Kampis: How Traverse City Dug Itself Into A $14 million Broadband Hole

December 29, 2025

Traverse City is offering the country yet another reminder of why government-owned networks are almost always a bad bet. Despite repeated warnings, city leaders plowed ahead with their broadband vanity project—and now, predictably, they’re back raiding taxpayer coffers to keep it afloat.

At a recent meeting, commissioners signed off on another $1 million loan to Traverse City Light & Power (TCL&P) just to finish the buildout. That’s on top of a project that was supposed to cost no more than $4.4 million in 2019 and has since exploded past $14 million. The same consultant behind this mess, Uptown Services, has a long track record of overpromising and underdelivering — something the Taxpayers Protection Alliance highlighted in its report, Government Broadband Consultants: The Big Grift, which ties the firm to some of the most notorious GON failures in the country.

To make matters worse, city leaders financed most of this misadventure by selling $13.5 million in municipal bonds — effectively gambling the city’s credit rating on a project already drowning in overruns.

Ted Bolema, a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, pointed out in a recent blog that TCL&P keeps moving the goalposts on the project, initially projecting profitability by 2021 when first presenting the plan to city commissioners. The initial take rate goal was 50%, but now the GON is hoping to capture just 40% of the local internet business.