Twenty Years Too Early: The Broadband Policy Work Washington Eventually Caught Up To
April 2026
In July 2002, a coalition of technology professionals, telecommunications providers, and public utility representatives in Kitsap County published a document called Last Mile – Bringing It Home. It mapped fibre routes, modelled deployment costs, and proposed a mechanism by which communities could finance their own last-mile connections. It was, in retrospect, a complete blueprint for what Washington State eventually built. But at the time, the world wasn’t ready to build it.
Professional Options assembled the report under the Kitsap Regional Telecommunications Committee. Our CEO, Doña Keating, was Vice Chair of the Committee - and Chair of the Subcommittee of Private Sector Last Mile Solutions. The coalition around the table was unusual: Sprint, Kitsap Public Utility District, local ISPs, cable companies, wireless providers, and independent consultants — competitors contributing to the same document. The central argument was deceptively simple. The last mile represented approximately 90% of per-unit broadband deployment costs. Private providers would not build where returns were insufficient. Public mechanisms, specifically Local Utility Districts financed through property liens, could close the gap by treating broadband as a capital improvement rather than an endless subscription. The infrastructure would be owned by the community. Providers would compete to deliver services on top of it.
The reports became the most downloaded documents on the Kitsap Economic Development Alliance’s website — not by local residents, but by site selectors worldwide, evaluating the region’s connectivity trajectory before recommending it to relocating businesses.
From analysis to legislation
The reports established the analytical foundation. The next step was policy. In 2003–2004, Professional Options authored two companion bills for the Washington State Legislature.
House Bill 3980 embedded broadband into the transportation budget framework, authorising road construction funds to be used for installing and upgrading telecommunications infrastructure. House Bill 3981 created the regulatory architecture for underground utility construction during road projects, setting minimum allocation floors and mandating that the Washington State Department of Transportation accommodate conduit installation in all project planning.
The conceptual innovation was classifying telecommunications infrastructure as transportation rather than utility. Data moves. It uses rights-of-way. When a road is already being built, the marginal cost of laying conduit is trivial compared to a standalone buildout.
Legislators sponsored the bills enthusiastically. Washington would have been the second state in the nation, after Oregon, to adopt this approach. The bills advanced further than any similar legislation had gone before.
Then WSDOT killed them, indicating they would oppose them.
Institutional resistance, dressed as technical concern
The agency’s response was a careful construction of objections: constitutional concerns about motor vehicle and gas tax funds, safety concerns about manhole clusters, maintenance burden. Each presented as prohibitive rather than what they actually were: solvable engineering problems of a kind WSDOT already managed for other utilities in highway rights-of-way.
Our response addressed every objection systematically, including turning the “highway purpose” argument inside out: intelligent highways require monitoring and control networks; fibre supporting traffic monitoring, emergency dispatch, and first responder communications is unambiguously transportation infrastructure. Once justified for operational purposes, additional capacity costs virtually nothing.
WSDOT’s final line — “contact will be made with the writer of these bills to discuss any appropriate further actions” — was the soft kill. The bills died.
The long middle, and the vindication
What followed was fifteen years of sustained advocacy through different channels: regional committee work, relationships with elected officials, infrastructure built community by community across the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsulas.
In 2021, Representative Drew Hansen (representing Bainbridge Island) sponsored the Public Broadband Act, removing all restrictions on public entities providing retail broadband in Washington. In the same period, WSDOT, the agency that killed the 2004 bills, established a formal Dig Once programme, an interactive map of construction projects available for conduit co-location, and a structured application process. Washington is now classified as one of only six states with a strong dig-once policy.
Every position the 2002 and 2004 work had advanced — broadband as essential infrastructure, public last-mile mechanisms, dig-once conduit installation, open-access networks, municipal authority for retail service — is now either established policy in Washington or recognised nationally as best practice.
The cost of being right too early
Every road Washington paved between 2004 and its dig-once adoption represents money left on the table. A 2025 report from Vanderbilt University’s Policy Accelerator found that 75–90% of underground fibre deployment costs come from digging up and repairing roads, and that adding broadband after a road is built costs roughly ten times more than installing conduit during construction.
The federal BEAD programme, $42.45 billion to connect every American to high-speed internet, is attempting at national scale what the 2004 Washington bills would have begun addressing twenty years earlier.
The question was never whether this approach would work. The analysis was sound in 2002. The question was always who would control the infrastructure — and who would profit from delay.
The full case study, including primary source documents, is available for review upon request.