During Saturday’s Showoff on the Square city “fiberhood” residents can visit the C Spire tent to sign up for C Spire’s ultra-high speed fiber optic internet.

City residents have until the end of the year to sign up the minimum numbers C Spire is requiring in at least three of the five Batesville fiberhoods. If the goal is not met by December 31, Batesville will lose the privileged priority it earned when it was selected as one of nine in the state that will have the first opportunities to have the fiber optic system built.

Saturday’s demonstration on the Square by C Spire should be the first event in an all-out effort to make sure Batesville reaches its goal by the end of the year.

The problem is that most of us understand too little the advantages ultra-high-speed internet offers when we are already satisfied with high-speed internet. The ultra-high speed internet will surely expand game and entertainment options, but that is not the focus.

Ultra-high-speed fiber optic internet opens doors to creative entrepreneurs and inventors who can compete in international markets right from their homes in Batesville. It is the infrastructure of the future that will expand horizons to an extent that is limited only by our imaginations.

The city moved quickly one year ago when the mayor and aldermen responded aggressively to C Spire’s  challenge to be selected as a fiber city. We won that one. Now we need to finish the race.

Seventy years ago, Batesville set an unusual precedent for infrastructure construction that was in competition with private business. Then-mayor Dan L. Ferguson, with other area leaders, had helped create the Tallahatchie Valley Electric Power Association (TVEPA) to bring electricity from the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to rural residents in Panola and eight surrounding counties.

The electricity that soon became available for the first time to so many revolutionized people’s lives.

But Mayor Ferguson had a problem. By law, TVEPA was prevented from building electric lines in Batesville. Congress, in the legislation that had created TVA, prevented it or any of its subsidiaries (like TVEPA) from building electric lines in an area already served by a privately-owned utility, and Mississippi Power and Light already served Batesville.

Mayor Ferguson’s solution was to convince the citizens of Batesville to approve a bond issue to fund the construction of the city’s own electrical grid. In the early 1940s, city voters approved a bond issue of approximately $200,000 to build a grid. The city turned around and leased the grid to TVEPA to allow  TVA-generated electricity to flow into Batesville homes and businesses.

During the 1940s and into the 1950s, there were on some streets in Batesville parallel electric lines — one belonging to MP and L, the other to TVEPA. The lines of the former were abandoned and removed as their customers abandoned them to take advantage of the cheaper TVA electricity.

Mayor Ferguson scored another coup in the late 1940s when Tennessee Gas Transmission Company built its pumping station to repressurize natural gas flowing through its pipelines to cities in the northeast.

Ferguson convinced TGT to allow access and convinced city voters to pay for a pipeline that would bring natural gas from the pumping station on Highway 6 West into Batesville where the city created the gas department that serves city customers with inexpensive heating fuel today.
For those accomplishments Mayor Ferguson might today be castigated as a socialist and monopolist who put the city in competition with private enterprise. But the availability of inexpensive fuel — electricity and natural gas — was part of the foundation that led to Batesville’s expansive economic development in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
That’s the challenge that city leadership faces today — not just the mayor and aldermen, but every one of us who has grubstake or bloodstake in this little crossroads burg that’s not exactly in the hills but shunned by the Delta.

There is one major difference. The electrical and gas infrastructure that allowed those services to flow to city customers was paid for city taxpayers.

C Spire is offering to build the fiber optic infrastructure at its own expense. All that’s needed for them to get started is enough people indicating by pre-registration that they want it.
In coming decades, will generations that follow look back at this opportunity and wonder how we could have missed it?