After searching for a suitable partner, the Village of Bald Head Island in North Carolina has reopened its RFP for a gigabit fiber network. Apparently, the community received four responses but no proposal provided the level of detail they require.
In order to give respondents another opportunity and to offer new candidates a chance, Bald Head Island leaders chose to release the RFP a second time with additional questions and a responsibility matrix. No response will be considered without answers to these new appendices. All three documents are available on the Village website.
The Village of Bald Head Island is home to approximately 160 year-round residents, but numbers swell to 7,000 during the busy tourist season. Vacation homes and part-time residents bring the potential fiber service area up to 2,500 but incumbents AT&T and Tele-Media don’t see the value of bringing fiber to such an environment. The StarNews Online described community leadership’s frustration and decision to move forward:
“Broadband is not available on Bald Head Island,” said Calvin Peck, the village’s manager. “It just isn’t, and none of the current providers have plans to invest the money to make it available, so the village council feels it’s an important enough issue to spend village resources to make it happen.”
While Bald Head Island looks for a partner it also plans to ask voters if they agree to pursue better broadband. Voters will decide on November 3rd if they support a $10 million bond issue. Community leaders will focus on revenue bonds, one of the most common ways to finance municipal network deployment. This mechanism shifts repayment to those who use the network, reducing financial risk to the community at large.
Clearly community leaders understand that the time to act is now:
“We are losing people who would build, buy or rent property on the island because they do not have Internet service,” said Gene Douglas, the village’s mayor pro tempore. “Many executives of major companies’ office is wherever they are as long as they have access to the Internet, and we simply don’t have that.”
As we have noted in the past, good partners are difficult to find; municipalities must always move forward with caution. We applaud Bald Head Island for being thorough and insisting on the details before choosing a partner. Kudos to them also for taking a bifurcated approach and asking voters for funding approval now so all pieces are in place when they find the right partner.
This article is apart of MuniNetworks. The original piece can be found here
