Solution to an ISP monopoly in my rural town, how do i fix this?

Hello everyone at r/networking,

I read through the community rules and I think this meets all requirements. If not please remove it.

As the title states, over the last few years a semi-monopoly has manifested itself in my town. CenturyLink has ownership of the only fiber line coming into town, and they only offer their service on the north side of town. Everywhere else has to be covered by smaller ISPs that lease bandwidth off of CenturyLinks network. As it stands currently, we are paying $80/mo for our 35mbps connection. Drive 30 minutes down the highway, and the college town nearby is offering 1 gigabit connections for $69.99/mo.

As any rural area, we have always been years behind in tech - we are in a conservative state and our town is like 60% retirees. However, in an effort to increase tourism and build the town, over the last 15 years the city has approved the building of at least 5 different subdivisions of 200+ homes around town. We've been gaining evacuees from the high prices in California for years, but with the pandemic that rate has tripled and houses are popping up everywhere.

We simply don't have the IT infrastructure to support what's coming in the next few years. Now, I'm just a 22yo greenhorn in the IT department at the local school district, but as it's such a small town that my dad has known most of the people in the city council for 30+ years - and I think I can get some pull to get stuff moving if it's feasible. I've already sent an email to the mayor to try to set up a meeting, and he said he'd be happy to whenever works for me.

I've heard of communities setting up their own ISPs, I've also heard of towns providing incentives for ISPs to get larger coverage and faster speeds. Does anyone have any experience with anything like this? What direction should I try steering people towards? How feasible is it for a municipality to form their own ISP? How feasible is it to start running fiber in town?

One of our big issues is that 3 of the new subdivisions are geographically separated from the rest of town, and they are going to have as many or more houses than the main area of town in the next few years. Yet the best the ISPs have done thus far is put up one radio on the hill between the main drag and the subdivisions, and I've even talked to the technicians at the ISP and they say their radio is maxed out and can't handle any more households. They said they were even planning a price increase because demand is going up.

So if anyone has any starter advice or personal experience it would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to go to the mayor and council with at least some semblance of a suggestion as to what to do. I can provide much more info, but I didn't want to make a long post even longer. Thank you in advance.