WESTBY - Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers made a stop in Westby at the headquarters of Vernon Communications Cooperative (VCC) to present a check for $5,697,500. The amount is from a broadband expansion grant recently awarded Vernon Communications by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) to undertake a project in northwest Crawford County that will provide fiber optic to-the-premises broadband internet to 1,075 homes and businesses.
“These grants provide a great opportunity for smaller, locally owned telecomm companies to right the wrongs for rural areas that haven’t gotten coverage from the big companies,” Vernon Communications CEO Rod Olson said. “We live here, we make the decisions for our local area, and we’re not looking to provide the minimum service either –we’ve always set out to future-proof our network.”
Olson said that it had “been a long process to get here,” and that it had all gotten started with a petition from the Township of Seneca in 2003. From there, he said, VCC had worked with a smaller cooperative, 3C Cooperative, that had done a lot of the legwork to get the project to a shovel-ready form that could garner the needed funding.
“This is the seventh grant VCC has been awarded from the PSC to expand broadband in our area,” Olson said. “We’re doing pretty well, having gotten seven of the eight grants we’ve applied for.”
The project in Crawford County, Olson said, is really two combined projects. The first phase, to be started immediatley in Spring of 2022, will supply fiber optic to 138 households in the Eagle Mountain subdivision near Ferryville. Olson said that he hopes to complete the second phase of the project in the 2022 building season that will supply fiber optic to residents in Seneca, Utica and Freeman Townships – a total of 1,075 subscribers.
“The grant funding, the willingness of Crawford County to contribute to the project, and cash flow the project, and the financial participation of the Townships of Seneca, Utica and Freeman, and the Seneca School District, have made this project possible,” Olson explained.
Olson said that the terrain of counties like Vernon and Crawford make laying fiber optic cable very expensive. He said that at the cost of $6,485 per subscriber, the projects would “make no business sense” without the grant funding and participation of partners.
Governor Evers said that broadband expansion remains a top priority of his administration, and is the reason that he named 2021 ‘The Year of Broadband Internet.’
“Broadband internet is a necessity, not a luxury, and the co-ops and smaller telecomm companies are the ones that are getting it done in rural Wisconsin,” Evers said.
Evers said that since 2019, his administration has helped expand broadband internet to 300,000 households and businesses in Wisconsin. But, he said, there remains lots of work to do, with between 600,000 to 700,000 households in the state still lacking the utility.
“Folks, we know that the digital divide is holding the rural areas of our state back,” Evers said. “It’s like the telephone, or electricity – everyone in our state has to have broadband, and I can tell you that if we can get this done in difficult terrain like Crawford County, then we can get this done anywhere.”
