LWV NEWS RELEASE
The League of Women Voters’ community event, Lunch with a Leader, will be on Thursday, March 17 (via zoom from noon-1PM). Their leader will be Jerry Smith, the new Broadband Manager for Los Alamos County.
He has an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Baylor University and has a Project Management Professional Certificate from Project Management Institute and numerous other IT certifications. He was an IT Director for 15 years at a medium-sized school district in the Dallas/Ft Worth (Texas) area; 4 years with the non-profit startup Glorieta Outdoor Adventure Camps as IT Director for 3 national sites; 4 years most recently with the State of New Mexico’s Public School Facilities Authority (state agency), in the Broadband Group, where he collaborated with IT Directors of public school districts and charter schools across the state, working with them to advise them on computer network upgrade projects, as well as major fiber optic upgrade projects related to internet improvements. His wife of 35 years as been a lifelong public educator, currently a high school librarian for Albuquerque Public Schools. She grew up in New Mexico, mostly Silver City and Bosque Farms. Their 2 grown children are making their way into their careers, his daughter as a museum curator and his son as a coffee business operator/music production.
Jerry’s marching orders when he was hired in Los Alamos were to improve broadband options for homes and business in Los Alamos and White Rock. He is working now to put some structure to what that means. He will be covering an overview of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of having never-seen-before levels of funding coming from the national and state levels. This is coupled with an unprecedented level of public interest and consensus acknowledgement that we have a problem that private enterprise competition isn’t taking care of. He will also discuss getting funding (that will be challenging for our community) and go over the options for our county.
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYuce-rpzwqHdzr5m_UIEFZoWjuFBdgHv3N
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.