Agriculture Hands Out $1.2 Billion in Rural Broadband Grants
The Department of Agriculture awarded 126 broadband grants worth $1.2 billion Wednesday as a part of its second round of broadband funding through last year’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Despite the ambitious nature of the initiative, Secretary Tom Vilsack said it wouldn’t ensure the full deployment of universal broadband in the U.S.. “It’s a down payment, but not a balloon payment approach … to make broadband available in all corners of the country,” he told a media briefing. “There is a lot of work to be done but this certainly puts people to work.”
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Vilsack acknowledged that broadband adoption could pose a problem and the initiative will likely face hurdles as the technology is deployed to rural residents. “We learned that with the rural utility service and with rural electrification in the 30’s and 40’s that there was at least, initially, some skepticism about it all,” he said. “But as people saw the benefits, they saw their neighbors utilizing it effectively to make their lives better, there was greater adoption, greater acceptance and that’s obviously what we're going to have to continue to do with broadband,” he said.
The money is intended to create jobs and provide rural residents with access to improved communications services, said Vilsack. “This investment in broadband is already beginning to put Americans back to work and we anticipate that the investments we have announced to date will create somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 immediate and direct jobs.”
The largest grant was $123.8 million to West Kentucky Rural Telephone Cooperative for the construction of fiber lines to 21,072 households throughout west Kentucky and west Tennessee. A complete list of projects receiving Recovery Act broadband grant awards today is at www.whitehouse.gov. The USDA said there’s an additional $1 billion in authorized funds that will be provided in loans and grants by the end of September. Recipients have three years to substantially complete their projects, and funding is contingent on the recipient meeting the terms of the loan, grant or loan/grant agreement, the department said.
"We expect that these investments will positively impact and expand broadband access to an estimated 1.2 million households, 230,000 businesses and over 7,800 anchor institutions, colleges, universities, hospitals and libraries,” Vilsack said. “We anticipate and expect that expanding broadband will help small business owners in rural areas to be able to strengthen their distribution channels, increase efficiencies and have access to global marketplaces.” He also said the broadband grants would help enhance the communication capabilities of rural first responders and provide farmers with real time commodity and weather information.
The department will have to promote programs that educate residents on the benefits of broadband technology for the initiative to succeed, said Hilda Legg, a former Rural Utilities Service administrator. “Adoption will absolutely be an issue. It won’t be a ‘build it and they will come’ situation,” said Legg, now a consultant at Wiley Rein. Rural residents “will eventually [adopt the technology] but there continues to be a lot of discussion about helping consumers better utilize the capacity that this will be bringing forward.”