WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI - When a benefactor provided students in Manchester schools free iPads and Chromebooks, Barbara Fuller recognized some children would face a brick wall when it came to using the technology at home.
In many parts of rural Washtenaw County, families got by with dial-up speeds, capped data plans or no internet access at all.
“I was really angry that the kids out here were left behind through no fault of their own because they didn’t have access to any internet, let alone high-speed broadband,” Fuller said. “That’s what set me on this mission, is to figure out how do we fix this.”
Read more: Life in the ‘dead zone’: How thousands in Washtenaw County get by without broadband
Now, Washtenaw County is almost there, poised to become what broadband advocates are calling the first Michigan county with universal high-speed access.
“This has been nearly a 10-year journey,” said Fuller, who joined those efforts several years after they began and went on to chair the county’s Broadband Task Force — a key group of volunteers and officials from across the political spectrum that pushed to close the digital divide.
At the end of this year, that task force will be no more. That’s because its mandate of finding a way to connect thousands of residents is all but fulfilled.
The county is “within a whisker” of having all four contracts signed to complete a county gap-filling initiative to bring fiber optic cable to households that missed out on other federal and state grant programs, Fuller said.
The story of that achievement, as told by the task force’s final report delivered this month, takes root at a 2013 meeting at the Sylvan Township hall convened by the then-state Rep. Gretchen Driskell and the Chelsea District Library that birthed a consortium to bring high-speed internet to areas that lacked it.
An early success came in Lyndon Township, north of Chelsea.
There, in 2017, residents came together to approve a bond proposal funding a publicly-owned fiber network, now serving roughly 1,200 households and becoming the first of its kind in the state, according to a presentation to the county board delivered on Nov. 16 by Ben Fineman, a broadband advocate who was instrumental to the efforts and served as vice chair of the eventual county task force.
“It was one of those situations where the people of Lyndon Township said, ‘Yes this is important. We’re willing to pay for it. We don’t see anyone coming to put it in for us anytime soon, if ever.’ And they bit the bullet and taxed themselves to put that network in,” Fuller said.
While voters in her own community, Sharon Township, rejected a similar measure, Fuller soon approached county Commissioner Andy LaBarre, who then chaired the county board, about moving the connection efforts forward. A subcommittee came out of that outreach, laying the ground work for the eventual task force.
The group faced an immediate problem. Federal Communications Commission maps showed the 98% of rural areas had broadband service, Fineman said during the presentation.
That’s despite what many residents knew — that even minutes from one of the top research universities in the country, some homes relied on shaky cellular internet service or lacked it entirely.
“We knew that all of our work was for nothing if we didn’t get true data to support this. You can have anecdotes from residents saying I can’t get online, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. But until you truly have that upload/download speed, it doesn’t mean anything,” said county Commissioner Shannon Beeman, who served on the task force and represents a rural southwestern Washtenaw County district.
So the county task force got those numbers.
They teamed up with Merit Network, a nonprofit corporation governed by Michigan’s public universities, to survey households online and by mail. The responses from nearly 7,200 residents revealed roughly two out of every three homes didn’t have a minimal level of broadband service, a far cry from what the FCC maps showed.
Armed with that baseline knowledge, the task force was ready to take advantage of programs like the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The group helped incentivize internet providers to seek funding, knocking out almost 6,700 underserved households from the list in Washtenaw County in the process, according to Fineman’s presentation.
They also embarked on a mapping project with a local company, DCS Technology Design, led by Sylvan Township resident Chris Scharrer, who drove some 2,000 miles of county roads, visually identifying home-by-home where broadband service was lacking.
That survey formed the basis for the gap-filling project to serve the remaining almost 3,800 households.
The effort came at a time when the need that existed in the county was becoming clearer than ever, according to Fuller. When COVID-19 hit, the task force set up hot spots at township halls for people to use during shutdowns.
“We had minivans with kids in them and their parents. Parents trying to do work, kids trying to do school. Well then of course somebody got hungry, somebody had to use the bathroom, so it wasn’t without its drawbacks but again it was better than nothing,” she said.
The pandemic may have also served to galvanize residents and officials, who worked in unison across the county’s townships, said Beeman. The commissioner has countless stories of what it means to go without a good connection.
Among them, an elderly woman whose landline phone was shut down when her husband died. She was “virtually cut off from the world because the phone company (came) to cut off this phone that is in a dead man’s name,” Beeman said. “There’s thousands of those stories in our community.”
The county board took some of their meetings on the road, heading to townships to hear from residents about their experiences, which left some commissioners from more urban areas shocked, Beeman added.
That may have informed what they did next, choosing in September of 2021 to invest some $14.6 million in federal COVID recovery funds through the American Rescue Plan Act in connecting the remaining underserved homes, located in every corner of the county, Beeman said.
In June, the first home was connected through the effort, by a local internet company started by a resident to get fiber to his own home.
Read more: Michigan man started his own internet provider. Now he’s got $2.6M to bring broadband to neighbors
While that project and other grant-funded initiatives are ongoing, a new online map shows progress household-by-household, including estimates for when more areas go online, with the goal of completing the effort by 2025.
Fuller acknowledges in some regard that the work may never be over, as new developments and construction bring homes that weren’t on the list to the area. And the county has yet to operationalize money it has set aside for affordability programs to help residents afford service.
But Beeman also says residents have reached out to her surprised that crews were knocking on their door so soon to do installations.
“It’s one of those problems that if you don’t experience it, it’s really hard to grasp,” she said. “It’s frightening to be completely cut off from the world.”
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