Grant PUD fiber workshop scheduled for January

Cheryl Schweizer/Columbia Basin Herald John Janney discusses some of the information from a study of the Grant County PUD fiber program with commissioners. A workshop for commissioners and the public is scheduled for mid-January.

by CHERYL SCHWEIZER
Staff Writer | December 20, 2016 2:00 AM

EPHRATA — Grant County PUD officials will sponsor a workshop during the week of Jan. 23 to discuss the status of its fiber optic buildout, the wireless project, and where it all goes from here.

The workshop will be open to the public, and district customers and PUD commissioners will have a chance to ask questions and make suggestions, said chief financial officer John Janney.

Janney updated commissioners on the ongoing review of the project at their last meeting. Commissioners asked for a review of the fiber project and its wireless supplement earlier this year. Janney said the PUD hired a consultant to help them answer those questions.

“The objective to this is really to try to understand what the fiber business is costing and how much of an impact it has on our electric rates,” Janney said. “The way we’ve been measuring it in the last several years has been very transparent and upfront, but it really doesn’t capture all the costs and all the benefits.”

As a result the impact of the fiber business on electric rates has been “unclear,” Janney said. Utility district employees have been working to “quantify about how much we have invested in the system. And then going forward, to lay out several different options.”

The original plan was to provide wholesale fiber optic service throughout the county, and the PUD could still do that, Janney said. The project could be stopped where it is. The buildout could be speeded up or slowed down, and there’s a range of options, he said.

“There are a lot of assumptions that need to be made,” Janney said. They include the number of fiber customers the PUD can expect, costs of future construction, costs of maintaining the system and how all of that might impact electric rates.

The PUD can’t provide fiber optic service to customers directly; it provides wholesale service to businesses that sell to customers. Utility district officials met with those business owners, and Janney said they indicated they would be willing to pay higher wholesale rates, if the alternative was no PUD-supplied fiber at all.

In answer to a question from commissioner Larry Schaapman, Janney said the analysis includes consideration of the wireless program. The wireless program was started to supplement the in-ground fiber. It supplies service to parts of the county that haven’t received fiber yet.

The retail providers said the fiber system is more reliable. And the financial analysis is showing the wireless system might be more expensive in the long run, Janney said.

The analysis is designed to look at the long-term operation of a telecommunications system, Janney said. Commissioner Bob Bernd asked if the studies included some consideration of the future, since fiber might not be needed in the future. Janney said PUD officials are thinking about that, since they don’t want to invest in a system, then discover it’s obsolete in a few years.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.