Innovation in Small Town America (Episode 48)

The community I wanna talk about today is actually Ammon, Idaho. It’s one that I’ve talked about before. I’m just curious, Brenda, have you ever heard of Ammon, Idaho, before outside of me talking about it all the time?

In Ammon’s case, it actually didn’t start off being about what was good for residents. It was more focused on actually the municipal services because they needed to get broadband to different parts of the city. For instance, they had a swimming pool and the cost to connect the swimming pool from the incumbent carrier was much greater than the cost of them doing it themselves with fiber, in which they would basically have no recurring costs. Whereas if they went with the big company that was there already they would have not only had to pay a one-time fee but ongoing fees to keep it going. So they built it themselves. They continued building it themselves to connect areas all around the city related to their own needs. Then businesses wanted to start being connected so they started connecting some of the businesses.

Then when residents were really clamoring to be connected they came up with a new model using improvement districts, which is a very common way of financing infrastructure. We made this video that is called The Virtual End of Cable Monopolies, in which we explain exactly what Ammon’s doing. It’s got some really great interviews. Tremendous reception from people that have seen it. It’s actually helped to convince many cities around the country to consider their options.

One of the key points I wanted to make is that in Ammon this was something, it was an idea. A lot of this came out of a person, Bruce Patterson, who had started with the city as a plumbing inspector. He had really good ideas. He really got into this and he decided to apply himself to it. It ended up pioneering this new model, in part with the friendship and partnership of some other local private carriers and people working for some local rural carriers. They were all just working toward common purposes. That’s something that we see happening in small towns across America.

The other thing I was curious though, Chris, what I understand is that a lot of communities that have gone down this road of doing their own fiber networks, their own broadband networks have tried to finance it out of the revenues that come from the initial subscribers. You either borrow money or you’re using the revenues from your initial subscribers to build out the network. I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit about how improvement districts are used for other kinds of improvements. Like what might people be familiar with that an improvement district is used for?

The interesting thing about the Ammon model is that you can opt in. If you would like service you can pay a one-time fee for the cost of connecting your home, which might be on the order of $2,500 to $3,500. Or more commonly, you would have a 20-year assessment on your home and you’d pay it off every month, $15, $16 at a time. That’s just a part of the bill. If you move, and this is something that you know all about John, from the property assessed clean energy PACE programs, if you move then the new homeowner, they get the benefit of the fiber but they also have to deal with the costs of that infrastructure. It’s very equitable also.

Ammon just breaks this out and the costs of these projects out in very intelligent ways that really make sense and allow communities to get into this without taking a lot of risk, without borrowing a whole lot of money for everyone in the community. We’re advocates of communities doing what works, so I don’t want to say that one is necessarily better than the other, but it’s really great to have options for communities to pick what’s best for them.

We want to switch gears now. I’m curious, Brenda, you’re on the show so rarely. I’d love to get into some of the stuff that you’re working on in this brand new report that you call Yes In My Backyard. Tell us about this report and then let’s talk about some of the small towns that are doing really cool things around composting.

I love one of the programs we documented is Orlando, Fla., where their marketing campaign was Get Dirty With Your Valentine. They launched it on Valentine’s Day. They got so much great publicity and marketing around their campaign that I think they gave out 3,000 home composting bins the first year. It’s been quite an amazing program. Then they expanded that to Get Dirty with Your Neighbor. One of the tips for replication is certainly be innovative and think outside the box.

Give you an example. Cheverly, Md., in Prince George’s County, is a small town of 6,500. They invested $4,000 in providing discounted home composting bins. Over 10 years they estimate that that 4,000 investment will turn into $60,000 over the 10 year life of the bins they gave out. They have calculated that a quarter ton of organic material, food scraps and yard waste, is diverted per household per year. That can add up to a lot of savings over the lifetime of the bins that a local community gives away.

