Northern Colorado residents are fed up with paying long-distance rates for calls to communities only a few miles away, and they want changes.

Those proposed changes could boost phone bills for customers statewide, however.

Officials from Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley and 14 other northern communities have asked state regulators to lump them into a single local calling area.

Calls between many communities within Larimer and Weld counties are considered local. But cross the county line with a call, and long-distance rates apply.

The coalition wants to eliminate long-distance rates for roughly 311,000 northern Colorado residents calling between the counties. All those residents are in the 970 area code.

It is a problem that plagues many rural areas. For instance, on the Western Slope, a call from Basalt to Aspen, Carbondale or Glenwood Springs is local, but a call from Basalt to Rifle is long-distance. The proposal under consideration by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission only deals with customers in Weld and Larimer counties.

Keithly-Williams Seed sales representative Craig Yearous said calls from his Evans office north of Greeley to a customer across Interstate 25 near Fort Collins sometimes add up to $10 or more a month.

«I think it would be a great deal,» Yearous said of the proposed change. «It would save the company money for calls to customers, and I would tend to call friends in Fort Collins more often.»

Long-distance rates vary, and Qwest isn’t the only carrier providing the service in the area.

For Qwest’s residential and business customers, the cost of a long-distance call generally ranges from 5 cents to 9 cents per minute depending on the service package.

For customers who don’t have an in-state long-distance plan, the rates are substantially higher — up to 17.5 cents per minute for residential and up to 20 cents a minute for businesses.

Qwest is the principal carrier in the area, with 234,000 lines. A small rural company, Nunn Telephone Co., has 658 lines.

Both provide long-distance service within the region and would lose revenues if those calls were to become local.

State regulations governing utilities allow the companies to boost rates to make up the lost revenues, said Terry Bote, Public Utilities Commission spokesman.

Any increase faced by Qwest, which has 2.7 million lines statewide, might end up being absorbed by ratepayers inside and outside the affected calling area, Bote said.

When long-distance calls become local, people generally respond by increasing the number of calls they make, said Edie Ortega, Qwest regional manager for northern Colorado. She said an increase in call volume could require additional equipment.

Qwest customers throughout the state could also face rate increases to pay for any equipment required.

«We just want to recover our costs,» Ortega said.

Nunn Telephone’s customers would shoulder any lost revenues or the cost of any equipment the company would have to add or upgrade, the company’s lawyer, Barry Hjort, said.

Since the rural phone company has so few customers, the switch could cause a substantial increase in the rates they must pay, Hjort said. But he didn’t have any specifics.

The PUC asked the companies to submit studies by Friday outlining the losses they would incur.

The plan’s proponents are aware that it carries a danger of rate increases, said Rene Wheeler, assistant to Loveland’s city manager.

«Everyone is worried about rate increases,» she said. But if the rates run too high, «we have the opportunity to pull our application.»

The PUC has approved similar requests in the past. Most involved fewer phone customers, and none resulted in a rate increase, Bote said.

The northern Colorado proposal is larger than any other long-distance area change and could involve significant costs, he said.

Colorado’s Office of Consumer Counsel, which makes recommendations to the commission on such plans, will look carefully at the cost studies, said Ken Reif, who heads the office.

The plan might not be fair to those outside the area or to some northern Coloradans who don’t call beyond their existing local boundaries, he said.