Opinion : You can\'t stand still in a parade

iVinton campaign for telecom utility

Debi Durham, Director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority said at a meeting in Van Horne, “Growing communities have four things in place. Those four things are commercial buildings, utility capacity, high speed connectivity for internet communication, and housing.”

Right now Vinton has commercial buildings and commercial land available, and we have utility capacity. What we lack are housing options and high speed internet. The absence of those two factors is holding Vinton back in efforts to recruit and grow businesses, and is working against us when families are looking to relocate.

Today, “High speed” internet isn’t a luxury for businesses. In business many people are simultaneously doing tasks requiring the ability to send and receive information over the internet. Imagine a call center with 30 people simultaneously talking, listening, and accessing data on a database in a location thousands of miles from Vinton. “Fast” in this example actually means “a lot of data at the same time”. The current commercial vendors of internet service in Vinton aren’t providing the speeds we need to meet the needs of business today.

Reliability isn’t a luxury either. For many businesses today, an internet connection that’s down means the business is effectively out of business. Without the ability to access the internet they can’t access critical information, place orders, or help their customers. Being told a service technician won’t arrive until three days later, as some Vinton businesses have experienced, is a minor catastrophe. What business has confidence in their future growth under those conditions?

Businesses aren’t the only ones wanting fast, simultaneous access to the internet. Families do too. Children are doing homework while surfing the web, accessing photos, and posting to social media. Mom or Dad may be using their iPad as a cookbook while they’re making the evening meal. Someone else is streaming video, and another is playing a very data-intensive game. When families relocate today, the availability of fast, reliable, high-capacity internet connections are part of what they’re looking for.

Some people are worried that moving forward with a local telecommunications will raise the cost of living in Vinton. They should be much more worried about rising costs from not establishing our own telecommunications utility.

When a community’s population stays the same for many years, as Vinton’s population has, the average age tends to move upward. We don’t need statistics to tell us that’s true, we can just look at the average age of our service groups, church groups, and other organizations to see it for ourselves. Look at our school enrollment – Vinton’s population is the same, but because we’re older as a whole, we have fewer children in school. One effect is that as the average age creeps up, a greater share of the population is on a fixed income and especially vulnerable to a higher cost of living.

We also know prices increase over time; a degree in economics isn’t needed to know that’s true. Over time the cost of the critical services we receive from local government: police protection, street maintenance, sewer, clean water, and energy will increase as well.

The choice is clear and the math is simple. If our community is content to continue on the no-growth path we’ve been traveling on, the cost of living here is going to increase or our standard of living is going to decrease. I don’t think anyone wants less police protection, dirty water, faulty sewers, or rougher streets, so the smart money in a no-growth future is for higher costs.

We think the best way to achieve a lower cost of living while improving our standard of living is to support initiatives designed to make Vinton more attractive to families on the move and businesses wanting to grow. Some members of our community have been working with Mayor Watson and the City Council to make housing more available. Ours, iVinton, is working to improve telecommunications for our community.

We held an election in 2005 to do the very same things we’re asking you to support today. In the 10 years since the election was defeated not much about our internet service has changed. In that election voters were swamped with direct mail and TV ads claiming that a local telecommunications utility would fail, that it would result in higher taxes, and that the current vendors were rapidly on the move toward faster, more reliable service. Chances are good that you will again be confronted by those same claims.

Ten years later, Vinton is a community with lower capacity internet service than other Benton County communities including Garrison, Van Horne, Mt. Auburn, Norway, Watkins, Keystone, Newhall, and Atkins. In addition, Shellsburg and Urbana will soon join this group now offering extremely fast fiber optic internet services.

We encourage you to learn more and we’re confident that if you do, you’ll vote ‘Yes’ on November 3rd. iVinton…..we’ve waited long enough.