(The Center Square) – Senate Bill 5671, which would modify eligibility criteria for Washington state’s broadband service expansion grant and loan program, received a public hearing Wednesday morning.
Sen. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, the prime sponsor of SB 5671, explained his rationale for the legislation.
“It is now fairly clear that we don’t need to continue giving state money to private for-profit entities,” he told members of the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee.
According to a Senate Bill report, SB 5671 “Strikes limited liability corporations and incorporated businesses or partnerships as eligible entities for the Broadband Service Expansion Grant and Loan Program.”
Narrowing the list of eligible applicants leaves eligible entities such as local governments, tribes, nonprofits, cooperative associations and multiparty entities comprised of public entity members to get funds to expand access to high-speed internet in underserved areas.
Committee member Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, asked Hansen if he thought there was room for both public and private access to grants to expand broadband.
“I feel like there are projects in certain areas that might be better handled by [the] private sector or [a] private-public partnership,” Short said. “Do you not see the need to have those private-public partnerships?”
Hansen suggested that federal grants are available to private companies for broadband expansion, but that state money is not needed.
Forbes Mercy, president of Washington Broadband, Inc., an internet company based in Yakima, testified against the bill and two related pieces of legislation.
“While these bills seem written by a phone lobbyist, the landline industry has lost 73% of its phone customers,” he said. “This Legislature continues to support a failing industry. The days of the government building phone infrastructure are over.”
Mercy told lawmakers that Lumen Technologies, Inc., a Monroe, La.-based telecommunications company, earned $11 billion last year but is still eligible for state grants.
“They refused to remove aging copper lines blocking fiber expansion on poles throughout the state, but here you are ready to subsidize them at the state level,” he complained.
Short then asked Hansen a question, but when he attempted to respond, the sound on the video was inaudible, and at that point, the committee chair said it was time to move on.
“It was obviously purposeful because that committee does not want on record the valid opposition to the state continuing its goal of making the internet run by the government and not the private sector,” Mercy told The Center Square over the phone after the hearing.
Mercy believes the state has done everything it can to prevent private companies from profiting from broadband.
“Anybody who knows the government knows their service is marginal at best compared to the private industries that built it,” he said. “And secondly, the people who built the Internet when the government didn’t even understand what it was built their whole lives and investments in counting it as their retirement.”
According to the Washington State Broadband Office, its mission “is to enrich the lives of all Washington state residents and businesses by ensuring they have access to affordable, reliable, redundant and scalable/future proof broadband technologies ensuring the economic viability of both urban and rural Washington state today and into the future.”