Broadband service still coming soon

East Texas Council of Government’s long-running effort to enhance broadband connectivity throughout the region is officially moving from grassroots to green – to the tune of $168.5 million.
For the past several years, ETCOG personnel have been crisscrossing their 14-county region to connect with elected officials on the ground for insight about what’s actually, practically needed to get locals plugged in. They’ve put all that research into a comprehensive strategic broadband plan, identifying 65 ‘essential’ projects and crafting budgets for each to guide the public funding phase that will ultimately get communities connected.
The broad effort included ETCOG’s hiring of David Scott as Director of Special Projects, and he was a key voice in the agency’s Sept. 20 virtual meeting on the broadband initiative. Meeting with project principles, members of the media and other East Texans, the online session officially marked the project’s transition from planning to fund-seeking.
“I’m happy to say we’re at the very end of this,” Scott said. “Now we’re in the process, the final phase of this, seeking funds and trying to get this stuff implemented and installed.”
Simply put, he’s tired of all the planning and ready to actually turn dirt on the work.
“I want this stuff off my desk,” Scott quipped. “Let’s go forth and really start making an impact here.”
ETCOG’s been pursuing funds for rural broadband programs in East Texas as far back as 2009. This most recent grant-funding effort dates back to late 2020.
“For the past several years, the ETCOG… has taken on an aggressive project to provide internet services to our un-served or underserved areas, rural areas specifically,” Scott said. “ETCOG kind of took of a grassroots approach.”
The local planning process officially got underway in January ‘21, incorporating businesses, county and city governments, education agencies and healthcare partners to develop the final plan which was approved in May of this year.
“We did more of a strategic approach by looking at what each county needed, not what we were thinking we could provide. With each county we asked them to prioritize their projects and come up with a plan.”
The council of governments contracted out the individual county studies, including the development of budget infrastructure for the individual projects. At this point, ETCOG has completed broadband studies and developed action plans for 13 of its 14 counties – Upshur County abstained – with 65 projects on the drawing board.
“Some counties have one, other counties have up to six,” Scott said.
The combined projects total an estimated $168,484,762. For Gladewater residents, that includes five projects in Gregg County, one in Smith-Whitehouse, none in Upshur. Gregg County’s five projects (adopted in July 2022) total $2,675,619. The sole project in Smith County (including Whitehouse) is valued at almost $2.5 million, approved last December.
See the full breakdown at etcog.org/broadband-planning
As far as funding goes, there are billions of development dollars at play in Texas and across the country.
“We’re just watching to see what’s coming down the pipeline,” says Rebecca Gage, ETCOG Economic Development Grant Specialist Rebecca Gage,
Per Scott, the partnership with DETCOG is key to landing funding for the myriad projects here.
“This can’t just be a single COG or regional thing,” he said, especially when it comes to pursuing highly-competitive grant funds on the national level.
The local COG has also recruited grant writers and implemented a ‘Micro-Community Broadband Initiative’ to review, plan, evaluate, rank and produce RFQs, RFPs and grant applications.
“As we’re going in and assisting some of these micro-communities,” Scott said, “we’re creating a playbook for best practices so we can hand it off to other COGs and other areas who are struggling like we are.
“We need to get past this and really start connecting people,” ensuring rural residents have improve access to telehealth, telemedicine, digital literacy projects and more. For example, “The pandemic taught us we need to have Internet for kids to continue to learn.”
An immediate task is to improve the project’s web presence with an updated website. Meanwhile, ETCOG is updating a list of all the known Internet providers in East Texas. An overreaching goal is to connect those ISPs with local elected officials.
Notably, grants have small windows of opportunity for applications and tight deadlines, and it has to be the ISPs that file for them.
“What we want to do is start moving on this,” he said. “Our elected officials and the ISPs with jurisdiction in their counties need to be working together.”

– By James Draper

Facebook Comments