Oregon to receive nearly $700 million for broadband access

Oregon will receive a whopping $688 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to help provide broadband in areas of the state that lack high-speed connection. The funding is part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Oregon’s Broadband Office will craft a five-year action plan and has been holding community meetings across the state to hear what Oregonians are experiencing in terms of internet access. Nick Batz is the director of the office. He joins us to share what he heard at these meetings and what the timeline looks like for broadening internet access in Oregon.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. There’s a need for broadband in Oregon. An estimated 1.7 million Oregonians either don’t have high speed internet, or they are relying on outdated technology to get it. The state is about to get a big infusion of money to rectify that. The federal government has earmarked nearly $700 million to help get high speed internet to Oregonians that don’t have it. The money will come from the massive bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed in 2021. Oregon’s Broadband Office is working on a plan for spending all that federal money. Nick Batz is the director of that office and he joins us now. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Batz: Thanks Geoff, pleasure being here.

Norcross: That survey that I cited was done before the pandemic, and then the pandemic came and made the broadband access problem worse. Can you talk about how?

Batz: I think what it really did is highlighted that internet wasn’t just for entertainment, it wasn’t for catching up with high school friends, it wasn’t for downloading pictures of your pets onto Facebook. It had turned into everything for communities. And I think COVID really laid that bare.

Now, folks work remotely. Students learn remotely. You could access health care, you could access mental health treatment virtually. State and federal agencies were taking advantage of this. It became a key and necessary component to life, no matter where you lived. And Congress really recognized that, the White House really recognized that, and that’s how they ended up with this BEAD program, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. That’s the $42.5 billion program you’re speaking of, and it has the very aspirational goal of “internet for all.”

Norcross: Is there a community in Oregon, a specific one that you can point to, that would be transformed by the arrival of broadband?

Batz: Yes, a number of communities in fact. We did community outreach meetings around the state. We started in Tillamook, went down the coast to North Bend, ended up in Roseburg, Klamath Falls. And in between those two is the community of Ruch, in Jackson County, it’s in the Greater Applegate Valley. That was one of the most well attended meetings we hosted. They have not great internet access down there, and it’s really impacted their lives. And the community has come together and made it a priority to change that. And they recognize the value of having greater accessibility.

We heard from a 90 year old gentleman in Tillamook who came and gave a compelling argument for why internet was an absolute key and necessary component of his life. We heard from county commissioners in Harney County who recognized that the path forward for their communities, if they wanted to survive, was access to high speed, reliable broadband internet access.

Kind of the age-old question for rural communities since we’ve moved on from natural resource economies is “what jobs do we have for our young people? How do we get kids to move back to the communities they grew up in after they’ve graduated high school?” And a lot of folks that we’ve talked to around the state see broadband as the key to that.

Norcross: And what are some of the hurdles to getting broadband to a place like that?

Batz: Well, you look at the densely populated centers in Oregon and they have pretty good internet access. And if you drive out into rural communities that starts to change. Oregon is a huge state. We’re the 9th largest state by land mass. We have a lot of rural communities that are very small that have challenging geographies. We have a lot of mountain ranges, we have a lot of valleys, we have a lot of trees.

And why are trees a problem? Well, if you’re a house literally in the middle of nowhere and you rely on microwave towers or fixed wireless for your internet connectivity, or even satellites, depending on what season it is can influence whether you have connectivity, because we have so many trees, and you need a line of sight to have these services. And then we have just parts of the state that are so sparsely populated, it is gonna be a challenge getting those folks connected.

Norcross: You said that you held a dozen meetings with the public around the state so far this year. What kind of stories did they tell you about the great lengths they went to just to be able to access the internet?

Batz: It’s funny, the photo that you posted in your story about this interview today showed the CyberMill in Seneca. And I don’t know if folks have been to Seneca, but it’s a little tiny community in between Burns and John Day. They had a lack of internet access, residents, the employers in the community, a tiny community of maybe a couple 100. But they knew they needed to do something about it.

And they created a thing called a CyberMill. And it is like a community center for residents of Seneca to go visit and access the internet. There’s a big employer that has a lot of seasonal employees in that town. And the folks who move in in the summer to fight fires, the way they stay connected with their family is by visiting the CyberMill. It has more members than folks that live in that community. It’s such an important aspect of life in that town.

Norcross: Back in January, the secretary of state’s office released an audit of your office, and we’re gonna talk about a few of the key findings. One issue that was brought up was staffing. The audit reads “the broadband office has not been able to fulfill its statutory requirements to close Oregon’s digital divide due in large part to the lack of staffing.” What have you done about that?

Batz: We hired people, Geoff. One of the great things about these federal programs is they have administrative dollars attached to them so we can staff up. And in my conversations with legislators, I framed this funding as historic. It’s historic in the amount of money. It’s not every day we get $688.9 million for broadband deployment in the state of Oregon. But it’s also historic in the way Congress has dictated that the funds be administered. Historically, money flowed from Congress to a handful of federal agencies, and those agencies made awards directly to internet service providers. This time, Congress wants the money to flow through states. And states like Oregon didn’t have an official broadband office until Governor Brown created it via executive order in December of 2018. It was later codified by the legislature. But for the first two years of existence of that broadband office, it was staffed by one person. Over the last 18 months we’ve hired up. We’re about 10 people now, we’re in the process of hiring an outreach coordinator for Eastern Oregon as well, and I imagine we’re gonna hire quite a few more folks.

I was on a call yesterday. The State of North Carolina has a broadband office of 25 people. The state of Virginia has a broadband office of 40 people. New Mexico, 40 people. So we’ve got a ways to go to catch up. But we’ve done a good job hiring some really excellent people who have tremendous skill sets and fit perfectly with what Oregon needs to do.

Norcross: Another point the audit made was the agency lacked any DEI plans, or diversity equity and inclusion plans, or people overlooking those efforts to help address underserved communities. Where does that stand now?

Batz: The agency at large, Business Oregon, that’s kind of the home for the Oregon broadband office, we have hired a consultant and are working towards developing an agency-wide diversity equity and inclusion plan. Digital equity specifically to broadband is a component of the BEAD program. We have hired a person who is our digital equity coordinator. We are doing outreach meetings specific to digital equity. We are required to develop a digital equity plan, but we don’t yet have the final guidance from NTIA, that’s the federal agency in charge of these programs, on what that needs to look like yet.

Norcross: One more thing from the audit, it says “the data the Broadband Office relies on might not even fully show the depth of Oregon’s internet access disparities.” You divide the state by census tracts, and the audit says if a single home in a census block can get broadband, the entire block is considered served, despite how many other homes without broadband access may exist. In rural areas, these blocks may stretch miles. The flawed maps present a big problem as the government tries to distribute broadband funding. So what are you doing with that finding?

Batz: That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Not that finding, but the fact that that actually was the reality. And I say it “was” because it’s changed.

When Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, they changed the way the FCC maps broadband. So it used to be down to the census block, and if one house in that census block was covered, the whole thing was covered. What they’ve done now is they’ve gone much, much more refined. It’s down to what is called the broadband serviceable location, otherwise known as BSLs. Think of that as a building if you’re looking at an aerial map that you think should have broadband access. We now have an FCC national broadband map that it’s down to the individual location. I would encourage all of your listeners to go on to the national broadband map, type in their address, and see what that map says the service they have at their household. You can actually file a challenge on the availability at your home and dispute what internet service providers claim they’re providing to your home.

Norcross: Nick, let’s talk about how you’ll spend that $700 million that’s coming from the federal government. It seems to me to fall somewhat neatly into two buckets: getting the service to people, and helping them pay for it. And that first thing seems to be the really heavy work. How do you even start to get broadband to underserved people in Oregon, which as you mentioned earlier, is a big state with lots of empty space and mountains and valleys and trees and things?

Batz: Yeah Geoff, that’s a good question. The first thing you have to do is identify which of those broadband serviceable locations I mentioned fall into the unserved or underserved definitions provided by NTIA for the administration of this program. Unserved locations are those who have speeds at 25 megabits per second/3 megabits per second or below, underserved are 100/25. Again, you can go on the map, you can see how the feds designate your house.

NTIA, the agency administering this program, has a couple requirements for states. And the biggest one is we have to provide service to everyone who is currently unserved. That is the first bucket we must fill. We can’t move beyond that until we have that done. So we have to figure out a way to provide service to every single broadband serviceable location in this state that is currently unserved according to NTIA. Once we’ve shown them how we can do that, we can move on to the underserved bucket. Again, that’s the folks that have service below 100/25. I don’t anticipate we have enough funding to move beyond that into the third bucket, which is community anchor institutions.

But more broadly, your question of how do you move on beyond that, how do you actually start building this infrastructure? This funding program through NTIA is different than I think most people realize. it’s not a block grant to the state, it’s not an earmark to the state of Oregon or any other state. We actually have to jump through an insane number of hoops as required by NTIA before the funding can even get here. And the first of those big hoops is the development of a five-year action plan. And think of that as a high level outline of the resources, the challenges and the opportunities that exist in Oregon around broadband. That is due in about six weeks. We’re required to send it into NTIA, they’ll review it and get back to us.

