West Central Tribune reports further on the Willmar community broadband project…

For more than a year, Willmar city staff, company representatives from Hometown Fiber, experts and consultants have been working together to create the plans and contracts that will mitigate the risk to taxpayers for a city-owned, citywide open-access fiber network — the Connect Willmar Initiative.

The Willmar City Council will be asked during its Monday, May 6, regular meeting to consider approving $9.2 million in funding for the first phase of the construction of the broadband network and an additional $64,000 for Hometown Fiber to continue a community outreach and education campaign. It will also be asked to consider approving an operations agreement between the city and Hometown Fiber.

More info on the project…

Hometown Fiber has completed the architecture plans for phase one and city engineers from Bolton & Menk are preparing construction documents. The details of the operations agreement have been worked through with the city attorney, and a letter of intent has been signed with Hutchinson, Minnesota-based Broadband Corp . to provide service on the network.

The operations agreement solidifies the legalities behind the relationship between Hometown Fiber and the city of Willmar. According to the April 29 presentation, Hometown Fiber will charge a fee to the city to manage and maintain the network for the city, signing up internet service providers to lease the network to provide service to residents. It will not collect a fee from the city until the network has its first customer.

The lease fee paid by internet service providers will be 35% of whatever they are charging the customer for service. For example, if someone’s bill is $100, the city would get $35 of it.