KELSEYVILLE — On Monday, about one year after adopting a broad strategy for creating economic development in Lake County, officials from Lakeport, Clearlake and the County of Lake discussed their progress toward the goals that strategy laid out in a joint meeting of the three governments.
Robert Eyler, a professor who also leads an economic consulting firm, introduced the Lake County Economic Development Strategy in December 2018. The strategy outlined yearly goals for economic development that included incentivizing broadband infrastructure, among others, for the first year.
Monday’s meeting was a follow-up to the introduction of that strategy.
With a new report released in November that describes the current local broadband situation and makes recommendations on how to improve it, the meeting’s central question was how to bring more broadband internet to Lake County.
David Espinoza, the report’s lead author and a Chico State professor who leads part of the California Public Utilities Commission program to expand broadband in parts of rural California, said thousands of Lake County residents don’t have access to broadband.
The State of California has passed legislation directing the CPUC to develop 98 percent broadband availability in every region of the state.
“Currently, Lake County has around 80 percent broadband service availability,” Espinoza said. “That means that there is still around 18 percent to go.”
Of roughly 25,000 households in Lake County, Espinoza added, 5,000 don’t have access to internet speeds that meet the state’s definition for broadband.
“We have 5,000 households that are unserved,” he said.
Statewide, according to Espinoza’s report, only about 5 percent of the population (2 million people) don’t have access to broadband. More than half of those live in rural areas, meaning rural residents are disproportionately left without broadband: 61 percent of the state’s rural population doesn’t have broadband access, compared with 2 percent of the urban population, according to the report.
Espinoza noted that the CPUC has about $300 million to spend on rural broadband efforts, and encouraged Lake County to follow the recommendations in his report, which include adopting policies that foster broadband infrastructure creation and applying for grants to bring some of that $300 million home.
District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown took issue with one of Espinoza’s recommendations—namely, that local governments adopt “dig once” policies to encourage broadband conduit installation alongside any new excavation projects. The City of Lakeport adopted such an ordinance last week, and Clearlake and the county are considering doing so.
“It takes an awful lot of coordination” between construction crews and broadband providers to make something like that happen, Brown contested. “I don’t think we have the resources to do that.”
Espinoza argued that the “dig once” policies will make it cheaper for broadband companies to install cable, calling the effort “convenient” but noting that it is still a “new concept.”
Apart from broadband, local efforts to implement the economic development strategy adopted in 2018 have been focused on two other areas: improving the Lampson Field airport and developing an online tool to for prospective businesses to identify buildings they could rent or buy in Lake County.
At Lampson Field, a repaving project was initiated by the County of Lake, and a pilots’ lounge project led by the Lake County Chamber of Commerce was begun.
The Lake County Economic Development Corporation, a public-private entity that has been a focal point for local development efforts, created a tool on its website that compiles data on eligible properties for commercial development. According to LCEDC’s Andy Lucas, the tool has data on about 200 properties countywide, and is slotted to expand.
