Jesse Harris has posted an interesting update on the present UTOPIA situation, where a number of cities are heaping perhaps too much blame on UTOPIA for rising local taxes.
A lot of cities have been talking property tax hikes lately, and the most certain thing about all of the proposals is that elected officials are going to look for someone or something to blame. In UTOPIA member cities, blaming the fiber network has become the easy go-to solution, especially since so many mayors and city council members weren’t involved in the original decision. The problem, however, is that this blame is completely paving over a deeper problem of city tax structure that’s boring, doesn’t fit the anti-UTOPIA narrative, and is a much larger problem for city budgets. Let’s take the examples of West Valley City, Orem, and Taylorsville, the latter of which is not a UTOPIA member city. In all three cases, they’ve called for large (as a percentage) property tax increases to make up for lagging sales tax revenues. So if UTOPIA is the cause of property tax increases, why would a non-member city need to more-or-less do the same thing?
The discussion in the comments offer some additional news about UTOPIA’s efforts to expand its subscriber-base by giving residents the option of “leasing” a last mile connection if they cannot afford to pay for it outright in areas where UTOPIA is presently not able to extend its network all the way to the home.
Communities seeking alternative ways of financing networks that simply issuing lots of debt upfront should examine the different approaches UTOPIA has pioneered.