By Kate Stockrahm
Genesee County officials aim to expand broadband access across the county through federal funding, but first they need residents’ and business owners’ help.
“It’s kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity where bipartisanship has worked in Washington,” said Dr. Beverly Brown, Genesee County Commissioner for District 4, of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program.
Funding for BEAD passed as part of President Joe Biden’s massive 2021 infrastructure bill, which allotted $42 billion to make broadband internet universal by 2030.
Of that $42 billion, the State of Michigan received roughly $1.6 billion, Brown said, which “presents quite an opportunity for us in Genesee County to get a slice of that pie.”
But to get that slice, Brown and Michael Dawisha, Genesee County’s Chief Information Officer and Chair of the Broadband Task Force, need residents and business owners to help prove the county’s funding needs through the “Merit BEAD Mapping Challenge.”
“Our aim is to get as many people on this as possible, because the result affects how the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] draws its maps of coverage,” Dawisha explained. “By default, if you look at the maps from the FCC for the county, we’re fully covered. And everyone knows that’s not true.”
Dawisha said that’s why he and other task force members are asking residents to participate in the challenge: to prove the real internet gaps in the county so officials can seek appropriate funding to expand broadband access.
“Our goal at the county is pretty lofty,” he said, noting the task force wants every address wired for fiber from “end-to-end.”
“And we’ll even take it further,” Dawisha added. “We want to be open and equitable for all, which means we don’t want to wait for any one or a dozen for profit motivated vendors to do it. We want to establish a standard so there’s reasonable pricing for all, [and] reasonable data standards for all.”
Participants in the challenge are asked for documentation of their current internet service, if any, and to run tests to confirm the speed of their service from their home or business address in question. Administrators also ask that the challenge be completed from a desktop or laptop computer rather than a mobile device.
When asked why this push for broadband is important, both Dawisha and Brown put broadband on par with providing other basic utilities, like gas and electricity, given the internet’s necessity to daily life in 2024.
“We learned that a lot of students and Genesee County were negatively impacted because of COVID,” Brown said. “They couldn’t access their classes effectively because everybody was at home [with unequal access to internet].”
Dawisha added, “They had to go to Starbucks or Taco Bell or something to do their homework. That’s not right. We want to remedy that.”
Brown also noted that many people access telehealth services online, as well, and expanding the county’s broadband will also encourage businesses to stay or move to the area knowing there will be reliable, fast internet service already available.
“Once we can build in infrastructure, and put that backbone conduit underground for every business and every household to have access to — once we can get that done, then, I think the world will open to us,” she said.
More information on the Merit BEAD Mapping Challenge can be found here, and an instructional video can be found here for interested participants. The challenge launched in late March and is open until April 23, 2024.
Editor’s Note: Nic Custer, East Village Magazine’s business manager, serves as a member of Genesee County’s Broadband Task Force.
