In a recent interview with APPA, Kris Sellstrom, the General Manager of the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities, the public power utility that serves Jamestown, New York, provides an update on the utility’s open access fiber network project and details his priorities as the new General Manager of the utility including one-on-one meetings with BPU employees this year.
Sellstrom in January became general manager of the BPU, succeeding David Leathers, who retired as BPU's general manager at the start of 2026.
Sellstrom began his career at the utility in 2011 as a junior engineer, and then subsequently held several other positions at the utility prior to being named general manager.
In a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast, Sellstrom details what his immediate priorities have been since taking on the role of general manager.
He cited safety, stability, and learning as key goals.
“Even though I've been with the utility for 14 years and had quite an experience in the electric division, this role comes with the responsibility for other divisions, including water, wastewater, district heat, and solid waste that we also manage,” Sellstrom noted. "There is still plenty to learn, which has been a lot of fun and very exciting,” he added.
“I've also spent a lot of time meeting with our amazing team members, just to make sure that I learn who they are and am aware of their needs and challenges,” and to ensure they have the resources needed “to keep the momentum going.”
He has been focused on holding one-on-one meetings with all 140 employees within the first year.
“We're also in the middle of building a new fiber division. So that's been a big, big effort right now as well,” Sellstrom said.
“And then I think moving forward over the next couple of years, generation's going to be a big issue.”
He said the utility’s steam turbines “are getting up there in age” and in today's economic and political environment, “we're trying to figure out what a re-powered power plant might look like to replace our steam turbines.”
Community-Owned Open Access Fiber Network
The BPU in August of 2025 announced the official launch of its community-owned open access fiber network.
In the interview, Sellstrom was asked to offer additional details on this effort, including the timeline for completion.
He noted that since the late 1990s, “we've actually had fiber in our system. We mostly used it for communication to our substations and for public entities such as the local schools and the city and the county. And we've also leased some of that dark fiber, (excess fiber strands), to businesses over the years through dark fiber leases.”
A few years ago, Jamestown’s mayor was concerned about internet affordability and speeds along with the economic potential for remote workers. He initiated a project to evaluate if the city should develop its own fiber network.
It didn't progress at the time, but a funding opportunity came out a few years later that was aligned with more of a utility model.
“So the BPU applied for and was awarded a $30 million grant to deploy [an] open access fiber network to our entire electric service territory, which is about 25 square miles,” Sellstrom noted.
“The fiber will be brought to every home that signs up for service before the end of this year at no charge, and it's capable of providing 2 gigabit per second internet. The cool thing about this network is unlike traditional internet providers who provide the internet and the infrastructure, the BPU is not going to be the internet service provider,” he said.
“Instead, we're the infrastructure provider, and there will be multiple private businesses competing for the consumer internet service, as well as potentially other digital services that might come to fruition on the network.”
The utility thinks of it “much like a road where the community owns the road and private companies like FedEx or UPS can travel that road and bring the deliveries to the customers.”
The project will pass about 13,000 homes and businesses, and there is a “pretty aggressive timeline due to the funding limitation.”
The entire project “has to be built in just over a year and a half. We're well on our way, but we still have quite a bit to do.”
The utility’s construction partners have installed about 70% of close to 1,000,000 feet of fiber that are going up. “We've got quite a bit of make-ready work done. We still have some to do, such as pole replacements, and moving existing attachments to make space for the fiber.”
The remaining work is about 13,000 customer drops, and “lots of splicing, marketing to our community, and setting up new customers to actually get them service.”
Sellstrom also discussed news announced in January that the utility had executed renewed electric flex rate agreements with two regional manufacturers, providing them with slightly lower electric rates in exchange for continued economic development investments and stable workforce numbers.
