“Master facilitator” says Shumlin’s broadband promise is on schedule

ConnectVT's Karen Marshall. VTD/Josh Larkin

Karen Marshall, chief of ConnectVT, says Gov. Peter Shumlin’s campaign pledge to extend universal broadband access to every last mile by 2013 is on track.

Shumlin launched ConnectVT (not to be confused with ConnectVermont, an Agency of Transportation project), shortly after he took office, and Marshall is the standalone entity’s sole employee. She has no budget per se and no employees to manage. Her office is on the Fifth Floor of the Pavilion building, where the governor’s closest advisors work.

In an interview, Marshall described her job as “master facilitator.” But the petite one-woman arm of state government also serves as a gadfly-style enforcer: Her job is to ensure that state and federal agencies, private companies and Vermont municipalities work together to meet the governor’s 2013 deadline.

ConnectVT is widely viewed as Shumlin’s alternative to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, which is run by former Gov. Jim Douglas appointees. After four years of state funding, the authority has, until this year, failed to make much progress on broadband expansion (Douglas’ identical objective) materialize, in part because of corporate disinterest in investing in expensive rural broadband development. It’s only in the last year that private companies were awarded enough federal funding to make extending broadband access to very rural parts of the state financially viable.

Marshall’s job, as she puts it, is to “connect the dots”– to work with the Vermont Telecommunications Authority and private companies to overcome sticking points that could hold up projects, including the regulatory process, at the state and federal levels.

Marshall, for example, was the driving force behind S.78, the omnibus telecom bill that passed this year. The legislation creates exemptions to Act 250, Vermont’s land-use development law, for large telecom projects.

Communication with federal officials is crucial, Marshall said, given the large amount of federal stimulus funding for Vermont projects, roughly $150 million. All of the money must be spent by 2013, Marshall said.

“The (federal) money was a game-changer,” Marshall said. She noted that former Gov. Jim Douglas’ goal of universal broadband by 2010 fell short, “not for lack of trying,” she said, but because of the economic environment following the 2008 Wall Street crash and subsequent credit crunch.

The state of Vermont, Marshall said, faces unique challenges because of its topography and population distribution. Marshall said fiber optic cable can cost up to $40,000 per mile to install. In rural Vermont, where there may only be five houses along one mile of cable, it could take years for commercial providers to recoup their infrastructure investments.

“We’re trying to improve the economics,” Marshall said.

The state wants to make building infrastructure in hard-to-reach areas financially feasible for broadband service providers. The Vermont Telecommunications Authority does this in two ways, Marshall said. In some cases, they invest money directly into a private sector project. In VTel’s large-scale Wireless Open World project, for example, which is largely funded by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service to the tune of $116 million, the Vermont Telecommunications Authority has invested $2.065 million to encourage VTel to expand the project beyond its initially proposed area.

The Vermont Telecommunications Authority is also building and operating signal towers in rural areas and then renting the towers to different companies. In this way, the authority absorbs the cost of permitting, building, and running cable and power to a tower. Private broadband companies then lease the space in order to provide service to remote areas.

Marshall has had a long career in the private sector. She is a former executive for Clear Channel Radio, and at one time, she worked as an advertising executive for Comcast, the cable company which offers broadband service. Before joining the Shumlin administration, Marshall worked as a consultant. She also served briefly as the head of SecureShred, the document destruction company. She now makes $115,000 as chief of ConnectVT.