Patrick County supervisors called up representatives from three internet service providers in a recent meeting. They asked a version of the same question to each one: Are you prepared to take on some new customers?
The question had urgency. North Carolina-based RiverStreet Networks has stalled out in its efforts to provide broadband to thousands of potential customers in Patrick County and eight other Southside and Central Virginia counties.
A RiverStreet spokesman confirmed to the supervisors that the company has not completed service to a single one of the 8,381 fiber locations it had contracted to complete for the county in 2022 and 2023 under grants obtained from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, called ARPA.
RiverStreet, which teamed with the Martinsville-based West Piedmont Planning District Commission to receive ARPA funding, contracted to deliver broadband to 50,805 potential locations in 12 counties, according to a document provided by West Piedmont, the projects’ grant administrator.
To date, it has only reached 11,773 of them. Patrick County is not the only municipality with no RiverStreet service. The company has failed to deliver in Henry, Nottoway and Dinwiddie counties, as well. In Franklin County, the company has delivered connections to only 22 of 2,046 contracted locations.
RiverStreet says that the need for new financing is at the heart of its problems. The money doesn’t come directly from the government to the ISPs, but instead is reimbursed after it is spent.
Its two biggest partnerships with West Piedmont are the West Broadband Project of Patrick, Henry and Franklin counties, and the East Broadband Project, covering Amelia, Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Nottoway and Pittsylvania counties.
The West project was funded through a $33.5 million grant that the state administers via the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, largely funded by ARPA. Another $59.4 million comes from match funding that RiverStreet and local government partners provided, according to West Piedmont.
The East Broadband Project received an $87.0 million VATI grant, with $65.4 million in match funding from RiverStreet Networks and local governments.
The money must be spent before the government will reimburse it, and there is a federal deadline after which the government will keep the money that hasn’t been accounted for. Getting money to spend requires financing.
Then came news last year that RiverStreet was approved for funding from another federal program, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment act, or BEAD. The ISP was granted $44 million for new areas, some of which overlap with Patrick, Henry, Amelia and Dinwiddie counties.
In a letter to its VATI partner localities, the company wrote that “growth” from the new funding “required a full redesign and refinancing of our plans to meet several updated federal requirements.” RiverStreet added that “because these new build areas overlap with our existing infrastructure, legal and financing protocols require finalized contracts before we can break ground.”
Responding to questions from Patrick County supervisors on May 26, RiverStreet’s Greg Coltrain said the company has contractors lined up and inventory ready, but the new financing contracts aren’t done.
“The core value, the core concern for us right now is just getting the financing secure, which we’re very close to working on finalizing that,” said Coltrain, the company’s vice president of business development.
ISPs and grant administrators have until the end of the year to show that the money has been spent, or the Department of Treasury will keep the funding. Treasury recently announced that it will extend some deadlines related to funds that pay for broadband and connectivity infrastructure to June 2027, however, and West Piedmont Planning District Commission plans to apply for that extension.
The slow progress and lack of new funding has put the company in the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development’s sights. The department’s broadband office has issued RiverStreet two different corrective action plans for missing performance milestones.
RiverStreet is the only one of 19 ISPs working with federal grant funding in the commonwealth that is currently under a corrective action plan, according to housing department documents. Four of its projects were listed as high risk to be unfinished, according to the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative quarterly report released in April.
RiverStreet’s response to the second corrective action plan is due on Monday, and it is possible that Housing and Community Development’s broadband office will remove the company from all of those projects.
‘The investment … is significant’
While the federal deadline is the end of 2026, RiverStreet and West Piedmont’s contracts with DHCD called for the projects to be done before then.
Discussions “from recent risk assessment meetings for this project conducted on Sep 08, 2025, and Jan 29, 2026, have revealed financial concerns impacting the project’s ability to progress as contracted,” according to letters from DHCD to West Piedmont regarding the projects.
The April 3 letters, provided by the broadband office via the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, state that comprehensive action plans for all the projects were to include updated budget documents that identify sources of lending and equity, along with information on the funding status; resource management plans detailing construction crews and executed contracts; and construction plan production dates for each county.
West Piedmont and RiverStreet responded, but DHCD determined that it still lacked sufficient capital funding information. In a May 8 letter, the department requested documentation “that all outstanding capital sources are secured, including the identity of the lender, equity provider, etc.,” and it requested “to meet with representatives from the source of capital prior to finalization of funding being secured.”
Hence the Patrick County supervisors’ questions to other ISPs.
Michael Armbrister, the planning district’s executive director, said in a June 1 phone call that the project will be completed, regardless of which internet service provider is the partner.
“I feel confident in our conversations with DHCD that regardless of what happens we’ll be able to find a solution,” Armbrister said. “We agreed to be the grant applicant for these projects because we want all of these folks to get connected. So my primary concern is working with DHCD to make sure that regardless of what ISP we might end up with, or whether River Street secures their financing and we move forward, that all of those locations continue to be part of the project, and we’ll get connected.”
Coltrain told the supervisors that his company is committed to finishing the work.
“The investment in Patrick County is significant for us,” he said. “The need is real. We recognize the citizens have waited far too long for a reliable broadband service, and we’re anxious to get that up and working for them and active.”
After the meeting, Coltrain compared the broadband financing process to building a house.
