Morris said UTOPIA officials plan to put together a new financial plan to evaluate if UTOPIA will stand on its own. Although he feels it will still happen, Morris did leave the door open for failure. "UTOPIA has to stand on its own," Morris said, adding the system should not be a burden to supporting cities. If they cannot make the business model self-sufficient, Morris said he will have no problem closing down and letting UTOPIA slip into obscurity as a once-proposed project.

UTOPIA supporters remain optimistic that the system will be built. "We're confident that the numbers will make it very clear that UTOPIA will move forward with the 11 other cities," said Arthur Brady, direc- tor of Utahns for Telecom Choices.

But could UTOPIA actually be growing soon? Although he refused to give specific names, Brady said he knows of some six Utah cities, including one in the Salt Lake Valley, that are mulling the possibility of joining UTOPIA. Brady mentioned that the interested cities are not among the 18 original cities that make up UTOPIA's core. If they were to join UTOPIA, Brady said each city would have to hold a series of public hearings and ultimately put the bond issue to a public vote.

Morris said in the coming months, officials will be doing some hard number crunching to get their proposal ready for review by lenders. "We first had wanted the dust to settle on which cities are in and which are out," he said.

When asked how UTOPIA will deal with bridging the gap between northern cities and those in the south, Morris said he anticipates the network will run through West Valley City and leap to Centerville in Davis County. Although quite an expensive endeavor, Morris said money budgeted to connect Salt Lake City to surrounding cities has now been freed to deal with such logistics. But hard numbers have yet to be produced.

"The timeline won't change," Morris said of the next step. Officials say they plan to have financing secured by midsummer, with construction of the network to begin in July. Under their plan, construction of the network, which will mainly involve stringing fiber cable on existing utility poles, will begin in several cities simultaneously.

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