The honest answer to every "public broadband fails" argument.

Each was a debt-financed build from scratch — the opposite of a routine upgrade. Burlington Telecom improperly used about $17 million of city cash to build a new retail fiber system. Kentucky Wired was a greenfield middle-mile network whose costs blew past estimates by roughly $100 million on pole and right-of-way problems. iProvo was a bond-financed citywide build (open-access like ours, but debt-financed — unlike ours) later wrecked by a private buyer's default; its real warning is about abandonment, not money-losing builds. Okanogan isn't borrowing to build anything new — it's refreshing equipment on a network that already earns ~$1.1 million a year and runs an audited surplus. And the scary "failure" rosters don't survive a fact-check: when the Institute for Local Self-Reliance examined a widely-circulated list of "failed" municipal networks, it found the vast majority weren't failures at all.

Bristol's network didn't fail as a business — its managers committed fraud. Nine people were criminally convicted in 2016. The network itself was sound enough to sell for tens of millions afterward. That's not a case against public broadband; it's a case for transparency and oversight — which is exactly what we're asking this Board to provide by putting its analysis on the public record.

It looked at cities borrowing to build retail fiber from scratch — and that distinction is the whole point. The 2017 Wharton/Penn study found most municipal fiber builds weren't on track to cover their costs over a 30–40-year horizon (researchers on both sides still argue the method). But every case it studied was a greenfield fiber build — and greenfield rural fiber runs $77,000–$204,000 per home (USDA ReConnect awards). Okanogan is the opposite on every axis that drove that result: already built, already profitable, sold at wholesale, and facing a one-time radio refresh in the low hundreds of thousands — not a decades-long buildout. A bottom-up reconstruction of the District's own billing and budgets puts the wireless segment near $270,000 of annual operating income — it is covering its costs today, which is exactly what the fiber builds in that study could not do.

Those were speculative bids that fell apart before a dollar was spent — and the biggest one was Starlink's. The defaults critics cite were applications that failed federal review, not built networks that went bankrupt. The largest single rejection was Starlink itself — the FCC pulled its $885 million award after finding it couldn't show it would deliver at the time. Okanogan is the inverse: a network that is already built and already serving customers.

No private company has built it — which is exactly why a public utility should. Where the returns don't pencil out for a private firm chasing profit, a public utility — with a far lower cost of capital and a mandate to serve — is the right owner. That's not a loophole; it's the entire reason public utility districts exist. And the District isn't competing with private business: its eight local providers aren't rivals it undercuts — they're its customers.

The open-access model is the opposite of crowding out the private sector. The District sells wholesale capacity to private retailers who compete with one another over its network — more private competition than most rural counties have. Abandoning the network doesn't free a private market; it hands the county to a single out-of-state satellite company.

Recurring equipment refresh is the cost of this business for any owner — Starlink and every private WISP included. But the durable assets here — the towers, the fiber backhaul, the rights-of-way — don't go obsolete; only the swappable radios do. "We'll have to keep it current" is an argument for stewardship, not for walking away. Letting end-of-life gear decay is the one path that guarantees the network falls behind.

Fiber to every ranch across this terrain costs a fortune and takes decades. Rural fiber runs roughly $77,000–$204,000 per location in the hardest-to-reach areas (USDA ReConnect awards) — which is why federal policy itself (NTIA's "extremely-high-cost" guidance) directs states to use fixed wireless where fiber is uneconomic, and why Washington's own 2026 BEAD plan put nearly half its build on fixed wireless. The District already runs the recommended model — a fiber backbone with a wireless last mile — and as a tax-exempt public utility it is the lowest-cost-of-capital owner this infrastructure will ever have, a structural reason no private firm has matched it. Fiber where it pays, wireless where it reaches; letting the wireless layer decay is not the prudent choice.

The ability to stabilize this market is a 25-year stock, not a switch — and you don't get it back by flipping it. When entering and leaving a market both cost money you can't recover, exit and re-entry are asymmetric (the "hysteresis" result — Dixit, J. Political Economy, 1989): a temporary retreat becomes a permanent loss. Customers who buy a Starlink dish sink a cost that works against returning; the small local ISPs, who own no towers of their own, lose customers and fold; trained crews scatter into a market short 178,000 broadband workers; and the one-time federal money that built the network may never come again — the District just walked away from a $30M fiber grant it already held. The cautionary tale critics like to cite, iProvo, is the proof in reverse: the same open-access wholesale model, its providers left to collapse, sold for $1 and never rebuilt. "We'll invest later" assumes a door that may not be open. Why the pause can't simply be undone →

"Competition exists" says nothing about whether the market will serve ratepayers — that depends on who owns it. The District competed here for two decades and grew, back when its rival was a locally owned operator (NCI Datacom) and the only fallback was slow satellite. That market has changed: NCI is now part of an out-of-area investment firm (Core Fiber / Heritage Holding) that consolidates local companies across a dozen-plus industries, and the rural fallback is Starlink — a ~$350B multinational that prices by how few choices you have. By the one measure that matters for a price-stabilization utility — ownership and incentives — the market is worse for ratepayers now than at any point the District operated in it. Across essential services, for-profit/outside-investor ownership reliably costs consumers more (the GAO found private water utilities charge $15–21/mo more than public). That's not the moment to step back — it's the moment a public check matters most. See then vs. now →