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Sam Penrod and Randall Jeppesen reportingThe controversial broadband network owned by Provo City has been sold. iProvo had lost millions of dollars in recent years. So what does that mean to customers and taxpayers?
iProvo brought an infrastructure of fiber optic and high-speed Internet, phone and TV to Provo residents.
Now Provo City is selling the entire system to a private company, and city officials say they will recoup the losses the system has had in recent years.
The announcement came today as Provo Mayor Lewis Billings announced his proposed budget for the city.
iProvo was available to all of the city's residents and businesses and was said to be the largest municipally-owned fiber optic network in the U.S. But the expense of bringing that service had a price, and it was a price that Provo could not keep out of the red. So, it will sell the network to a company called Broadweave for $40 million.
It is a sale that other Internet service providers (ISP) believe should have been put up for public bid, instead of what they call a back-room deal. Pete Ashdown with XMission said, "I think the public should be concerned there wasn't a proper RFP (request for proposal) process to this, that it should have been a fully public deal. The value of a government-installed monopoly is very high, and I certainly hope that Provo is getting the best value for their dollar out of it because that's what they are installing."
"This is a system that, three weeks ago, the Utah Taxpayer's Association said ought to be sold at a fire sale, and so give me a break," Mayor Billings said. "I mean, here we are getting full value, and somebody is going to say you could have got more. I mean, let's not get greedy here, you know. We are going to get our money back. We are going to get the benefit of what we put out there. We are still going to have access to the dark fiber and the other things that we have set out to get in the first place. We're not going to pay for a lot of that. I mean, this is ‘wahoo' if you are a Provo taxpayer or Provo stakeholder."
The city council will hold public hearings on the proposed sale and will make a final decision on this sale.
The deal is expected to be finalized sometime in June.
E-mail: spenrod@ksl.com
E-mail: rjeppesen@ksl.com
