As the weather turns towards spring and slowly starts warming up, construction on the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities’ Community Fiber Internet Project has begun again.

At the BPU’s March meeting, General Manager Kris Sellstrom gave an update to the board on where that construction currently stands. Work is ongoing to secure a place for a new drop installer, to enable the installation of service drops for all potential customers in the service area. This should accelerate the project appointment, meet the BPU’s construction deadlines and lower the hurdle for future in-home installations, Sellstrom said.

Conversation for the board members also briefly returned to last month’s discussion on the double telephone poles in connection to the fiber project. City council representative, Tony Dolce, R-Ward 2, said there was some activity in his area in regards to that with people going around and taking pictures.

“There was an auditor here for the fiber project, I want to say it was like two weeks ago, that would’ve gone around and taken pictures of the places where the fiber was installed,” Sellstrom said.

He added it could have been another company taking pictures to take note of the work they need to do, as any time a new pole is put in, companies will get notified that there is a pole that needs to be removed. Sometimes these companies do not have enough people to work on taking down the old poles, but Sellstrom said maybe if that is who it was they got enough people now to work on that.

The issue of broken poles was noted again as well, including one on Hallock Street. Sellstrom said the double pole issue is an ongoing concern.

“Once we get through the fiber project we will do a full audit of all of the double poles in our system,” Sellstrom said. “We’ll send out another notice to the contractors that need to transfer their poles … hopefully we can figure out how to get them moving.”

In some places, Sellstrom said, the bottom half of the old poles will be cut out and the middle chunk of the pole will be tied to the new pole.

“That is a solution some communities use,” Sellstrom said. “I don’t particularly love that either, but you technically can’t transfer the third party’s pole.”

Sellstrom added that the BPU will do that occasionally but only when the new pole has to go in the same hole as the old pole.