Roger Baker, Gilpin County Manager. It’s not news to local residents, but as wonderful as life is in Gilpin County, it does come with a few challenges most folks—even mountain folks—don’t usually have to face.

Those are the tradeoffs of living in a county that is so sparsely settled, and yet so close to the metro area. With many local residents working down the hill, or at least driving to Idaho Springs or Nederland on a regular basis, those communities become the de facto business and service providers for Gilpinites.

That was part of the rationale behind the development of the Gilpin Connect transportation service, so local residents who don’t have cars of their own can get to doctors’ and dentists’ appointments, banking and other services not available locally.

(That service is available to anyone; call 303-582-9200 if you want to schedule a trip).

But there are some services that have to be delivered to the home, and getting the private sector to supply them up here can pose a real dilemma for our elected officials.

Pretty much everyone in the County has (if they want it) electricity, and an increasing number of our homes and subdivisions are served by natural gas.

High speed broadband service, for access to the internet, is increasingly becoming the sort of utility that is almost as necessary for modern life as heat and light, but is in short supply in Gilpin County.     The Commissioners are very aware of the problem, and have worked for several years encouraging the local providers to improve their offerings and broaden their service areas.

To some extent those efforts—and market forces—have been successful. USA Communications provides broadband services to some areas of the County, and Century Link has fiber optic cable along many of the major highways that could be used for broadband access to individual homes. Mountain Broadband uses microwave transmission to perform internet access, but they are limited to those homes that have a direct line of sight to one of their transmitters.

Our dispersed population and difficult topography pretty much preclude any single provider from reaching the whole County, however, so the Commissioners are exploring other options that would increase the available options.

The County doesn’t have franchising power the way cities do: cities can insist that as a condition of doing business in the municipal limits, a service provider has to make adequate service available to all its residents, but counties can’t.

The situation is further complicated by the passage, in 2005, of Senate Bill 152, a Colorado law that prohibits local governments from getting into the internet business themselves—not that Gilpin County could likely entertain that method of providing service.

Still, there are other options the County can explore. Right now, Gilpin County is working with Clear Creek County, and even Jefferson County, whose mountainous areas (Evergreen, Conifer, etc.) face similar difficulties.

These three, along with some of the local municipalities, are looking toward forming some entity that could seek funding from our old friends at the Department of Local Affairs for studying what would be the best alternative to providing service to our outlying areas; DOLA also has funding available to implement one of those alternatives, once identified, although the dollar match required would still be pretty hefty.

These are complicated issues, and though the Commissioners have already spent some County money contracting with a company to revise the standard Federal Communications Commission map that woefully understated the scope of the problem in Gilpin County, moving forward will require both some hard decisions and the funding to back them up.

The Commissioners need to get those decisions right, of course, and getting public input as to the County residents’ needs and wishes will be key.

Accordingly, the Commissioners will devote their next “Coffee with the Commissioners” open house to the subject; it will be Thursday evening, May 28, at 6:30 at the Community Center.

If you’re interested in the topic, stop by. The Commissioners won’t have any easy answers—there aren’t any—but you can at least help them ask the right questions.