BroadbandNow estimates 674,433 people in Colorado lack access to an Internet service that can provide 25 Mbps (million bits per second) download speeds and 3 Mbps upload speeds. That is higher than the 161,000 people the FCC and the 182,600 people the state says are on the wrong side of the digital divide in Colorado…
— from Governing Magazine, June 8, 2021
One hundred and thirty years after the Town of Pagosa Springs incorporated itself as a one-square-mile municipality centered around the “world’s deepest hot spring”, the vacant lot at the corner of North Fifth and Loma Street is showing clear signs of residential development.
I live one house away from this particular vacant lot, and the pending arrival of another house on my neighborhood street is somewhat remarkable, considering the formidable barriers to home construction in Archuleta County in 2021. Outrageously priced materials costs, for one. Onerous permit and connection fees charged by our local utilities. Bureaucratic hoops to jump through. The high cost of vacant land.
A bicycle ride through downtown Pagosa Springs — or a virtual bike ride using a Google map — reveals numerous vacant lots within that square-mile area, 130 years after Pagosa officially proclaimed itself to be a “town”. Development of residential property, within the town limits, has proceeded at a casual pace over the past century. You might even say, at a snail’s pace. Additionally, the ‘density’ of the development pattern has remained charmingly ‘rural’… basically, one smallish single-family house per parcel.
Assessing the town’s development pattern via Google’s satellite images, I would estimate that we could easily quadruple the number of dwelling units located within the town limits… if people were willing to accept a more ‘urban’ style of neighborhood development.
Look at the amount of land actually taken up by buildings, in this image. Only a fraction of the available overall acreage is built out. As I said, it’s a rural development pattern.
The vacant lot I’m talking about is the long, narrow parcel stretching north-to-south in the center of the Google image above, and — what is not evident from the bird’s eye view — it sits high above McCabe Creek and has a somewhat spectacular view of Eagle Peak to the north. According to the Town zoning map, this one-fifth-acre parcel would be allowed a maximum of four dwelling units. A four-plex apartment could be built there, in other words.
As of this morning, I’m not sure what type of building the developer is planning, but I would be willing to bet it will be a single-family home. That’s what most middle-class folks prefer in America. A separate, free-standing house, accommodating one nuclear family. With a front and back yard… a dog and a cat.
The three red roofs at the top left, in the image above, are a low-income housing apartment complex managed by Archuleta Housing Corporation. More people live in those three apartment buildings than live in the entire rest of the neighborhood shown in the Google image above.
That is to say, the only people making highly-efficient use of the landscape, in this part of downtown, are low-income families. But who wants to live in an apartment building? Unless you simply can’t afford anything else?
Yesterday, a crew from La Plata Electric Association — LPEA — installed a new residential electric line, and a new transformer, on the telephone pole in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, to accommodate the ongoing development on the nearby vacant lot.
We naturally assume that any new house, or apartment building, will have community-provided electric service. Goes without saying.
Even though it’s very possible — and maybe even affordable — for a homeowner to generate their own electricity in 2021, it’s so much simpler to join the LPEA co-op and have their crew run a wire from the nearby pole.
That got me to thinking about utilities, and the way we finance and distribute utilities in rural communities.
The first meeting of the LPEA board of directors took place in Durango on August 22, 1939, following the filing of the official incorporation papers for the new electric cooperative a week earlier. Some citizens in downtown Durango had been enjoying the benefits of distributed electric power since 1892 — courtesy of the privately-owned Durango Light and Power Company — but the mostly-rural development pattern in La Plata and Archuleta County made it financially impractical for a private electric company to service the surrounding rural areas.
Few urban residents believed that the rural parts of Southwest Colorado would ever be illuminated, period, due to the tremendous cost of extending lines and service to isolated farms and ranches. But by 1939, the picture had changed, thanks to new federal legislation. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 — one of many New Deal proposals by President Franklin Roosevelt to remedy high unemployment during the Great Depression — provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States.
We will make a note here of a particular financial mechanism. “Federal loans.”
The REA funding was designed to be channeled through ‘cooperative’ electric power companies, hundreds of which, like LPEA, continue to serve their members in 2021. (If you are hooked up to LPEA, you are a voting member of the co-op, and you should have received a ballot in the mail for this year’s board election.)
According to the minutes of the August 22, 1939, LPEA board meeting, a group of rural citizens were beginning the long process of establishing the basis for running the electric cooperative — including the assessment of a $5 base charge to all members, and a requirement that co-op members purchase all their electricity from LPEA.
Eighty years later, my new neighbor appears to have joined the co-op. I’m sure the fee was more than $5.
I’m thinking about all of these issues, because my neighbor might also want to connect, eventually, to the internet. In that case, he has — for the time being — a choice of several ISPs to pick from. CenturyLink. Visionary Broadband. Zito Media (formerly USA Communications). HughesNet. And, coming soon… StarLink?
A question. Why did we end up with this particular development model — numerous competitive, privately-owned companies — for internet distribution in rural America?
The delivery of internet has thus far been very similar to the delivery of electric power, and has faced the same kinds of distribution challenges.
Why didn’t we just form rural co-ops, like they did 80 years ago?