Patrick County’s Broadband Committee plans to pull out all of the stops at the Board of Supervisor’s meeting on Monday, with speakers lined up to underscore the importance of adequate broadband service.
Steve Terry, the committee chairman, said speakers from different sectors of the community will discuss the potential impact on businesses, telemedicine, real estate/taxes, tourism, education, and other areas.
Terry said he is hopeful the renewed focus will encourage residents to complete a survey that soon will be underway.
Officials with the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), which will conduct the survey, have said it is a critical first step and an important part of the assessment process. When the survey is completed, CIT will make recommendations to the locality. Because CIT is a state-funded agency, the work will be completed at no cost to the locality.
When initially approved, the survey was scheduled to start last year. The start date was bumped up to early February, Terry said, adding that committee members do not yet have a firm start date. CIT officials did not immediately return a call for comment.
However, when it does get underway, Terry said he encourages local residents to participate, especially given that survey participation generally is low.
“Let’s create some excitement and some hope” by bucking the trend, participating and “doing something good for the county,” Terry said.
Other localities working to address connectivity include Carroll County, which is part of the Wired Road, a partnership between private sector providers and local governments in Carroll and Grayson counties and the City of Galax, according to Carroll County Administrator Steve Truitt.
Participating localities are dedicated to obtaining funding and working to provide broadband service to un-served or underserved areas, he added.
There, officials are conducting a different kind of survey, Truitt said of the survey on a Neighborhood Pole Project. Through that project, the locality can erect poles/towers that will provide broadband to clumps of homes and use signals to serve customers, Truitt said.
The county has received bids for both building the towers and providing service to customers, with plans for the project to move forward soon.
When working on those projects, Truitt said the county is “doing the best we can with what we have” to ensure growth continues, whether it be broadband or any other type of project.
“Business development is one of the most important things I work on,” he said. “I think we always need to be looking for opportunities” to work together to address common issues or meet common goals.
In his opinion, Truitt said he would like to see the federal government create a program similar to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, but for broadband. The act allowed for federal loans to install electrical distribution systems to serve rural areas. With that intervention, most homes had electricity by the mid-1950s, he said.
“An effort like that, that would recognize our residents need” broadband would go a long way towards ensuring those needs were met, he said. Without it, and as it stands now, “what I do is I do the best I can and it’s a struggle.”
The supervisors will meet at 6 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 11 on the third floor of the Patrick County Veterans Memorial Building.
