SEARSURG — People in some of Vermont’s most rural communities will get a chance on Town Meeting Day to join districts that could open the door to bringing high-speed internet to places that now have little.
Voters in northeastern and southern Vermont will decide next Tuesday whether their towns should join a communications union district, a type of governance body that allows municipalities to team up to provide broadband service.
Legislation adopted in 2015 allows a district to obtain municipal bonds to build the infrastructure needed to reach remote customers, without direct financial risk for member towns.
The black holes in internet coverage are “holding back our economy, no doubt about it,” said Tim Scoggins, who is leading efforts to create a communications union district of 12 towns in the Bennington area.
As chair of the Shaftsbury Selectboard, Scoggins hears a lot from local residents about struggles to get online. Those who are served by Comcast have the connection they need, he said; those who don’t are out of luck.
“We have real estate agents tell us regularly that they lose sales in places like Shaftsbury when people find out they can’t get internet at the home,” he said.
“It’s a problem we’ve got to solve.”
A few hours north, advocates in the Northeast Kingdom have been pitching the idea to selectboards and residents for months.
The region has some of the lowest availability of broadband, or high-speed, internet in the state. Essex has the lowest rate at 21.7%, according to data from 2018. Orleans has the third-lowest at 50.6%, and Caledonia has the fourth-lowest at 51.2%. Those access problems translate into barriers for businesses and population retention problems.
Voters in 27 towns in the region will be asked to join a district on Town Meeting Day. As the date approaches, organizers are rolling out the last stages of their campaign.
Public meetings have been held over the past few weeks in Kirby, Lyndon and St. Johnsbury. Volunteers have been handing out flyers and informational materials at transfer stations and general stores. Planners aim to submit letters to local newspapers, as well as posts on Front Porch Forum.
“We have been out in a full steam ahead in outreach and education,” said Katherine Sims, director of the Northeast Kingdom Collaborative. “Feels like we’ve got a lot of good momentum.”
Advocates have faced pushback. Selectboard members in St. Johnsbury wondered what would happen if towns pulled out or the district flopped. Even after voting ‘yes’ to ask the question on Town Meeting Day, the St. Johnsbury board’s chair doubted proponents had done enough to let voters know this wouldn’t be an immediate project.
“We think it’s probably a good idea,” St. Johnsbury Chair Kevin Oddy said in January. “It’s just, how is it going to be built out and when is it that we could reasonably expect to see that high-speed broadband?”
To form a district, at least two towns need to approve the ballot measure. If that happens — and organizers in the Kingdom are confident it will — then selectboards will have to appoint representatives to a district board.
Evan Carlson, a Lyndon broadband advocate who has been working with Sims on the effort, said the first district meeting would likely happen in late April or early May.
“We’re feeling very good about this, and I would expect that the large majority of the towns will be voting yes,” he said.
Carlson and Sims said the next steps would be completing feasibility and business plan studies. They want to identify infrastructure improvement areas and pursue grant funding. Plans are also underway to develop formation documents with lawyers.
In southern Vermont, organizations are more dispersed, with Bennington-area towns proposing the Southern Vermont CUD, Wilmington and four surrounding towns voting on another called the Deerfield Valley CUD and the Windham Regional Commission using a state broadband innovation grant to develop a plan for increasing connectivity in Windham County.
Meanwhile, the tiny border town of Stamford is going to join a district in Massachusetts, said Ann Manwaring, a former Wilmington lawmaker who is helping to organize the Deerfield Valley district.
“We’re not unlike the Northeast Kingdom,” Manwaring said. “Our issues are somewhat the same, which is small towns with not enough population to financially enable the single town to do what the larger towns have done.”
Windham County has a lower service rate for broadband than several other counties, at 73%, according to the late-2018 state data.
Southern Vermont’s mountainous topography presents a major challenge to the reception of remote signals and to the laying of fiber-optic cable. Demographics add a layer of difficulty, too. With a population of just about 100, Searsburg doesn’t even have a representative regularly involved in efforts to create a district.
“Searsburg has not yet shown up,” Manwaring said. “I have been meaning to find someone from there who will just come to the broadband working group meetings.”
But the movement last fall and this year is overall a big step toward better connectivity, and with it, a better economy, said Carole Monroe, who is on the board of ValleyNet, which manages the community-owned, fiber-optic network for ECFiber, the 24-town East Central Vermont Telecommunications District that covers Montpelier and Barre.
ValleyNet became the first district in the state three years ago. The group is working to promote the formation of the CUDs in southern Vermont, though Monroe said she didn’t know if it would be ValleyNet that provides fiber there. But the CUD process “really does make perfect sense,” said Monroe.
Companies in Maine and New Jersey might also provide fiber to the proposed districts in southern Vermont, she added.
ECFiber, established in 2011, makes enough money to cover debt service and operations, plus maintenance, Monroe said. They only borrow when they expand the network, she said, and the additional customers repay the cost of that borrowing.
“The towns aren’t on the hook for anything,” she said. “That’s the idea: to get these districts to the point here they have enough revenue where they can be paying back debt.”
The advocates in the Kingdom hope more communities will join the effort after the Town Meeting Day vote. They’re energized by the movements they see elsewhere in the state.
“We in rural regions know that the large telecommunications companies are not going to be deploying the level of service that we want,” said Carlson, the Lyndon organizer.
“I think our rural communities believe that taking it into our own hands … is the only way forward.”
