds. (Or so it seems.)
All of which could certainly encourage a municipal government to put “Broadband” at the top of their list of “special priorities”… as the Town Council did last Friday, at their annual strategic planning retreat. But as I mentioned yesterday in Part Five, the total municipal budget this year was $12 million, earmarked for the dozens of public services provided by the Town of Pagosa Springs. To imagine that the Town of Pagosa Springs could make a meaningful dent in the “lack of local broadband access” is… well, imaginative.
Unless, as Town Manager Andrea Phillips hinted at the retreat, we want to talk about the “T” word…
…Higher taxes.
“I don’t know if we want to talk about the ‘T’ word, but if people want broadband, it’s going to take millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in underserved areas. And we can’t just keep going, ‘Okay, here’s $50 grand’ here or ‘Here’s $100 grand’ there.”
So true. $100,000 won’t go very far towards solving the broadband challenge in a county of 1,356 square miles of largely undeveloped forest and semi-desert shrubs.
But maybe, if the Town Council simply exercises a little patience, the problem will magically solve itself?
According to numerous media outlets, Elon Musk’s space research and development company, SpaceX, has received official federal permission to send 11,000 satellites — and maybe possibly more — into ‘Low Earth Orbit’ (LEO) as part of a program called Starlink. If things go as planned, the satellite network will deliver Internet speeds of at least 100 Mbps everywhere on earth, at a price of perhaps $60 per month plus the purchase of a $300 antenna. Each satellite weighs about 500 pounds and is the size of an office desk, not including its massive solar panel. The Spacex Falcon 9 rockets can reportedly carry about 60 satellites per launch.
Starlink has already put 500 satellites in orbit, and I hear they are testing the system this summer.
Elon Musk is quoted as saying: “The focus is going to be on creating a global communication system. In the long term, it will be like rebuilding the internet in space. The goal will be to have the majority of internet traffic go over this network…”
Curiously enough, there are other companies currently planning their own LEO ‘broadband’ satellite arrays: Amazon (3,200 satellites), London-based OneWeb (2,000 satellites), and Canadian company Telesat (400 satellites?) The Chinese government has its own plans to launch 800 LEO satellites. A Luxembourg-based company called LeoSat is also raising capital for a future satellite array; Facebook is reportedly working on a laser-based satellite telecommunications system; Boeing has plans for a LEO array on the back burner.
If you total up the planned number of satellites currently approved or proposed, we will see a fair number of new LEO satellites orbiting the earth within the next few years. Like, maybe 60,000? Or more?
Meanwhile, the federal government is preparing to hand out $16 billion, to qualified bidders, for broadband infrastructure in underserved areas — based on coverage maps that the FCC admits are inaccurate. Developers of LEO satellites will be invited to bid in that auction, or so I hear.
Listening to the Town Council discuss the broadband issue last Friday, many interesting comments were offered, and it was clear that the Council truly desires to see high speed Internet made available throughout our community. Several of the comments mentioned fiber optic cable, and the need for additional installations of “fiber”. But “fiber” could conceivably be a dinosaur by the end of this decade.
I look forward to hearing the Council continue its broadband discussions, once we all understand better where the Internet industry is headed.
The spending and policy priority that received the second highest number of votes among the Council members was “LUDC”.
The Land Use and Development Code.
Land use codes have been around for a century now, but existed mainly in urban areas for the first half of the 20th century. These codes attempted to address the clash between quiet residential uses and noisy, smelly, polluting manufacturing uses in dense urban areas. The effort to separate incompatible uses brought about the creation of an entirely new profession: the Urban Planner.
Rural communities, with economies and communities built around agriculture and minerals extraction, were generally slower to get on the Planning bandwagon. The Town of Pagosa Springs, for example, didn’t hire its first “urban planner” until, I believe, the late 1990s.
The Planner’s job, initially, was to protect the health and safety of the citizens, but a bureaucratic office — once created — has a seemingly unstoppable tendency to stick its nose into the business of the citizenry in creative ways. If you read the Town’s current LUDC, you will find that many of the rules have nothing to do with “health and safety” and everything to do with “real estate values” and “aesthetics”.
I’ve been attending the annual Town Council strategic planning retreats for the past six years, and I can’t recall anyone even mentioning the “LUDC” at any previous retreat. The general attitude among the Council members has seemed to be, ‘Of course the Planning Department will amend the LUDC, as necessary’.
That attitude has apparently changed somewhat?
As a result of the River Rock Estates debacle?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.