Fort Dodge voters may be asked this fall if they want a separate board to oversee a planned municipal broadband utility.

A referendum on establishing such a board may be the next highly visible step toward creating the utility, which could begin serving its first customers in March 2023.

City voters gave the local government the authority to begin looking into a broadband utility during a November 2019 referendum. At that time 71.6 percent of them voted yes.

Since then, a lot of work has been done behind the scenes by the city staff and various consultants.

On Monday, the City Council received an update from SmartSource Consulting, of Grimes; Howard R. Green Co., of Cedar Rapids; and Kielkopf Advisory Services, of Indianola.

The plan is for the city to build, own and operate a municipal broadband utility that provides fiber optic cable directly to homes.

That arrangement would require 138.2 miles of cable, the consultants reported.

Building it would cost $29 million. That money would be borrowed and paid off with revenue collected from customers of the broadband service.

The tentative plan is to offer three options for download and upload speeds: 100 megabytes, 1 gigabyte or 10 gigabytes. The prices for those levels of service haven’t been determined yet.

The referendum on having a board of trustees run the utility instead of the City Council could be held in September, according to Todd Kielkopf, the president of Kielkopf Advisory Services. If approved, the board members would have to be appointed late this year to oversee construction of the broadband utility through 2022.