The Portsmouth City Council held a work session beginning at 9:15 AM and a regular council meeting in the evening on May 12, 2026. The work session included presentations on the Portsmouth Broadband Authority, a proposed citywide public art master plan, amendments to the refuse ordinance, and a framework for community organization funding. The regular session adopted the FY2027 operating budget and capital improvement plan, approved pay and fee increases, and appointed a new city attorney. Several items were deferred for further discussion.
IT management consulting and like I said, merger consulting. In general, I'm I'm a Portsmouth advocate, uh Portsmouth fan. Both of my businesses are in Portsmouth. I love Portsmouth. I think it's it's our region's most misunderstood, uh, but at least utilize GEM. Um, so I'm here to support in any way I can, whether that's uh to provide advice to the city if if that's desired or or partner in any sort of other way. Okay, that's awesome. All right, all right, um, once Ms. Evans comes back, you're the chair. Well, should we wait item number four? Okay, uh, item number four that we are going to move to next is going to be the history and purpose of the Portsmouth Broadband Authority, which I believe you are going to you awesome. But uh, I'm gonna need some assistance. Huh. I uh I'm gonna call on Kelsey. I'm gonna call on Ms. White, call on Adam Huell. Uh all these people have more history than I do. Um, but what I really wanted to make sure that the board understands is that where do we how do we get here where to come from, where we're trying to go, and they kind of what the roles are. Uh I can't tell you when this board and the date this board stood up. Can one of my uh lifelines help me with when this board was stood up before I was on city council? So I got a board in January of 223, so it was earlier than that. Yeah, that sounds right to me. Because you've just gotten started in this covenant right before you came. All right. Now in organizing this board, in a Steve's belief, and please help me if I'm wrong. I've been around these kind of boards before, and we're gonna make sure I'm not uh misspeaking when I talk about this particular board, is there's certain things that uh our city as a municipal government is limited in doing. One of the things that a municipality can't do is enter into any kind of a competition for uh technical space like what we're talking about with fiber. We actually have built or in the process of completing building a fiber ring around the city of Portsmouth. To monetize that would be illegal for the city, however, an authority has those type of capabilities that can enter into agreements with uh other businesses or entities that can actually make those kind of arrangements. Why would the city want to do that? Well, first of all, a lot of times in this particular space, the expansion of that the expansion of that network is often driven by supply and demand. But supply and demand is not the only thing that is driven by supply demand and ability to pay. Our other internet providers have the supply. Our neighborhoods have the demand, but a lot of them don't have the ability to pay the price that's necessary to make uh it lucrative for other providers to go into those networks, know those neighborhoods. Normally these kind of things are designed to help encourage or incentivize moving into those areas that would normally be left behind. There's a lot of uh grants that states and even the feds use to try and incentivize that, but normally they build in gaps, and the gaps that's built in is based on how they request and and data is reported to them. They request data based on census tracts, so all of the world as far as this is concerned is is divided up into sections. We call those census tracts based on uh how the federal government has laid that out. When it comes time to report who's being served in those census tracts, you don't have to serve everybody on a census track to count that census track as served. You only have to be able to serve somebody in the census track. And then that census tract is counted as served. So if I am a large provider, and I'm getting incentivized to provide service to a census track that if I'm going to charge $90 a month for a service, but there's probably not a lot of people in that census track that's able to pay $90 a month. Anytime that I can serve somebody in that census track, I can count that as served. The problem with that is there's a lot of people left in that census track that has not been served. There's no incentive for that service provider to expand their network and provide subsidized service. How do you incentivize those service providers to actually provide service to those people who are underserved? For that's what I worked really hard on this when I was in the state of Georgia to get the language changed from served to underserved when we start talking about those census trucks. Yeah. What we want to be able to do is incentivize other carriers. That's not what we're trying to be today.