Committee updated on county broadband project

SHAWNA KONIECZNY

At Tuesday’s meeting, the Taylor County Broadband Committee met to discuss the progress of a number of projects and programs that are meant to help bring broadband connection to the county.

During the meeting, committee chair Michael Bub gave an update on the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) grant applications. He explained that about $420 million was requested from this round of the PSC grants, however only $100 million is currently available. The committee submitted a total of five grants, four of them were submitted for WANRack to extend the county’s network to many of their townships, including Jump River, Hammel, Goodrich, and Grover.

The fifth grant was a last-minute request from Bug Tussel Wireless just before the deadline. The committee was unable to meet to approve the grant, so Bub made the decision as the committee chairman to submit the grant after consulting a few people over the weekend.

However, there was a condition that came with getting the grant submitted. “We did submit the grant with Bug Tussel, but with a condition that we will only accept the grant if Bug Tussel uses our network. So we’re not going to be part of them building a new network and then ours is obsolete,” said Bub.

Bub then explained that the committee’s consultant, Russ Berg, said that if they are unable to come to an agreement with Bug Tussel if they were to receive the grant, that the county had the right to not accept the grant. Members of the committee were worried about Bug Tussel trying to buy out or take over the county’s network, but that doesn’t seem like something that would happen at the time being based on the discussion that took place.

The county’s network is currently under contract with WANRack and will be for the next twenty years, so if another company were to want to buy the network, it’d have to be through WANRack. “When we turn that network on and then for the next 240 months after that, WANRack owns it,” said Blake Mayfield, the Director of Sales at WANRack. “So if someone was going to try to buy it, they would have to make an offer to us that would be too good to refuse because we are very excited to be operating in Taylor County and are not looking to sell it.”

In the future, there will be another round of PSC grants and Bub suggested that they submit requests to get fiber internet connection to different sections of the county as there’s been a trend of Fiber to Home (FTH) grants receiving more approval. “I think we should start identifying parts of Taylor County [that need fiber connection] and if we do this, if we do one or two a year that long-range thing to have more and more people of Taylor County on fiber to the home becomes possible,” said Bub.

Last Thursday, there was a meeting with town and village chairmen and other guests from within the county that focused on the topic of towns spending part of their American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds on broadband. At the meeting, Bub explained to the over 25 people in attendance an idea to have towns group together and invest in building broadband towers in areas that can cover multiple towns instead of having each town build their own.

While they are hoping to get the PSC grants, the idea of pooling together different towns’ ARPA funds could work as a backup plan. Bub said that with that plan, they could potentially get towers up and running by the summer of 2022. The committee gave Berg permission to start the process of figuring out how to pursue this plan. Until they hear about the PSC grants, there isn’t any action that can be done for now, they are just making plans and preparations. “I think we need to start lining up ducks in a row for plan A, plan B, plan C, because everything is happening so fast,” said Bub.

During the meeting, Bub also gave a construction update for the towers and expansion of their network that is currently going on. He explained that there’s been some difficulty with loading and unloading equipment as they haven’t had a loading dock. Along with that, the weather hasn’t been the best for construction in the past couple weeks. WANRack decided to rent a portable loading dock and a forklift to make future construction easier.

There’s also been some difficulties with locators from companies to come out and locate gas lines and such so that’s been causing a slight delay in plans. However, Bub explained that they are making progress and they are scheduled to follow their timeline. “Quite frankly, the reports every Thursday have been going really good. The construction is going good and that they believe they are on pace,” said Bub.