George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 29 May 2019. A slightly edited version of this piece was published in The Union's 1jun19 print edition and also online here.]
Broadband connectivity to the internet is fundamental to the economic growth of every community in America. And it is doubly critical for the economic development, if not survival, of small rural communities off the beaten path like Nevada County. However, that truth has yet to be embraced by our local governments. In fact, there are many of us who adamantly oppose the availability of broadband in these foothills for the simple reason that they are opposed to everything that promotes growth in our county, be it in housing, new or expanding businesses, or anything that invites more working families to locate here.
When we arrived early in the millennium, I got involved in the nascent efforts to promote connectivity that would attract commerce and middle-class families into our county. For the last 30 or so years, Nevada County’s population has been stagnant. During this time we have seen improvement in some local cultural offerings and the arrival of more retirees (I am among them). But in the large we have also witnessed the departure of cash importing businesses and working families as their jobs moved elsewhere along the I-80 corridor, or even out of state.
Nevada County is off the beaten path. We have slowly acknowledged the futility of manufacturing anything here that must then be sold elsewhere. Today the county’s main cash importers are tourists, retirees, and the remaining businesses which more and more focus their revenue producing activities around receiving and transmitting digital data. To make the point more strongly, the only cash-importing businesses that will seek a suitable home in our county are those that can import lots of bits over broadband conduits like fiber, then use locally available human labor to make those bits more valuable, and finally send those valuable bits into the outside world. And all of that requires broadband connectivity way beyond what is available today.
Nevada County shares this ‘broadband problem’ with many other remote communities in the country. But due to our location in an acknowledged high-tech state, and our proximity to a major modern metropolitan area, our telecom shortcomings stand out like a sore thumb. Legal scholar and Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford has written Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It (2018) in which she documents the gathering telecommunications crisis in the United States. In there she describes a “world of fiber optic connections reaching neighborhoods, homes, and businesses (that) will represent as great a change from what came before as the advent of electricity. The virtually unlimited amounts of data we’ll be able to send and receive through fiber optic connections will enable a degree of virtual presence that will radically transform health care, education, urban administration and services, agriculture, retail sales, and offices. Yet all of those transformations will pale compared with the innovations and new industries that we can’t even imagine today.”
The problem she reveals is “how the giant corporations that control cable and internet access in the United States use their tremendous lobbying power to tilt the playing field against competition, holding back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward. And … how a few cities and towns are fighting monopoly power to bring the next technological revolution to their communities.” But to highlight her punchline of how some communities are failing the challenge to bring in broadband fiber, she cites Nevada County, California. That’s right dear people, we in these foothills are held up as a national poster child of how not to succeed in this critical aspect of promoting economic development and growth. We are the backward child in a competitive world, and we are in the most part doing it to ourselves.
As a longtime advocate of broadband fiber to our towns and neighborhoods, I have joined with fellow promoters of this technology who work through non-profit organizations and lobby local leaders to embrace bringing broadband to Nevada County. But over the years, our broadband walk has not matched our broadband talk. As professor Susan Crawford points out, our county has no political leaders willing to step up to champion this critically needed technology. Today, as our national economy continues to grow, I plan to rededicate myself to encourage our political leaders to start making measurable progress on Nevada County’s road to the 21st century. And as your neighbor, I invite you to also make your own voice heard to our community leaders and elected representatives.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] Here are some bon mots about Nevada County from Susan Crawford abstracted by my assiduous partner in crime, Russ Steele – H/T my friend.
- The rural framework of this capacity story is revealed by comparing Nevada City/Grass Valley, where local government refused to get involved in fiber, to the RS Fiber region in Minnesota, and to Otis, Massachusetts—two places where local government did all it could to bring fiber to town.
- It is important that the community, the local government, have some skin in the game; the lack of such involvement in John Paul’s Nevada City/Grass Valley has made it very difficult for him to privately finance the building of the Chip Carman network.
- Certificates, skills, adult education: that’s the workforce development model that mayor Andy Berke of Chattanooga is focused on, and the one Nevada City/Grass Valley and Greensboro don’t seem to have. It’s working well in Chattanooga, but students must physically go to a center, with its high fixed costs for buildings and grounds, in order to access adult education opportunities.
- Laissez-faire is not working for rural America, particularly in areas like Nevada City/Grass Valley where the local authorities are uninterested in intervening to ensure that their people have communications capacity.
- . . .one of the key reasons that both Greensboro and Grass Valley/Nevada City are making such slow progress toward any flavor of publicly oriented fiber is that there is no prominent public leader willing to stand behind it.
[9jun19 update] I recently received an email from a former county leader who took me to task for agreeing with Susan Crawford’s assertion that BB introduction to rural communities like Nevada County have and are being hindered by the lack of local leadership. In our subsequent exchange he made it clear that there was no lack of leadership, but that it was our low population and population densities that did not make financial sense for an outside outfit to invest in adding to the county’s BB infrastructure. To put a bow on it, he summarily dismissed further efforts to convince suppliers like ATT, Comcast, … until our population grew to some TBD level that would then ‘pencil out’ for the suppliers. Attempting to understand the suppliers’ criteria and financial methodologies for evaluating the profitability from our community has not been done, and need not be done. In short, nothing can be done re expanding BB in Nevada County until sufficient population growth occurs.
I report this exchange as evidence of how Dr Crawford’s research into the causality of poor BB penetration in the country’s hinterlands is correct and confirmed by our own experience. Our electeds and community leaders have not stepped up because they all have considered it to be an exercise in futility – ‘it can’t be done’.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment