Cindy Dvergsten lives on a ranch in Dolores, a small town located in the southwest corner of Colorado, near the borders of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Dolores has a population of 936.
Dolores is remote, but for Dvergsten and others in rural Colorado, each day is still business as usual. Yet, many of these communities are often dependent on slow and unreliable internet.
Dvergsten runs an agricultural consulting firm and also operates a farm full of Navajo-Churro sheep – a rare, hardy breed that was actually raised by the Navajo and other Native peoples in the American Southwest. Navajo-Churro sheep are big and shaggy. The rams can grow up to four thick, spiraling horns.
“At first, it would be nice if everybody had internet, but now it’s getting to be almost crucial. In my part of the world, you generally have very little access or no access … That makes doing a lot of things very difficult,” Cindy said.
At the beginning of April, Governor John Hickenlooper signed a bipartisan bill that increases broadband access to “unserved areas”- this is mostly unincorporated, small towns with populations less than 7,500. The bill is pretty simple: it mandates the construction of better broadband infrastructure in these areas. Broadband plays a big role in development, but installation is expensive and it doesn’t make sense for telecom companies to bury pricey cable lines out into the country for just a few customers.
KC Becker, majority leader of the Colorado House of Representatives, helped sponsor this bill.
“Because the subscription base is so much less than in an urban area – just like it was with electricity 80 or 90 years ago – a lot of rural areas aren’t going to be able to finance the cost of bringing service to them,” Becker said.
The funding for the subsidy is already in place, too. Before, the subsidy was used to construct landline phones. Now, the funds are being shifted to the construction of something even more useful: high-speed internet.
Medical records, school systems, realtime data for law enforcement – these everyday municipal tasks all require a steady connection.
Good internet is also key for business development, too.
“I’m selling at a distance … My wool and pelts … I need to sell at a distance, I can’t just sell those products locally,” Cindy said.
This bill also includes a win for telecom companies. The Broadband Deployment Board, established in 2014, is in charge of implementation and distribution of the actual funding for broadband development. This new bill changes the membership of the board from 16 to 17 members, adding two members representing the broadband industry and removing one member representing the public.
Still, Becker said that without help from the telecom companies, broadband development can’t happen. According to Becker, the membership change adds more expertise to the board.
“One of the concerns we heard when the board was created in 2014 was that there wasn’t enough expertise so the little money there was, there were a lot of complaints about those grants,” she said.
Governor Hickenlooper has spoken at lengths about the disconnect he sees between Colorado’s growing cities and small towns.
When he gave his State of the State address in January, he talked about key issues to rural areas such as the opioid epidemic, education and economic development. As metropolitan cities like Denver grow, Hickenlooper says that rural towns have some concerns about getting left behind. This broadband legislation appears to be a step in addressing this.
Crisanta Duran, Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, also helped sponsor this bill. She says that she prefers to focus on the things that unite Coloradans rather than the things that divide them. Still, she says there are certain investments that need to be made into Colorado’s rural communities, including broadband expansion.
“I’m a big believer that there is more that binds us together than divides us,” Duran said.
The new grants from this legislation to fund further broadband construction are being distributed over the next four years. In the meantime, rural citizens of Colorado look forward to faster internet.
