Emmett/Gem County Community Review Report Summary

drilled as needed with expansion of the transmission and service lines. Good planning and
sizing of the trunk lines for the water distribution system is important, as is the annexation
of land and zoning of land uses.
Public Works Director Tom Hapole shares concerns about water quality and
the wastewater plant with Infrastructure Team members and the City Council.
Telecommunications
Emmett has competitive advantages in the arena of telecommunications when addressing
business recruitment. Upon review of the telecommunications infrastructure and services
available in Emmett, the team concluded that it is adequate to facilitate business growth and
provide essential services to the residences. There are a few areas that could use
improvement.
Many towns in Idaho do not have the connectivity that Emmett has to the rest of the state
and beyond through high-speed backbone fiber optic transmission facilities. QWEST has
fiber cables that terminate in Emmett as they pass along the north/south route. Syringa
Networks, a competitive middle-mile fiber carrier, is nearing completion of its route through
Emmett as well.
These routes will provide a positive, competitive environment that traditionally is good for
the consumer because it spurs pricing pressures and improvements. Having an alternate
provider also creates route diversity, so that a business with critical communications
requirements can purchase capacity on totally independent networks with physically
separated routing in the event of an outage on one provider or the other.
The gap in the long haul facilities is the Syringa termination point five miles north of town.
There are no current plans to bring it into the downtown area, but the carrier is willing to
create this spur given sufficient demand and an effective economic argument. From the
perspective of economic development, if a business requires high speed data or high volume
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