City of Decorah honored by Iowa League of Cities

Decorah City Council member Randy Schissel and Decorah Mayor Don Arendt accept the award from Iowa League of Cities representative Waterloo mayor Buck Clark

The Iowa League of Cities has presented its "All-Star Community Award" to the City of Decorah.  The award recognizes the city for its role in creating the Decorah Metronet, the system of fiber optic cables that connects local governments and non-profits in the area.  It's the second year in a row the City of Decorah has been recognized by the League--last year Decorah won the same award for its role in the creation of the Trout Run Trail.

A news release from the League of Cities says, "When the Upper Iowa River flooded Decorah's emergency operations center in 2008, the community began focusing on how to enable redundant operations and communications for the area. The City of Decorah, Winneshiek County and Decorah Community Schools saw community-wide benefit to expanding the school district's project to connect its buildings. The idea: an 11-mile fiber optic loop throughout the community to enable better disaster recovery and bring broadband Internet access to the community. Eventually Luther College, the Winneshiek Medical Center and the Upper Explorerland Regional Planning Commission became involved in the project as well. MetroNet, a 28E entity, was formed in 2010 to help make this public-private service sharing project a reality."

"In September 2013, installation of a loop of 144 strands of fiber optic cable – double the standard 72 strands used in most fiber optic installs—was completed. The loop connects most of the facilities of the six anchor organizations. The impact was felt almost the instant the fiber was lit, in both Internet access savings and speed. The anchor organizations are also seeing savings in other areas due to the connectivity the fiber optic loop provides and are already working on new related projects."