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During the called March 24 meeting, Macon County Manager Derek Roland said the county anticipates receiving four applications from three companies ahead of the April 4 deadline with projects totaling $10.6 million.
On March 24, the Macon County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to set aside up to $200,000 in American Rescue Plan funds for future broadband expansion in the county.
The money is allocated as matching funds for the Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) Grants, a grant administered by the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office and created to support private internet service providers’ efforts to expand their coverage to unserved and underserved communities.
During the called March 24 meeting, Macon County Manager Derek Roland said the county anticipates receiving four applications from three companies ahead of the April 4 deadline with projects totaling $10.6 million. Roland said the proposed projects would connect up to 2,000 new customers to broadband internet if completed.
While the grants are given to private entities, the support of local governments can have a big impact on the scoring system used to determine how the funds are distributed.
“Each applicant that can prove the county has appropriated funding from American Rescue Plan funds will receive six additional points in the application scoring process and the private provider’s match will be reduced from 30 percent to 15 percent,” Roland said. “That’s a big deal when you’re looking at the $10.6 million project.”
Roland said the three applicants who have expressed interest in applying are Frontier Communications, BalsamWest and Altice, which acquired Morris Broadband last year and has submitted two project proposals for Macon County.
The county’s role is primarily as a supporting partner in this process, Roland said, with private providers shouldering the majority of the burden of making these projects a reality.
“The providers are in discussions with the broadband infrastructure office themselves, so when this sort of opportunity is out there it’s up to the providers in each county to make the business case to pursue this grant application,” Roland said. “What we have here is a situation where three local providers have seen this money on the table, looked at their current service areas and been able to put projects together that made financial sense for them in light of this grant funding.”
While the county’s support will go a long way in ensuring these local applications are competitive, Roland said there are a number of other criteria that will weigh on how much funding an individual project receives. Criteria like how many new connections will be created and how much each individual connection will cost are components of the final decision-making process.
In the event that a project is not awarded a GREAT grant, the funds allocated by the county will remain untouched.
“We’re only required to expend the funds that are awarded, so if these four applications go down there and only two get awarded that means we’re only out $100,000,” Roland said during the meeting.
Broadband access in Macon County has been an issue for years, and this latest round of grants represents an opportunity to bring a significant amount of funding into the county to address the longstanding problem of connectivity. The county has formed a broadband committee, composed of local business owners and stakeholders, which will continue to act as a resource for these service providers as they navigate the application process and ultimately carry out any projects that receive approval for GREAT funding.
“The broadband committee is just going to continue to assist these providers in any way we can to help them do whatever they need to do, whether we have to assist them with mapping or be a resource to them in taking this process from the planning phase to actually rolling it out,” Roland said.
The Macon County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to approve the allocation of $200,000 of American Rescue Plan funds as a match for any approved local projects in this year’s round of GREAT grant funding.
The next regular Board of Commissioners meeting is Tuesday, April 12.
- By Carter Giegerich/For The Highlander