PORT ANGELES — City Council members have not yet decided how the city should respond to the potential sale of Port Angeles-based Capacity Provisioning Inc.
But they agree doing nothing is not an option.
“I have two pages of questions, as I’m sure everyone [does], but I am already ruling out ‘do nothing,’” City Councilwoman Brooke Nelson said at Tuesday evening’s council meeting.
Lee Afflerbach, founder and principal engineer for Maryland-based Columbia Telecommunications Corps., presented four options he and city staff had developed as potential responses to the possible sale of Capacity Provisioning Inc., or CPI, which provides fiber-optic Internet services to the city and a number of other public entities in Clallam County.
CPI Vice President Craig Johnson confirmed Saturday that an “interested party” has inquired about purchasing the company. He provided no other details.
He said then that the sale is not a sure thing.
In a Wednesday email, Johnson said there was no new information to share about the potential CPI sale.
Vital to city
City Manager Dan McKeen said the network CPI built, for which the city pays a monthly service fee to use, has become vital for the city’s operations, especially for the utility service the city supplies to its residents.
“We incorporate [the CPI infrastructure] into almost everything we do,” McKeen said.
“We have significant reliance on those services.”
Phil Lusk, the city’s deputy director of telecommunications systems, said the city’s existing service agreement with CPI would transfer to the company’s new owner and last until 2017, meaning service would not stop even if CPI were sold tomorrow.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Afflerbach presented four responses the city could possibly take to the sale of CPI, though he did not rule out other options that have not been thought of yet.
Those four options are to do nothing, to seek a new Internet services provider in mid-2014, to build infrastructure to replace the CPI network or to negotiate to purchase the existing CPI network.
With no formal vote, council members directed staff to work with Afflerbach to gather more information on what implementing the last three options would mean for the city.
“I don’t like the idea of doing nothing, but the others — there are just so many questions,” Councilwoman Sissi Bruch said.
“We need more information.”
Request for proposals
Seeking a new service provider would involve issuing a request for proposals from other service providers in the area, such as Wave Broadband and CenturyLink, Afflerbach explained.
Afflerbach did not have specific numbers for how much building new fiber-optic infrastructure would cost but estimated installing new fiber-optic aerial lines could approach $30,000 per mile of cable.
“[This option would be] as if we were a utility starting from zero and saying, ‘We want to build a telecommunications utility. How much does it cost?’” Afflerbach said.
Multiple council members expressed concerns with the cost it would mean for the city.
“That’s my big question: How do we capitalize something like this?” Deputy Mayor Brad Collins said.
Last option
The last option would mean the city would negotiate the purchase of CPI itself and operate the network to support the city and CPI’s other customers, though the city could elect to outsource these operations to a third party.
Bruch said she wanted more information on what CPI-owned infrastructure is used by the city and CPI’s other customers compared with that used solely by the city.
Afflerbach told council members he likely could come back to them in about a month with more information.
“Now that you’ve told us what you want to do, I think we can turn it around pretty quickly,” Afflerbach said.
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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.
