A bill intended to solve disputes in Virginia’s quest for full broadband deployment is one small step from reality.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin added one recommendation late Monday to what has been called the make-ready bill. That recommendation would give the State Corporation Commission more time to solve disputes related to utility pole access for broadband cable.
House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, and Sen. David Marsden, D-Fairfax County, shepherded versions of the make-ready bill through their respective chambers before lawmakers combined them and sent SB 713 to Youngkin. It focuses in large part on solving disagreements between internet service providers and utilities, which must work together to deliver internet access to the state’s rural areas.
The General Assembly gave the SCC 180 days to make decisions in such cases, but Youngkin recommended a 60-day extension, should the commission need the time, Marsden said.
Youngkin also preserved budget amendments that will use a combined $50 million from the state’s general fund to help with the cause. Marsden had proposed one of those amendments, which House of Delegates and Senate conferees set at $30 million from the general fund to go into the fiscal year 2025 Virginia Make Ready Initiative.
The second budget amendment would provide $10 million over each of the next two fiscal years for the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, which administers the broadband deployment process. It also survived the process.
“I think we’re in pretty good shape,” Marsden said.
Internet service providers that string cable across utility poles, and the utilities that own those poles, have until Dec. 31, 2026, to spend about $750 million in federal pandemic relief funds or risk having the government take back the leftover money. Some ISPs and utilities have sparred about the time it takes for utilities to approve and engineer the work required, and about who is responsible for the cost of replacing outdated poles or adding new ones.
Virginia officials estimate that about 162,000 locations have weak internet access or none at all. During the pandemic, that was a disadvantage for school-age children who could not attend in person, and workers who needed to do their jobs remotely.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, ARPA for short, addressed that need. Virginia combined its portion of that money with state, local and private money to create a more than $1 billion kitty for extending internet access. That money also created a dense workload and a backlog of work, particularly for those who are putting broadband cable on poles. Burying the cable is a more expensive proposition and more difficult to do, depending on the terrain.
ISPs applied with the utilities that own the poles for access. That sparked inspection and engineering work to “make ready.” In areas where the poles are outdated, they must be replaced; and in some rural areas, there aren’t enough poles for the load. All of that requires money both to pay the inspectors and engineers and to provide new or replacement poles.
The process is eating time, which interested the General Assembly and inspired the legislation. The bill addresses the commonwealth’s electric cooperatives, but not municipal electric utility companies or the state’s large investor-owned utilities, Appalachian Power and Dominion Energy, both of which are also in the deployment mix.
Marsden has said that only a small number of co-ops are holding up the process. He declined to identify them.
In late March, Bedford County welcomed groundbreaking on a new RiverStreet Networks project near Huddleston, in the southern part of the county. RiverStreet contractors were burying the cable on Virginia 626. The same week, the county announced that Verizon, using its own poles, had completed a project connecting a potential 1,000 customers almost directly north of Huddleston, in the Big Island and Wheats Valley communities.
Bedford County Board of Supervisors Chairman Edgar Tuck said that he expects all the work in his county to be complete by the federal deadline, but that the law won’t have much if any effect on how it gets done there.
“The main pinch points for us, in the parts of the county that are being held up, aren’t covered by this law at all,” Tuck said in a phone interview. “The co-ops are covered, which we’ve got Southside [Cooperative Electric] in Bedford. However, the providers that are doing the project in those areas aren’t going on the pole. So it’s really not going to help us move things along any faster. It may get them moving in other areas, but … I don’t want to call it a nonevent in Bedford but it’s not going to move the needle.”
ISPs that disagree with the investor-owned utilities can take their case to the Federal Communication Commission, whose existing rules are reflected in the make-ready bill. Municipal-owned utilities are part of a separate state law and were not covered in the new legislation.
“Hopefully there’s enough safeguards in place that people will do the responsible thing and get broadband out to people,” Marsden said. “That’s the goal here … this is about getting broadband to people who’ve not been well served, and you … cannot participate in the modern world without good internet. … We’ll see how it goes, but I’m hopeful.”