Loveland voters on Tuesday heartily approved a ballot question that will allow the city government to provide high-speed Internet to its residents.

The second batch of results released at 10:07 p.m. showed ballot Question 2C leading 82.8 percent to 17.2 percent. Actual vote totals were 16,501 yes and 3,423, according to the Larimer County Clerk’s elections website.

Roger Ison, chairman of the Loveland Broadband Committee that worked for passage of 2C, celebrated the apparent margin of victory.

“I wanted to not just get it passed but get a clear mandate,” he said. “Our goal was to pass it in a really strong way.”

Since the passage of a state law in 2005, local municipalities have been forbidden from creating their own broadband networks.

Across Colorado on Tuesday, voters in 26 cities and towns and at least 17 counties were asked to pass similar overrides of SB 152, which when approved by the Legislature in 2005 was intended to keep cities from competing with private businesses. Before this election, about 10 Colorado cities and towns already had passed such overrides.

“Loveland has a patchwork of services that are not getting upgraded,” Ison said.

The way the Internet has developed, high-speed service is becoming critically important not just for Internet uses but also for phone service and television, he said. The ballot measure will allow the city to provide all those services, either directly or indirectly.

Without citywide broadband that’s reliable and affordable, Loveland residents will be left out, Ison said. Access to high-speed Internet would give the city a competitive edge economically, he said.

Approval of the issue is just the start and doesn’t guarantee that Loveland will get into the broadband business, Ison said.

“The City Council’s going to have to decide what they want to do,” he said, adding that the committee will disband and allow the council and citizens take the next steps.

Loveland’s municipal government has a number of options, Ison said. It could go the route that Longmont has taken and create its own broadband utility, which is taking super-fast fiber optic service to every home and business in town.

Loveland also could build the high-speed infrastructure — using fiber optic lines that the Platte River Power Authority installed in Loveland years ago — and then lease the bandwidth to commercial carriers who would sell the service to residential and business customers.

Craig Young: 970-635-3634, cyoung@reporter-herald.com, www.twitter.com/CraigYoungRH.