I wanted to share a short article highlighting the never-ending hypocrisy surrounding our institutions and public resources under the leadership of all the mayors and city councils I’ve lived under in my decade and a half in Bellingham.While researching public broadband and being given the run-around by Public Works, IT, the City Council, and the Public Records Office, I discovered that one institution does have a public fiber lease with the City of Bellingham (CoB). It’s the Whatcom Transportation Authority (WTA).

I have no problem with this. In fact, I’m glad public transit is expanding and our network is being used. However, when I asked Joel Pfundt, the public works director, why those of us wanting to help the homeless, and the poor in general, can’t use the network, he gave me static, as usual.

Then, when I asked about the many existing COB-operated wi-fi spots that have simply been turned off instead of upgraded, I received the same static. Pfundt said he preferred to involve an ISP (like Verizon) instead of performing upgrades of existing COB equipment at those locations. But when I asked why anyone would involve an ISP to provide service for an existing public fiber network, I again received static.

I belong to a group of talented, hardworking, and competent tech people who are willing to volunteer their help to our community. We have offered to install $300-per-piece external WAPs (Wireless Access Points), to replace these inactive APs (Access Points), at no charge to the city. Unfortunately, our help is consistently turned down, even though the city complains they don’t have the staff or other resources to do their own simple infrastructure upgrades.

This is shaping up to be just another corporate welfare scheme. There is no need to allow ISPs exclusive deals to provide services we used to provide for free to our citizens. We already have an existing network, the COB does employ enough staff to make our public hotspots work, they just don’t do it and they won’t accept help. Their mission seems to be to maintain the illusion that they’re working hard.

So how did WTA get a lease when the COB continues to refuse other similar entities working in the public interest? Years ago, I spoke with the network administrator for WTA at the time. They admitted they were friends with Mayor Fleetwood. So, while I support WTA having a lease, it’s sad that the only way to get anything done in Bellingham is to be part of the Good Ol’ Boys/Girls Club. You see, they don’t care if you’re talented, hardworking, competent and willing to help your community. First and foremost, you need to be one of them.

In the same e-mail exchanges, I asked Pfundt for an update on backup systems for our emergency services communications equipment. He admitted that a private company provides their power backup services, but the city doesn’t know what equipment is or is not connected to it. So, they have no idea whether the system will work during an actual emergency. At the same time, they currently have no plans to look into it.

James Erb, a city attorney, tells me that if we really want access to the COB public fiber network, we should sue the city. This is the city flexing: they have unlimited resources and if they need to use our lawyers to protect special interests like Comcast, Verizon, etc., they will just raise our taxes.

So, what to do now? If WTA has a lease, that means the COB already has a process in place to easily provide other leases. We need to keep demanding access to the resources we have already paid for. Specifically, we need to follow the Mount Vernon Open Access Model. We also need to keep holding them accountable. Lying is obviously as natural to the COB government as breathing and we need to remember that decades of corruption and toxic nepotism won’t disappear overnight.

Relevant Salaries (Rounded):
Mayor: $236 K

Council Members: $71 K
Public Works Director: $215 K

City Attorney: $ 215 K
IT Director: $171 K
Fiber-Optic Network Engineer: $110 K
Parks Director: $171 K

Library Director: $176 K
Total: $1.365 Million

All departments have various additional staff who carry out day to day tasks and make a bit less than $100 K per year. It’s easy to estimate that we spend about $2 million a year on staff who refuse to do even the most basic work to make this community better for the bottom 90%.

The truly sad thing here is that we’re not even asking them to do the work. We just want Open Access to the public network like Mount Vernon has so we can help the poor. We’ll do all of the work as volunteers. In some cases, we didn’t even ask for Open Access; we just offered to upgrade or add external WAPs, and we offered to do the fundraising to get them. There is no expense to the city.

It should be noted that the idea of increasing City Council pay has come up. My question is: For what? For NOT advocating for the citizens of our town over and over again? I could write a program that would replace the city council in a few minutes.

Here is the BASIC code for it from the council member’s point of view.

PRINT: "Are you a large donor, corporation, or special interest? (Y/N)"

INPUT response$

IF UCASE$(response$) = "Y" THEN:

PRINT "Here’s my private burner phone number. Let’s meet!"

ELSEIF UCASE$(response$) = "N" THEN:

PRINT “Go to hell!”

ELSE

PRINT "I’m pretending to know what I’m talking about. Just smile, nod and pay me more."

END IF