Expanding broadband crucial to Maine economy

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus package, has done a lot of good for many communities, families and small businesses. Taxes have been cut, small business loans are more affordable, and many that need it most have received help in the form of food stamps or extended unemployment benefits. We have also seen jobs retained and created through investments in our nation’s infrastructure.
But some of the investments are complex and take more time than others to get to our communities. The stimulus was designed to work over a two year period. And many of the investments are in the millions and billions of dollars. That size investment needs to be managed well and that’s why some pieces of the stimulus package are still being rolled out.
One such initiative is the expansion of broadband access.
Overall, the Recovery Act contained $7.2 billion to expand broadband access to unserved and underserved communities across our country. The Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) were directed to make loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas.
A number of good projects from Maine have put forward applications for funding. As I write this, both NTIA and RUS are about to award their first round of funding. The remainder of the funding will be released in two other rounds – one at the end of this year and another in the spring of 2010.
This first round of funding is important in two respects. The first is obvious – it will get broadband expansion projects off the ground all over the country. The second is less obvious, but equally important – lessons learned from the first round of funding will allow the two agencies to further refine the process they use to approve projects. This will help maximize the return on investment so that taxpayers are getting the most bang for their buck.
But stepping back from the details of funding approvals and bureaucracy for a moment, it’s important to keep in mind that identifying weak points in our current system and funding the fixes is a massive undertaking. It is one of the major infrastructure challenges of our age and one that holds great potential for job creation and economic development in rural areas of our country.
Many states have made incredible strides on their own in their broadband expansion efforts. Maine, for example, created the ConnectME Authority to expand broadband access throughout our state.
When ConnectME was first established in 2006, only 86 percent of our state had access to high-speed Internet service. According to their most recent annual report, in the two years since they were established, broadband access or availability has risen to nearly 91 percent.
This represents great progress, but much work is still ahead.
Connecting Maine and providing universal access to broadband in rural areas of our country is crucial to our economic growth and job creation. It is estimated that for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.
That’s why investments like those in the Recovery Act are so important. It is good in the short term because is will create jobs. But in the long term, we will have an economy that is better connected than ever before. This will increase the ability of rural areas to be better positioned to grow and create even more jobs for the future. While it is taking a bit longer than some would desire, we are on a path to make a difference by investing in broadband access.
The road to recovery may be a long one, but as a country we must move forward. We must fight to preserve the jobs that we have while we seek out new opportunities to put Mainers to work. Together, efforts at the state and federal level to expand access to broadband are crucial to our economic development and are a huge step in the right direction.