“When we talked earlier about winning the BEAD, the project got bigger,” Coltrain said. “And therefore it changed the dynamics and the size of the project, so we just had to go back. It’s kind of like if you were building a house and you decided, well, I really need [to add] 1,000 foot on the house, that’s going to cost you more money, so you have to go back to the bank.”
He added: “The project turned much bigger, and ultimately to the benefit of Patrick County, because we added a lot more locations every time the layer and the fabric for people to get covered grew, it got bigger. And so now we’re all comparing the size of the project, and we’re just going back to our lenders and saying, hey, the project’s now bigger, we need to secure funding for a much bigger project, and this is what it looks like, so that’s what we’re working on now.”
Poles in the ground, awaiting connections
It’s not that no work has been done. Appalachian Power is a partner in the West Piedmont project and has completed a significant amount of utility pole placement, company spokesman Rob Mann told the board. Appalachian is also providing the fiber optic cable that will run across those poles, in what is called the “middle mile” process.
The utility has built out 140 miles, with 31 left, which should be complete in four to six months, Mann told the board.
RiverStreet’s responsibility from there would entail running its cable underground to all remaining West Piedmont locations. In Franklin County, it has 2,716 location passings to complete, with 3,461 remaining in Henry County. RiverStreet has completed only 40 serviceable passings in the three West Project counties to date from the 2022 and 2023 contracts, according to West Piedmont.
In the East Broadband Project, Amelia County still has 4,521 locations left to serve. Campbell County has 3,826. In Pittsylvania County, 6,656 of its contracted 11,985 locations have yet to be completed.
A separate project focused on Dinwiddie County alone has seen no work done for 5,009 locations. Yet another West Piedmont/RiverStreet project, in Pittsylvania County, has provided potential service to 854 out of 2,105 locations.
Only Charlotte County, with 315 remaining, and Bedford County, with 995 to go, had seen more than half the work done, the West Piedmont document shows. But in Bedford, little has happened in the past year, according to John Putney, the county’s broadband manager.
Other companies working in Bedford County have finished their work or are nearly there, the state’s VATI Dashboard website shows. The county is “deeply disappointed” by delays in RiverStreet’s 2022 contract for VATI work, Putney said in a text message.
“Despite substantial progress having been achieved earlier in the project, work in Bedford County has advanced at an unacceptably slow pace over the past year, leaving many residents still waiting for the high-speed internet service they were promised,” he wrote.
“The County recognizes the complexity of constructing broadband infrastructure in rural areas and appreciates the challenges associated with managing multiple large-scale projects. However, the lack of meaningful progress in Bedford County is a significant concern and falls short of the expectations established when this project was awarded and announced well over four years ago. RiverStreet, in no small part due to its many other VATI project obligations in several rural localities, has completed minimal fiber deployment in Bedford County in almost an entire calendar year.“
Once West Piedmont completes its extension request, it will send it to the state’s broadband office, which will send it on to the U.S. Department of Treasury, Armbrister said.
Patrick County supervisors queried representatives of national ISPs Comcast and Charter Spectrum, and Floyd County-based Citizens Telephone Cooperative. The latter completed internet service to all of its home county in 2024. All three have done work in Patrick County in recent years.
Citizens CEO Donna Smith said her company has completed locations in the Meadows of Dan area, has some customers in Stuart and is working in Carroll County and has infrastructure extending farther into Patrick County. It puts all its lines underground, she said.
“We have four crews working in Wythe County right now that will be complete in the next two to three months,” Smith said.
Comcast delivered to 2,200 locations in Stuart in 2022, said the company’s Terry Ellis.
“We are always willing to have a conversation about” taking on new customers, Ellis said. “We have to learn more about the specifics, but yes, we’re happy to have that conversation.”
Joe Prater, of Charter, said his company has 215 locations to finish at two areas off Patrick County’s portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
“If the funds are available and the timelines are right, funds don’t expire, we have enough time to build it, we’re always interested” in adding customers, Prater said.
Even if Treasury grants an extension, it’s unclear whether RiverStreet or another provider could finish the work, said Steve Terry, who chaired Patrick County’s broadband committee for six years. The county disbanded the committee in January 2025, after the projects were funded, contracts were signed and apparent progress was made.
But Terry and other committee members continued to track progress, and as the federal deadline approached, he became worried about the county losing previously granted money. For example, the VATI dashboard shows that the 2023 RiverStreet/West Piedmont project had spent 8.5% of the $8 million government money the contract calls for, and 0.3% of the match funding, with 80% of the contract’s timeline expired as of May 13.
“The community stands to lose a lot,” Terry told the supervisors.
Terry worked to organize the May 26 meeting, called to address the lack of progress. During the meeting’s public hearing portion, Terry said that he did not want to disparage RiverStreet Networks, which had been cooperative over the years with his committee and which has spent a fair amount of its own money on the project. But he was concerned about both deadline and funding issues.
He told the board that he wondered if the West Piedmont Planning District Commission should be spending some time to get new contracts in place for a possible switch to another provider. The best case scenario includes work on a section of U.S. 58, which will require pole relocation, he said.
“Hopefully they’ll get their ducks in a row and come on,” Terry said of RiverStreet after the meeting. “I am convinced they want to. … The can-do is what I’m not sure of.”