This is something that is growing but to add curbside collection is an additional cost. It’s additional labor. It’s additional trucks. Cheaper than disposal but still. One of the things I think, if you’re a small town and you’re looking at adding composting you can start with home composting. You can start with a drop-off program. Falls Church, Va., was one of the communities we documented. It’s a town of 14,000, a bedroom community of the greater Washington, DC area. They started with collecting food scraps at a farmer’s market. They had so much interest and people demanding like, “Hey, we want a drop-off that’s permanent, seven days a week that we can come and drop off our material any day of the week,” that they let out a contract.

They contracted with a small company called Veteran Compost that hires returning veterans. They have a permanent drop-off site. That was so popular that they decided to offer curbside collection. When they surveyed the households that signed up for curbside most of the households said, “Yeah, we started at the farmer’s market.” One lesson I can tell you for if you’re a small town is feel free, start small. There’s no one way to do this. Start with home composting. Start with a drop-off. Farmer’s markets are great.

The way that they rolled out their curbside program I thought was really thinking outside the box. They actually issued another RFP for the curbside and they awarded that to a separate small-scale company called Compost Crew. They did a shared savings with that company so a household would only pay say six dollars a month and the city paid the rest. They were able to offer the program with a very small cost to their residents without increasing their solid waste budget. Again, lots of fabulous examples from small towns all across the country.

Their first approach to that was this notion of an energy district. It kind of brought from, it borrowed from the concept of soil and conservation districts back during the Great Depression which implemented a lot of agricultural practices to help keep soil fertile, and to increase yields, and to sustain farming communities. Their idea was what is it that we can do to keep more of that $100 million local. After the Great Recession in 2008 they got some initial federal funding. Their focus was essentially how do we help residents and businesses in the community keep more dollars local. They’ve been able to do assessments on more than 600 facilities, 600 properties in the community and help to retain more than $3 million in savings just for those users. Three million dollars that now circulates in the local economy.

That led to another initiative. The energy district was one way to kind of nibble at the edges of this problem. What residents of Decorah have done is said we want to go the next step. We want to talk more about having control over our energy economy. We want more control over keeping energy dollars local. We want less resistance from an outside entity like an electric utility. They’ve talked about creating a municipal electric utility, having a city-owned utility where they have control over where the energy purchases would come from and the kinds of fees that would be charged to customers who install renewable energy, essentially more control over where their energy dollars are going.

They started this off in 2017, I mean this is the culmination of decades of conversation, with a study looking at what it would mean to form this municipal electric company. Their initial findings were that they could get more renewable energy, more local renewable energy. Iowa’s an enormous wind resource, also a fairly good solar resource. In fact, I forgot to mention earlier that the Winneshiek Energy District helped install so much solar that if you measured it against most of the large cities across the country this county would have ranked number two in solar per capita. So they had been making remarkable progress for a community in the Upper Midwest and with not the greatest solar resource in the country.

They did this feasibility study for the municipal utility and found they could save about 30% on their energy bills over continuing to take service from the incumbent monopoly company. It created this campaign. It created this big movement in the city, this big conversation about is it possible for us to take over the utility company and do we have this opportunity to localize control that can continue to extend our interest in more energy self-reliance.

What I would say is that I agree with what the local organizers said in the paper afterwards. In the Decorah News they said essentially what we’ve learned is that we can have this very fruitful and thoughtful conversation in our community about what our options are and what we can do and that there are many other ways that we can explore for helping to keep more energy dollars local, that this wasn’t the beginning of the end. This was part of the conversation and a continuation of the conversation. People are gonna keep thinking about that opportunity there to save more money by localized energy. They might not be going whole-hog right now and having a city takeover of the electric company but I think Decorah has shown how small towns can really organize around these energy issues to get really impressive results in terms of building out solar in ways that save customers money and helping people reduce their energy bills, and that it doesn’t take a big city to do big things.

Once again, please help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and me, Nick Stumo-Langer. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction Al. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Nick Stumo-Langer and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.