When a government - whether city or port - hides a document online, then we know they are trying to sneak it through and avoid citizens even knowing about it. 

When they slow walk it for weeks then they are hoping to drop it when the alert citizens, such as Jon Humphrey, will slow down in their alertness - and miss it.  

When the Public Works newsletter on Friday makes no mention of such an important contract, such an important vote - then we know Public Works wants us to think nothing is happening.  They are sneaks and hiding public information.  

Why have a highly paid communications person when the intent is to hide information from the citizens  - from the residents - from the people?  Thank you Jon. I am sending emails tonight. 

If the Telecom contract is so good for us, the residents of Bellingham, then the council should be proud to approve it with our full knowledge of what they are doing. When it is bad - when Greed is in play - then they are sneaky and hide things.  

I can understand that each city / county should have their own Broadband just like Sewer, water etc. However, this being a relatively new public utility (though this is not officially designated as Public Utility by WA Utilities Commission), the federal policies have been to let it grow as private owned businesses. The plum fruits of dense population centers have already been taken by the fewer than 10 large internet / broadband providers. Just imagine this newly evolving industry, which brings in new technological advances every year, will require substantial continuous investments for upgrades by paying annual fees to private tech companies. Now the rural areas are really lagging because it is still up to private businesses to pick and choose jurisdictions to get grant funds. An internet speed of 150 mb download and 25 mb upload can perform over 90% of tasks of any household or business.  This demand for each City to reinvent the wheel and compete with established (and rich!) for-profit companies with GIG Speed using tax dollars is NOT PRACTICAL. Just the initial investment to get something like this off the ground will be in tens of millions. Instead of bashing the City Administration, let us find out how many residents in Bellingham are ready to pay EXTRA TAX to build a competing GIG Speed broadband network, which will need upgrade every year. Ask yourself:  Shall a new broadband compete for tax dollars against the Sewer Tratment Plant? Public Safety Budget (Police, Fire and EMS) budget? Mental Health Crisis and Treatment Priorities? 

Our nation has not been able to create a Public Healthcare network and the public pays over a trillion dollars annually in premiums. Shall we create a competing healthcare network locally with TAX DOLLARS? I would like all readers to give it a thought!

