On Monday, June 10, Mayor DeFever and the city commissioners held their bi-monthly meeting, starting off with an introduction by Vexus Fiber Director of Operations, Brian Borthwick.
“I want to thank Mayor DeFever and the city council members, Mr. Stokes and Mr. Miller for helping us set this up,” Borthwick said. “We appreciate your commitment to the infrastructure in high-speed connectivity and we are proud on our behalf to announce that Pampa is certified giga-bit city powered by Vexus. This marks a major milestone for Pampa along with Vexus. Our companies’ ultra high-gig fiber optic network is available to the majority of households here in Pampa as well as businesses. This includes our recently launched 5-gig service.
We are excited and honored to be here to be able to do this. I appreciate the cooperation of the city and working partner to make this happen and working with your staff in the departments for us to be able to build the fiber optics. We did our best to try to limit any interruptions. I know there are some that happened, but we did our best to answer when they did occur and we appreciate you guys working with us throughout this process.
Since the time we first met with you, we’ve privately invested $6.8 million in the Pampa infrastructure. We’ve put up over 120 miles of fiber optics and we now have fiber optics that reach over 10,000 homes. We are also excited to be working with Cortni and the Chamber. We have opened up a retail location downtown over on Francis so we will have a store located here where customers can come in and talk to us and see a smiling face and we’re excited about that. We’ll be open Monday through Friday 8 to 5 and we’ve got some technicians that have been here for a while doing installations and trouble calls as well as our network techs who help with the infrastructure of the city and we’ve got some sales agents as well going door-to-door that are residing here as well in our store location.
We’re extremely excited about this and we appreciate everyone in this community. This has been one of our fastest growing cities since we’ve started the project and that’s through a lot of cooperation with a lot of good people here in the city as well as the community, I can’t speak enough. We’re building across the state of Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. It’s been a huge accomplishment on behalf of y’all and we appreciate that.
We look forward to the continued relationship and look forward to continuing to provide infrastructure in fiber optics and high-speed internet which impacts education. And by the way, kudos to Pampa ISD and that group over there. They run a great organization and school system. There’s a lot of bright kids. We went to the recent awards ceremony and it was impressive to see the kids and all their accomplishments that they received. But also looking at what we can do for the economy as well as the community, that’s one our biggest pillars in being a part of it.”
Borthwick and other representatives from Vexus presented the City Manager, Shane Stokes an award in recognition of the City of Pampa in its milestone.
“Thank you, we appreciate your investment in Pampa and we’re all glad you’re here,” Mayor DeFever said.
Next on the agenda was a special recognition by Chief of Police Lance Richburg where he recognized Dispatcher Britnie Cooper and Officer Tanner Mathias.
“Britnie came over when we expanded about four years ago and she has done an absolute stellar job for us,” Richburg said. “Not only is she good at what she does as dispatching, but I think most of you will understand what I mean when I say this: she is also a good employee. I don’t have to worry about her at all. Tanner Mathias received the Officer of the Year award. He’s been with us for a couple of years now. He was born and raised here and we believe that there are some bright things in his future. We just wanted to bring them up here before the Mayor and commissioners and let them know I’m very proud of them.”
“Britnie and Tanner, we’re very proud of you and we appreciate the job you guys do every day and keep up the great work,” Mayor DeFever said.
The next item on the agenda was the discussion of the 2024-2025 budget where Financial Director, Theresa Daniels, went over some general information that the Mayor and commissioners will need to know before the more in-depth discussions about the budget will begin over the next few city meetings.
The next items on the agenda were consent considerations and they included: awarding the bid by Blas Ramirez for the delinquent tax property located at 237 Henry, awarding the bid to Hilda A. Castaneda for the delinquent tax property located at 1132 S. Sumner and awarding the bid by Duglaus Johnson for the delinquent tax property located at 901 E. Gordon.
The meeting was then adjourned.
