Saturday, August 31, 2024
OKANOGAN – The ongoing effort to bring digital access to all county residents, spearheaded by the Okanogan County and Colville Confederated Tribes Broadband Action Team (BAT), is completing installations city by city and negotiating agreements with utility companies to reach every household and business.
The federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, established as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), provided $42.45 billion in state broadband grants. The goal is to provide all Americans with access to affordable, reliable, high-speed internet service by 2030.
Every state - plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. - was awarded at least $100 million, with outlying U.S. territories awarded at least $25 million.
The highest allocation - $3.3 billion – went to Texas, followed by California, $1.9 billion, and Missouri, $1.7 billion. Among the 19 states awarded more than $1 billion is Washington with $1.23 billion.
How was this distribution determined? In large part, the Federal Communications Commission broadband coverage map identified at least 8.5 million locations without access to high-speed internet.
The Okanogan BAT team was out of the starting blocks early.
“We were one of the first broadband action teams in the state,” said Economic Alliance Executive Director and BAT facilitator Roni Holder-Diefenbach, “We were here before the Washington State Broadband Office was in existence.”
Holder-Diefenbach explained the complexities involved in bringing high-speed broadband service to a large, rural county like Okanogan. Not only does BAT need to establish partnerships to get service to more remote areas, but it must also meet mandatory compliance demands before proceeding with installation projects.
“Construction has not yet started in many of these areas because there are studies required like NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), SEPA (State Environmental Policy Act), archeological reviews, and cultural reviews even before infrastructure is deployed,” Holder-Diefenbach said.
“In 2019 our first feasibility study identified 26 projects costing roughly $160 million to complete,” Holder-Diefenbach said.
Since then, delays and inflation have more than halved the number of projects that amount will cover from 26 to 10. The challenge now is to stretch the dollars.
“We have been really lucky,” said Holder-Diefenbach. “We have seen quite an influx of money coming into the county.”
To date, the county has been awarded more than $80 million.
“We cannot get to Conconully without extending that middle mile,” said Holder-Diefenbach. “That’s where a lot of the cost is on those stretches of road where there may not be many houses, but you must have that infrastructure to get to where density areas are. It’s a huge, huge win.”
CCT Broadband
The Colville Confederated Tribes received an initial grant of $48 million.
“The current amount of funding is about one-third of what is needed,” said Ernie Rasmussen, Executive Director of Bigfoot Telecommunications, the CCT business created to handle its broadband installation. “We have requested another $95 million. The first round will allow about 2,200 homes to be served. We have a total of 3,300 broadband serviceable locations.”
To bring service to its far-flung areas, CCT must work with five utilities:
Rasmussen said CCT, using a hub-and-spoke model, is beginning with Inchelium, its least-served community.
“The CCT is well versed in understanding and negotiating these types of projects to meet the needs of their community with the long-term goal of being impactful over generations,” said Rasmussen. “We have plenty of tools in the toolbox.”
One of those is teamwork.
“We found out quickly through the pandemic that we cannot rely on just one person,” said Rasmussen. “If something happens to that person, what happens to that work? We have adjusted and started to create teams that are capable of carrying forward should one teammate need to step away for a period of time.”
Several parts of the reservation are extremely high-cost areas to serve.
“This is why the free market never showed up on the reservation or much of Okanogan County,” said Rasmussen. “The challenge is how do we sustain such a vast network footprint with few connections on a per-mile basis. Putting it all together to create a sustainable model is going to be one of the biggest challenges that we have.”
Then, there is the education side of the digital equity equation.
Holder-Diefenbach said there are two sides to digital equity: access and training.
“It’s one thing to provide access and get the infrastructure out, but the other part is teaching people how to utilize the technology,” Holder-Diefenbach said.
BAT is teaming up with the North Central Washington Tech Alliance to provide the classes, training, and one-on-one sessions.
As Rasmussen defines it: “Are you actually achieving the goal of a household being digitally literate?”
His answer comes in three parts:
“We have actually achieved digital lite4racy in 100 percent of our homes,” Rasmussen said.
“We are really happy as a group obtaining funding to bring broadband to Okanogan County in order to get to some if these hard-to-serve areas,” said Holder-Diefenbach. “There is still a lot of work to do.”
To learn more about BAT, visit the Economic Alliance website, economic-alliance.com, and select the OK CCT BAT tab.
Mike Maltais: 360-333-8483 or michael@ward.media
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