A little less hooey, a little more Huey: the column

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, July 13, 2008 Hibbing Daily Tribune. You’ll notice that it’s based on a post I made here two months ago, but includes new information and perspective.

A little less hooey, a little more Huey
By Aaron J. Brown

It may not seem popular to emulate the late Louisiana Gov. and Sen. Huey Long, who was assassinated at the peak of his power in 1935. Most folks on the street don’t know who he was and, to many of those who do, he was a corrupt Southern despot. But he took a poor state, Louisiana, and willed it from one century into the next at a time when most folks thought it’d be stuck behind forever. How? He just did it. He rewrote the tax code, eliminated favors for the oil industry, and built roads, schools and hospitals.

Let’s not ignore the obvious. Long’s tactics were often ugly. He fought powerful interests and used rough tactics. But his name is still carved in marble all over Louisiana. Why? He paved the roads. All of them. The big ones and the ones used only by poor farmers.

Today, we have paved roads in northern Minnesota. They’re not always great and should be improved, but they are paved. No one could fathom forcing rural Minnesota to go without paved roads just because they weren’t close to the Twin Cities. Without these paved roads, we’d be mired in poverty forever just as Louisiana seemed to be in the 1920s and ‘30s when Long was governor and the rural roads were so bad farmers couldn’t move their crops. The same argument could me made about electricity, which didn’t reach some Americans until Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority.

Well, today, I argue the most pressing issue isn’t unpaved roads or power lines. The issue is affordable high speed internet access for every Minnesota (heck, American) at work and at home. High speed internet is the new utility that will bring us from one century into the next. It is a very expensive concept with millions of miles of cable to install. There are a lot of reasons not to do it, but those reasons will all seem pretty silly when the Internet – and thus the economy – is controlled by other countries, counties that invested in high-speed internet throughout their population.

In his report “Municipal Broadband: Demystifying Wireless and Fiber-Optic Options,” Christopher Mitchell of the New Rules Project explains the idea that today’s internet is as important to the future as roads and bridges at the beginning of the last century. And he lays out the idea that municipal entities like cities, counties or (this is me talking) Iron Range Resources might need to take an advanced role in getting this technology going. The report is available at www.newrules.org.

I know that we can all get the Internet now, with no additional investment needed. There are still vast numbers of people using dial up web access on the Iron Range, some cities like Hibbing have excellent high speed options from multiple companies and even country folk like me can use satellite internet providers. Some of these options are affordable and some cost quite a bit more. But access to these services is neither consistent, nor affordable for all Iron Range residents. Furthermore, the future economy will need massive bandwidth (four lane highways instead of dirt roads) to get teleconferencing and interactive media to every corner of the Iron Range.

Someone I know in the tech business told me that a municipal network is not necessary because this service can be provided as needed already. But that’s true of any place and any customer willing to pay. By creating a ready-made network, we jump ahead of the pack. The Iron Range has access to as much or more resources in northern Minnesota than Huey Long did in Louisiana 1930. We could build the best rural internet network in the country. Not because our current population demands it, but because that’s what needs to happen to make this region competitive in the future. The resulting endeavor would be far more attractive to new and existing businesses than any glossy brochure put out by an economic development official.

Just as in the early 20th century, developers of the early 21st century react to economic reality, not talk. The Iron Range may not have population growth, but we do have mineral wealth and, if we invest wisely, superior infrastructure. There has been some publicity surrounding projects like FiberNet, which would create municipal owned networks in participating towns. I don’t endorse any specific project except the concept that the bigger the scope, the better. To me this seems an ideal goal for Iron Range Resources, one that could yield more jobs in the future than even the biggest of the agency’s currently funded projects.

The funny thing about history is that it starts right now. Huey Long may be a dusty old demagogue from a civics book to most, but on his good days he left the Iron Range a roadmap we can use responsibly. When you combine the international community’s increasing dominance of technology infrastructure with our increasingly global economy, it would be foolish for the United States to fall even farther behind in an internet technology that the U.S. itself developed. When that fact is fully understood, it will be proven to be just as wise for the Iron Range to invest in owning its share of the high-tech economy of tomorrow. We talk about the future all the time. Now we should start building that future.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog, MinnesotaBrown.com.