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of all of Satpal’s many lies and inaccuracies here let me just say how interesting it is when our Trump Democrats like Satpal say all of the same, crazy, uneducated, poorly researched things that Donald Trump himself would say like what he said above.
Remember when the Whatcom Democrats were swearing that Satpal was a progressive, even though Shewmake, Ramel, Lilliquist, etc. share many of the same views as the Trump administration, especailly in their “economic policies” as he proves again here. Ah the memories.
Look at him attacking not just public infrastructure but public healthcare too even though every other developed country does both fiber to the premises and universal healthcare successfully and at lower prices than we do for terrible private services.
Anyway, LIlliquist is out there using the tactics of Trump in the background too, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Satpal’s Insane Rants Unpacked and Fact Checked:
1. Satpal is 100% wrong about this being a new public utility. As highlighted in the book “Fiber” by Susan Crawford, and on many other sources, many places have been running public fiber networks successfully for decades and providing better service at much lower prices. Satpal just lies here and hopes you are not willing to do any research of your own. After all, if the establishment wanted your opinion they would have already given it to you. Remember, our elected officials and government staff hate public input, especially at the PUD, that’s why they love meeting with their good friends at big telecom in the background instead.
2. As covered in the book “Captive Audience” the big telecoms meet with each other and carve out territories. We have virtual monopolies everywhere, so no, from a functional standpoint you do not have real choice. Actual competition costs money so the telecoms simply don’t do it and there is no way to hold them accountable as there is with a public provider. Having a public option also changes the behavior of the private providers for the better and creates actual competition. Lilliquist himself said that years ago when he almost had a spine. The Democrats took care of that spine issue over the years apparently.
3. No truly significant advances have been made by private tech companies. We are always behind the 8-ball for speed, reliability and all copper tech, like DSL and Comcast Coax, is obsolete. If you don’t have a wired fiber to the home connection, your connection is overpriced and obsolete. The Biden’s fiber preference is going to be removed too, so get ready for CenturyLink/Lumen to offer you a turd with wires in it and call it broadband, because now they can actually get funding for turd-net.
4. Satpal is well aware that the testing the state and telecoms use is NOT accurate. That’s why we use RRUL, real-time response under load, network testing. I’ve talked about this many times before. Even if his statement were true, with 150 Mbits down and 25 Mbits up, being adequate (which it’s not for a household or business), none of the connections in town hold up to that testing for more than a few seconds. WIth the exception of Quantum Fiber, which is only slightly better than Comcast. Quantum has no intention of really competing with Comcast, CenturyLink or anyone else. Remember the telecom territories. None of them provide anything close to what you can get on public networks in Chatanooga, TN, many other parts of WA state, the rest of the developed world, etc. anyway.
5. GIG speed is a marketing term. Again, virtually every provider here does NOT provide true GIg speed service and their service is NOT symmetrical like real Fiber service is supposed to be. Even if they did, the cost for a Comcast “business” connection at $300 or more a month, with potential overage fees, would get you a 10 Gig symmetrical fiber connection with no data caps on public networks like in Chatanooga. $50 would get you a true Gig connection. Poor residents get 50 Mbits almost for free.
6. A Dig Once Policy would reduce the cost of installation by 90%. So no, there are NO NEW TAXES necessary. That’s a fairytale that Satpal and his good special interest friends tell you to try to scare you.
We just need the right policy.
Fiber would attract new jobs in many other industries too. So fiber makes money, improves quality of life, and increases opportunities. We already pay too much in taxes. It’s time for our elected officials to use that money wisely, on infrastructure, and not pretend after many tax increases that they somehow still don’t have enough.
However, Satpal has been the most corrupt, least effective, County Executive so I didn’t expect him to understand that. He shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for the people he forced out of their homes during the pandemic with his Reagan era policies to thank him.
7. This is a critical resource that supports our police, fire, libraries, public schools and more. It is PART of the budget of a modern city, not an addition to it.
(I have covered all of this in my articles, but if you don’t want to take my word for it, so have dozens of other authors, entire countries and orgs like the Fiber-Optic Association, Community Broadband Networks, Yale Author Susan Crawford and many more.
Lilliquist’s Lies: Now onto the lies of our other favorite Trump Democrat.
Liliquist, who is currently overseeing the Public Works Commission, stated the following lies to citizens who forwarded his responses to me today. I will tackle them one at a time.
1. Lilliquist claims that the disastrous Uptown report was refined into a “real plan.” This is like saying that he gave you a pile of shit to build a table with and then told you to pick out only the choicest pieces of shit to work with and then build a table with that. Here is my article on that:
https://nwcitizen.com/entry/how-to-get-nothing-done
The Uptown report can’t be used to create a plan. It is too deeply flawed as we’ve shown and lacks the research to be a plan in the first place.
2. Lilliquist is now referring to the virtually worthless “conduit ordinance” we wrote about here as a “Dig Once Policy” now. Lilliquist is doing the equivalent of putting lipstick on a donkey and passing it off as a beautiful woman. Well no matter what they call it, it’s not a beautiful woman, it’s a donkey with lipstick on it just like our conduit ordinance is NOT a DIG ONCE POLICY in any real sense. Here’s the article on that:https://nwcitizen.com/entry/updated-conduit-policy-worthless/P2300
In short, they have nothing like a proper Dig Once Policy. They have a do nothing “Conduit Ordinance” which is virtually worthless they are passing off as a Dig Once Policy because they are liars and have been lying for a decade now. Please stop reelecting them.
3. Lilliquist says this is part of a 10 year plan. However, just like it’s worthless when someone tells you they will address climate change by 2050, you know after Miami is underwater permanently and all of southern CA burns down, a 10 year plan means nothing since the date is too far off in the future.
The truth is that they still have no plan for providing open access, like Mount Vernon does on its public network, or for the COB acting as a provider. They say they’ll talk about it, maybe, for another decade or so and let us know.
4. Our elected officials do NOT care that this network provides the backbone for our critical services as mentioned above and has no real redundancy. They say that maintaining our critical infrastructure costs too much, you know like the Governor of CA said about the fire hydrants and broken, dry reservoirs, feeding those hydrants during the latest fires. Guess what the hydrants ran dry causing hundreds of millions in damages and an unnecessary loss of life. Fiber doesn’t cost nearly that much to install.
Think about a communications failure during an emergency. Well, even after being asked to do so, the COB still doesn’t care about routine maintenance and upgrades to this critical infrastructure.

Overall, they are hoping you won’t do any research of your own. The fact that I did is why they kept me off of the big telecom led BAG (Broadband Advisory Group). Had I been there I would have been able to create real change, but guys like Satpal and Lilliquist have made their careers off of pretending to be progressives in public but acting like Trump when they make policy decisions. Remember how they abandoned us during the pandemic? I remember.

Dear Jon,

You are drowned in your own nonsense. Best wishes!

Your opinion matters very little to me and intelligent people everywhere. Your wishes mean nothing as your actions show who you really are. You are a man with power who uses it to harm the many to benefit the few. The big difference between you and me is that I give people well researched information they can check. You, like your friend Trump, simply say crazy things, that sound "strong" only to idiots, and hope they believe you. I'm sure your army of idiots and special interest friends will continue to manipulate you into harming your community. It's what they do with weak minded people to maintain power.