Silverton ready to take calls, any calls

By Leslie Moriarty

Herald Writer

SILVERTON — Mary Deaton would give just about anything to get a telephone call. Heck, she doesn’t even care if it’s from a telemarketer.

By next summer, she may get her wish. Phones finally may be coming to Silverton.

"The place was all abuzz about it this weekend," said Deaton, a Seattlite who spends her weekends in Silverton. "Just the idea of being able to communicate with the outside world, that’s something we’ve been waiting for."

Silverton is a community of about 50 residents, 22 miles east of Granite Falls on the Mountain Loop Highway. Settled in the late 1800s as a railroad and timber town, Silverton has been without telephones, except for a time in the 1920s when the Forest Service had some crank telephones to communicate with employees.

Most of the people who live there want the quiet. Even so, they’d like to have phones.

In early 1999, Silverton residents met with state Utilities and Transportation Commission officials. Although they were discouraged, the Seattle-based Beaver Creek Telephone Co. came calling.

When International Telcom LTD entrepreneur Joel Eisenberg heard of the ringless town, he created Beaver Creek and went to work to bring telephone service there and to Hobart, a rural town near Issaquah.

While many big telephone companies weren’t interested in the two small burgs, Beaver Creek Telephone Co. has secured a $1.7 million loan from the federal Rural Utilities Service.

The company got the OK from the state utilities commission in late 1999, and since has been researching the feasibility of service, applying for grants, and securing permits to lay the cable underground.

"For Silverton’s service, it’s a matter of 20 miles of fiber optics," said Ken Hanks, spokesman for Beaver Creek. "But there’s miles of red tape and paperwork that has had to come first."

With those hurdles behind them, Beaver Creek is drafting construction specifications and is ready to put the project out for bids. By next summer phone lines will be operating in Silverton, he said.

What’s just as important, he said, is that the typical monthly service to Silverton will be about $50, Hanks said. Originally, some companies told residents their monthly bills could be $400.

But Hanks said the federal government has a pool of utility taxes that are used to help cover the costs of extending utilities to rural areas. It was through that program that Beaver Creek secured the loan for the Silverton line.

Like the Deatons, Diane Boyd can’t wait for her phone to ring. Boyd has lived in Silverton full-time for 14 years. She and her husband host a two-way radio that can reach Snohomish County deputies in emergencies.

"We’re very excited," Boyd said. "We’ve been told before that phones were coming and then, nothing. But with the amount of time Beaver Creek has put into this project, it looks like they are serious about it."

The Boyd family lived in Everett until their children were on their own. The kids refused to live in a house without a telephone, their mom said.

"It will be great to be able to have access to friends and family and hopefully, have the Internet," she said.

And once the phones are in, the Deatons may make Silverton their permanent residence, too, in an 1898 house they are renovating.

"This time, things sound very promising," she said.

You can call Herald Writer Leslie Moriarty at 425-339-3436

or send e-mail to moriarty@heraldnet.com.

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