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City staff outline OzarksGo fiber-hut lease and ongoing territory dispute with co-op
Summary
Electric Director Phil Stokes told the commission OzarksGo seeks a long-term lease for a fiber hut near the Lincoln substation in exchange for fiber service; Stokes also outlined a boundary dispute with Carroll Electric that the city has placed on the Arkansas Public Service Commission docket.
Phil Stokes, Electric Director, told the Siloam Springs City Commission the city has negotiated with OzarksGo, a regional cooperative, for a 90-by-150-foot site near the Lincoln substation where the company would install a ‘fiber hut’ to bring fiber into the city.
Stokes said OzarksGo proposed a 15-year lease with a 15-year renewal option and that, instead of paying the city roughly $400 a month for a fiber connection, the company would provide the city with one 1-gigabit connection and two 100-megabit connections. "There won't be any money changing hands. It's just to be a savings of about $7,000 to us," Stokes said. He said legal staff had reviewed the contracts and the item is planned for the second board meeting in October.
Commissioners asked whether OzarksGo is installing local lines or whether BrightSpeed is the contractor that had previously worked in parts of the city; Stokes said BrightSpeed has done earlier installs and that the OzarksGo feed would provide redundancy alongside the city’s agreements with Cox.
Separately, Stokes described a long-running service-territory issue with Carroll Electric that dates to a 1939 boundary and a 1981 reaffirmation. He said Carroll currently serves roughly 240 customers inside the city’s territory while the city serves about 40 of Carroll’s customers. "We went to the public service commission and we got the boundaries that were that should be updated," Stokes said, and added the city has docketed the dispute with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and will proceed there unless the utilities negotiate an out-of-docket settlement.
Stokes said staff and the city attorney met with Carroll’s representatives and expected Carroll’s board to consider the city’s proposal at an upcoming meeting; if negotiations proceed, Stokes said the parties could present the agreement to the commission to avoid regulatory adjudication. He cautioned that any customer swaps or redraws of lines would be handled carefully and that, at this point, proposed swaps would be small and one-to-one for affected customers.
The commission did not take action on the lease or the territory matter during the meeting; Stokes said the OzarksGo lease will appear on a later agenda once contract language is finalized.
