“What the pandemic did is it brought the delivery of broadband services to the attention of every mayor.”
Nearly 15 years after the first Colorado community opted out of a state law prohibiting local governments from providing or investing in broadband internet service, 121 cities and towns in the state have followed suit, including four more communities in November’s election.
For Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul, internet connectivity is “as important as having water and electricity, and we need to ensure we have robust systems in place to serve our residents and our businesses.” Crews with Paonia, a telecommunications construction company, install fiber-optic cable in Boulder as part of the city’s gigabit speed broadband buildout on Dec. 6, 2022, in Boulder. The effort to come out of the shadow of Senate Bill 152, a law passed by state legislators in 2005 and designed to keep municipal governments out of the online infrastructure space, has been slow but steady. The bill includes a provision allowing communities to override the law.
Fort Collins was early out of the gate, with 83% of voters there overturning the restrictive law seven years ago. Two years later, voters passed a $150 million bond measure to fund the city’s broadband network, dubbed Connexion. “The pandemic has made high-speed internet much more important, especially high upload speeds,” he said. “The pandemic resulted in a higher number of residents teleworking and students doing school work from home, thus the overall need for bandwidth and upload speeds has increased and high-speed internet has become a necessity.
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