Former Lane County commissioner Cindy Wood-Weeldreyer said "when she was first elected commissioner representing East Lane County in 1995 she focused on health and human services issues and on improving communication between the County Commission and its rural residents," Mortensen writes. "One issue Weeldreyer was dealing with was that while people in the metro area could attend commission meetings or watch them on community television, the broadcasts were not available to rural residents. With this in mind, she went to a telecommunications conference in 1997 thinking she would learn more about expanding community TV. What she got was a crash course in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the need to expand Internet services."
"Weeldreyer became a 'rural telecommunications evangelist,'" Mortensen writes. "Two regional consortiums were formed: Regional Fiber Consortium and Fiber South Consortium, which later merged into one consortium under the name of the Regional Fiber Consortium in 2007."
"Weeldreyer spearheaded an effort to bring fiber optic to Eugene and surrounding towns in the late ’90s when she discovered that a private telecommunications company was laying fiber-optic cable from Seattle to San Diego," Mortensen writes. "At that time Eugene was developing what some called a 'Silicon Forest,' with high-tech companies like Hyundai (Hynix) and Sony moving in, but Weeldreyer feared the high-tech movement would only benefit towns along the I-5 corridor, not the small timber communities she represented" in and beyond the Cascade Mountains.
"The fiber itself is the least expensive component in the effort, she says, so the question was what kind of proposal could local communities make that would induce the private company to lay dark fiber for them," Mortensen writes. "Dark fiber is simply fiber-optic cable that has not been lit up — connected to the Internet. "Communities from Coburg to Oakridge quickly adopted ordinances to join the fiber consortiums and prepared to trade right-of-way access for fiber. But Weeldreyer says when the time came to negotiate — they were thinking of asking for maybe six strands of fiber — the telecommunications company responded 'in true corporate fashion, ‘We don’t need your right-of-way.’”
"The fiber route would follow the railroad’s right-of-way, which is why there is a major fiber-optic route running through Oakridge and down to Klamath Falls," Mortensen writes. "Luckily, Weeldreyer says, Pam Berrian, telecommunications program manager for the city of Eugene, found that the city still controlled the right-of-way where the railroad crosses High Street, since the street existed before the railroad."
"Cities can charge fees for telecommunications companies to use their rights-of-way, and while Weeldreyer says most towns are reluctant to give up those moneymaking fees, this time they offered to expedite the permit and let the company have the right-of-way in exchange for 12 strands of fiber and access points to members of the consortiums along the way," Mortensen writes. "The company, then called Pacific Fiber Link, faced with a roadblock to its fiber optic network, agreed."
Milo Mecham of the Lane County Council of Governments, who has been working on the broadband issue since the late ’90s, said they received an $8.3 million Broadband Technology Opportunities Program grant "to enhance the existing fiber-optic backbone and add 124 miles of fiber-optic network to deliver broadband capabilities in Lane, Douglas and Klamath counties," Mortensen writes. "The project, which wrapped up in the fall of 2013, installed fiber in every city in Lane County with the exception of Westfir and Dunes City," where there were no anchor institutions that qualified. (Read more)
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