Morgan County officials are partnering with a local company to hopefully expand broadband Internet coverage.
Morgan County Regional Planner Dusty Douglas announced Monday that the county government is currently working with Frontier Communications on a fiber internet project to cover portions of the county that currently do not have broadband service available: “You really need someone to kind of quarterback, and we’ve been approached by Frontier that they’d like to take a shot at the funding. This is in no way an endorsement of them. We’ve enjoyed working with them, but they want to look at serving all of the unserved portions of the county. We are going to take a run at that funding and see if we can be successful.”
Douglas says the next steps in the process will likely be surveys to areas that would fall into the service territory: “I think there will be some additional surveys [conducted]. There’s been an appeal process to some maps that came out through the federal Department of Communications that I know they’ve been taking a look at. I don’t know how upset they are with those. I know there were some areas [of the county] that they felt like were probably a little bit off and they have already started some appeal processes. They’ve talked to us about that, but I think there will be some surveys but not as extensive as what you have heard about before.”
Douglas says that he doesn’t have a figure yet on the cost of the project. He says the surveys and solicitation of support letters from a variety of organizations will start in approximately a month. He says that Frontier will bare the brunt of most of the work on the project moving forward: “It’s public from the standpoint that [Morgan County] will be a co-applicant. I mean they are doing the heavy lifting, basically saying that they will do the work if we get the financial commitment. The county will be putting forth kind of a sign of goodwill in the form of $50,000. Other than doing some in-office work, we really don’t have a lot of big obligations so we’re hoping to be successful. If not, we’ll keep trying.”
Douglas says that the $50,000 financial piece from the county will come from the remaining American Rescue Plan Act fund balance.