Colville Discusses Ways To Increase High-Tech Access Leaders To Seek State Grant To Boost Telecommunications

A roomful of movers and shakers got together here Thursday to envision a super-highway from Colville to Spokane that’s a lot faster than U.S. Highway 395.

Northern Stevens County’s economic future requires bandwidth as much as blacktop, some 55 business and civic leaders agreed in a meeting of Colville’s new Rural Information Technology Center. Eleven prominent leaders signed up for a steering committee that will conduct a hasty survey of the area’s high-tech needs.

“All the right ones signed up,” said Al Kowitz, president of the Technology Center. “I couldn’t have done better if I went out and said, `I want you.”’

The survey is intended to support Colville’s bid for a share of $1.2 million Gov. Gary Locke plans to award this fall for projects to promote economic development in three economically distressed rural communities.

“I think this community is an absolutely top candidate to get a demonstration project,” said Terry Lawhead, who heads the Spokane regional office of the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development.

Lawhead said he is promoting Colville to get one of the awards, but community leaders “have to show they’re ready.”

One of the biggest needs is for more high-speed data lines from Colville to Spokane, said Malcolm Friedman, a businessman and former Colville mayor who is the executive director of the Rural Information Technology Center. US West’s microwave transmission system doesn’t have enough capacity for any more of the so-called T-1 lines that allow businesses to have high-speed access to the Internet.

Dave Smith, vice president of Colville-based Internet Xpress, said only about 85 lines are available. He said US West plans to expand its capacity, “but at last word, it’s not going to happen until December.”

Even that won’t address the lack of alternate providers that Kowitz said was one of the reasons a company, which he didn’t identify, recently decided not to place “a fairly high-end call center” in Chewelah. He said the company, which might have brought 20 good-paying jobs, wanted a backup system in case US West’s lines - if any were available - were to fail.

“That’s almost a large company in this area,” said Kowitz, who is Stevens County’s longtime Washington State University extension agent.

The center was formed last summer with a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service for timberdistressed communities.

A single number, 38, shows the need, Kowitz said. Stevens County ranks 38th in per-capita income among 39 counties in the state.

Using 1992 dollars to compensate for inflation, Kowitz said Stevens County’s per-capita income of $14,375 in 1997 was down from $14,953 in 1979.

The difference is even more dramatic when the average earnings from each job in the county are contrasted from 1979 to 1997. In that comparison, Kowitz said, the average annual wage fell from $24,128 to $18,292 over the 20-year period.

While Washington pulled out of a recession in the mid-1990s, average statewide earnings pulled above the national average, but Stevens County’s continued to slide, Kowitz said.

“When people say we’re a poor, rural county, they aren’t kidding,” he said.

But he said the county is rich in one of the two things that high-tech workers find attractive: coastlines and mountains. With adequate high-tech infrastructure, individual workers can be lured even if their companies don’t come, Kowitz said. The county already has at least three “teleworkers,” including an Intuit software writer and a Boeing computer programmer who moved to the Arden area about two months ago.

Kowitz said the Technology Center has a goal of attracting 200 more teleworkers in the next three years, such as Boeing engineers who make $60,000 to $75,000 a year.

But the county’s third high-tech teleworker, Bruce Kessler of Environmental Systems Research Institute, said the county must upgrade its information highway from the equivalent of a gravel road. While the Boeing programmer was able to get a medium-fast ISDN line with some help from corporate headquarters, Kessler said he is stuck with a standard telephone line.

Just Wednesday, Kessler said, he was kicked out of a videoconference among 80 of his co-workers because his slow connection caused unacceptable technical problems.

“I had 80 people yelling at me,” he said.

Kessler, whose company designs digital information mapping systems, serves on the board of the Rural Information Technology Center and lives in Arden.