Traverse City broadband project misses targets as costs climb to $30 million
Traverse City’s fiber plan was sold as a $4.2 million project that would turn a profit by 2021. Costs have climbed near $30 million, while neighborhoods are still waiting.
Traverse City residents were promised a relatively small, fast-moving fiber build that would start taking signups in fall 2019, reach profitability by 2021 and generate about $1.2 million in revenue. Instead, the city’s broadband project has stretched for years, lost money every year since launch, and become a much larger burden on the utility and its taxpayers.
Traverse City Light & Power began considering a fiber network in 2016 and the city approved the initial rollout in 2019. At the time, officials put startup costs at more than $4 million, later pegged the project at $4.2 million. The public pitch was straightforward: build the network, sign up customers quickly and use the service to pay for itself. That is not how it has unfolded.
The Mackinac Center says the project had ballooned to nearly $30 million by 2023 after repeated delays, a larger expansion and new loans. In June 2025, the group said the network was expected to lose $645,000 that year. Karla Myers-Beman, the city’s finance chief, defended the red ink as typical startup cost and said the utility hoped to reach positive cash flow in 2026, but the project still was expected to lose money that year.
The timeline has slipped as well. TCLP now says major construction remains projected to be substantially complete by summer 2026, after previously aiming for fall 2025. The utility says service will come online neighborhood by neighborhood as areas are built and tested, a slower rollout than residents were first told to expect six years ago.
By late 2025, TCLP was describing the citywide fiber build as a $14 million plan while also seeking an additional $1 million interfund loan from the city’s Economic Development Fund to finish the work. Public updates show the network extending to the Base of Old Mission Peninsula, Hastings, Parsons, Munson and Barlow, but the broader question has only grown sharper: how much more city money will be tied up before the promised public benefit reaches the street.
For Grand Traverse County taxpayers, the issue is no longer whether Traverse City wanted better broadband. It is whether a municipal project that began as a $4.2 million, self-supporting upgrade has become a long-running drain on city resources while residents in parts of the city are still waiting for the service they were told to expect years ago.
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