The day after the funding announcements, that was 2-3 weeks ago, it started a six month clock ticking and that’s the big one. That’s a huge deliverable called the initial plan. So we have six months, which puts us right around Christmas. The timing is terrible, but it is what it is. And we have six months to develop a plan that is extraordinarily detailed on how the state of Oregon with this $688.9 million is going to get everyone in Oregon who is currently unserved served. And they will go through it with a fine tooth comb. Federal program officers from other states will review it. Leadership at NTIA will review it. And there will be a back and forth dialogue until they approve what our plan is. And then we have a while after that to develop our final plan. And only then do we get the funds that we can actually deploy it.

Norcross: Can you talk specifically since we did touch a little bit on certain communities that are underserved? Can you talk specifically about how this effort might get broadband access to people living in Native American lands in Oregon?

Batz: Yeah, tribes are absolutely one of the eligible entities in this. We’re required to do formal consultation with the nine federally recognized tribes. So we’ve reached out through Governor Kotek’s office to the nine tribes, requested formal meetings. The first got scheduled yesterday, so we’ll be meeting with one of the tribes on the coast later this month. And tribes are eligible for direct funding through this program as well. We’ve already seen some success with some of the tribes in Oregon. The Burns Paiute tribe won a $500,000 award to build a new microwave tower just outside of their tribal lands, and it will go a long way into increasing connectivity and redundancy for that community.

Norcross: I can just see down the road you running into these little municipal hurdles when you’re trying to get the service to people. Like there are certain communities that have utility poles, you can put the lines there, others you don’t so you have to bury them. How do you navigate all that city to city and county to county?

Batz: Gosh, I wish I knew the answer to that. We started down that process. I’ve had a number of conversations with the governor’s office on convening statewide meetings around permitting. It’s a challenge that every state faces. What that path forward looks like, I don’t know yet. But we’re gonna have those conversations. I’ve been flagging it for communities and our outreach meetings across the state.

There’s an additional permitting challenge that Western states face that not a lot of other states do, in that a lot of our land mass is federally owned. So we have BLM land which is gonna have its own permitting challenges. We have lots of Forest Service land which is gonna present its own permitting challenges. So it is one of those three big issues that kind of keep me up at night on how we’re gonna address them.

Norcross: So for any community, or anybody who lives in the community that hears your criteria for unserved or underserved, and they think “that’s me, that’s my home,” and they think that they’re a good candidate for extension of service under this program, what should they do?

Batz: First thing they should do is go to the National Broadband Map hosted by the FCC, and confirm their suspicions. They’re likely right, those communities know pretty well what services exist within their city limits.

And then the second piece of advice I would have for them is they need to start outreach to their internet service providers. ISPs in this state are going to do a lot of work getting this infrastructure built. They have the know-how, they have the technical capacity, they have the supply chains. And there’s gonna be a tremendous supply chain crunch nationally. The feds airdropped between this program and the Treasury program north of $50 billion to be deployed on broadband over the next couple of years. So we expect to see pretty robust supply chain issues around the country.

The third thing I would recommend to communities is to reach out to us, start a conversation with us if they haven’t already. We’ve begun office hours, we held our first last Friday. The one on Friday was specific for local governments. They should reach out to us and ask questions. What do they need to do? Who do they need to talk to? Just a general understanding of these programs. This BEAD program is incredibly complex. The notice of funding opportunity available is like 200 pages long, and the frequently asked questions has multiple versions, and in and of itself is north of 100 pages long.

So these aren’t easy programs to understand. A lot of the communities that lack high speed, reliable, broadband access have capacity challenges, they have a mayor who is the director of the Parks Department who is the chief of the volunteer fire department. They don’t have a broadband person sitting around waiting to figure out how to administer this program. So use the Broadband Office as a resource. We are here for that purpose, and we are happy to talk to anybody who wants to talk.

Norcross: Last question, you mentioned the internet service providers, the ISPs who you’re gonna be partnering with in order to make this happen, they may be good partners, they may not, but they’re private companies. And a lot of people think that high speed internet has become a necessity, not a luxury, a necessity, just something that you need like water or electricity. And I’m wondering what this whole process means for the argument that some people are making that high speed internet should be a public utility, and regulated as such?

Batz: That is a fantastic question for the federal government. I’ve been asked that a number of times. I have zero control over what that looks like. And it is the third rail in the broadband world these days. So I don’t have an answer for it other than, if you have those concerns, I highly recommend that you reach out to your member of Congress.

Norcross: Nick Batz, thanks so much for the time. I appreciate it.

Batz: Thank you.

Norcross: Nick Batz is the director of Oregon’s Broadband Office.

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