Port of Whitman County joins broadband cooperative

Port of Whitman County commissioners are framing their decision to join the Washington Ports Broadband Cooperative as a way to reduce costs.

The commissioners approved becoming a part of the cooperative last week and will hammer out the details of the agreement that will govern the group later, with the other members.

So far the ports of Pasco, Ridgefield and Skagit County have come on board, and the ports of Bellingham and Kalama are expected to sign on soon.

The cooperative will manage the broadband communications systems of participating ports and save money on items such as software, said Brenda Stav, a spokeswoman for the Port of Whitman County, in an email.

The administration of the cooperative may be handled by the Port of Whitman County, but that decision has yet to be finalized.

If that happened, the port would receive about $225,000 a year for the work in the first three years of the cooperative. It would likely be done by port employees Joe Poire and Kara Riebold, who would spend about 75 percent of their time on the cooperative, Stav said.

Poire makes $141,000 a year as the port’s executive director. Riebold earns $109,595 annually as the port’s chief operating officer.

The cooperative has been a topic of discussion for the Port of Whitman County Commission since early 2018. It generated questions from people who worried that the Port of Whitman County might be investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructure for other ports.

Right now, the cooperative has no plans to provide financial backing for broadband expansions, Stav said.

“There are no projects planned with the cooperative at this time, and it is not envisioned ... the (cooperative) will own infrastructure,” Stav said. “(The cooperative) will provide professional services to individual ports, and the individual ports will own and develop their own assets.”

The Port of Whitman County has been a pioneer in building telecommunications in rural areas for almost 20 years.

It constructed a fiber-optic network that reaches places such as Washington State University and Whitman County’s many small towns.

It charges all private companies the same rate to lease capacity on the network. Before the Port of Whitman County’s project, the area had struggled to have up-to-date telecommunications infrastructure partly because companies prefer to invest in more densely populated urban areas where their investments would generate higher returns.

The Port of Whitman County model overcame that challenge. It gave businesses a way to provide services such as cable television, cellphone service and internet without the large initial costs of building a fiber-optic network.

Williams may be contacted at ewilliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.