The Board of Selectmen’s deadlocked vote on the broadband feasibility study is, on one level, entirely understandable. Thirty-five thousand dollars is not an enormous sum in the context of the town’s overall budget, but it is not pocket change either, and Arthur Pendelton’s instinct to pursue grant funding rather than raid the general fund is, on its face, fiscally prudent.
But the debate about broadband is not really about broadband. It is about whether Willow Creek intends to be a town that young people can return to.
The Gazette has profiled Niall O’Flaherty, 29, who returned to run his family’s sugarbush. Julia Chen, 33, who opened a guide service in a building that was once Pendelton’s Hardware. Dean Moreau, 47, who came home after fifteen years in Boston kitchens. These are not isolated cases — they are a pattern. Young people with skills and ambition are willing to live in a small town if the town can support the basic infrastructure of modern work.
Broadband is that infrastructure. Not a luxury, not an amenity — a utility, as essential as electricity was in 1936, as telephone service was in 1966.
The Gazette urges the selectmen to revisit this vote before the annual Town Meeting. Apply for the grant if you want — that’s fine, that’s smart. But authorize the study and show the town’s young people — and the ones considering coming back — that Willow Creek understands what century it is living in.