On July 15, the County Council approved sending a letter to Tom Novotney, Vice President and General Manager for Century Link in Spokane, Wash.
It read:
Thank you for taking the time to come and address the San Juan County Council’s questions and concerns about Century Link’s service in our County. Some of the areas covered were communications, redundancy, repair equipment availability, and protocol for handling emergencies.
We want to make sure that we all understand what we agreed to and what information we are expecting from Century Link as a result of the meeting.
In the near term:
- Protocols for emergencies
- Detailed communication plan which should include County Sheriff, County Information Services, and the Town of Friday Harbor Administrator. It was clear from our meeting that a press release doesn’t necessarily work when the internet is down.
- Types of equipment that will be on hand for repair work.
- What will happen and a timeline for when to address the redundancy issue. This should include the status of equipment, installation, and the radio frequency license which we thought was approved during the November outage.
In the longer term:
A written commitment with timeline and detail for infrastructure improvements in San Juan County; what will be done and how it will improve phone and broadband service.
It should not be a market competitiveness issue. This is very important since Century Link almost has a complete monopoly of the communications within the County and from the County to the mainland; handling not just land line services and internet but most of the cell phone lines to the mainland, and 911 services which include address and identification services from the mainland.
We look forward to your responses.
The letter was signed by San Juan County Councilmen Rick Hughes, Bob Jarman and Jamie Stephens.
Thank you very much, Councilors Hughes, Jarman and Stevens, for sending this much-needed letter on our behalf. As I’ve said at public meetings, REDUNDANCY is the key issue. And with OPALCO’s fiber backbone, we have the means to achieve it already. CenturyLink just has to find good ways to work together with the power company.