County and CenturyLink part ways

Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.

It seems that the long planned joint venture between local officials and CenturyLink to expand broadband service to remote areas of the county is pretty much off the table, if a recent board discussion is any indication.
On Thursday evening, May 20, Melissa Beaudry, a public affairs consultant with Langton Consulting in Jacksonville, held a Zoom meeting with Jefferson County commissioners on the status of the CenturyLink broadband project.
Langton Consulting is on contract to the county to help it find grants and also with the use of the RESTORE Act funding from the 2010 BP oil spill disaster.
Beaudry told the commissioners that she and County Attorney Scott Shirley had been meeting with representatives of CenturyLink over concerns that the latter continued to have with the contract, and more specifically with the federal funding.
The basic issue, Beaudry said, was that the RESTORE money that the county is using to fund the project comes with federal strings attached, and CenturyLink was wary of what those requirements might entail.
Shirley added that no matter how many assurances he and Beaudry offered that the money would not compromise CenturyLink’s independence, the company remained apprehensive.
“Mostly they have questions and concerns about how the federal program operates,” Shirley said, adding that the company had yet to sign the agreement with the county.
Beaudry added that so far she had worked about two years on the project, and things weren’t looking up.
“CenturyLink is not looking in a way that best serves the county at this point,” she said.
She noted that much had changed in the two years since the county had begun the process, in terms of there being more funding options available and a greater general understanding that broadband was no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
“At this time, CenturyLink is no longer the most efficient for the county,” Beaudry said. “I don’t think CenturyLink will provide the kind of work that is needed.”
One option, she said, was to continue to negotiate with CenturyLink and try to get it to sign the agreement, which was now some seven months old.
The other, she said, was to rework the Request For Proposal (RFP), now that everyone involved in the project had a better idea of what was needed, and use different funding to have a feasibility study done on the entire county, not only on selected areas.
Commissioner Betsy Barfield jumped on the idea. She proposed that the county pull between $100,000 and $150,000 from another funding source and get some other entity to do a general broadband plan for all of Jefferson County, not only selected areas.
“If we don’t have an overarching plan we’re going to be fumbling around,” she said. “It needs to be an all-encompassing plan so that it gives us a roadmap.”
She, moreover, wanted fiber optic cable, Barfield said.
“I want quality,” she said. “We’re not interested in copper. We’re chartering new territory here. The idea is to have an engineering firm come up with a plan.”
The idea, she further said, was to come up with a comprehensive system that encompassed all kinds of technologies, including broadband, hotspots, satellites and whatever other technologies might exist.
In the end, the board voted to allocate up to $150,000 to do the study, with the money to come from the CARES Act funding that was available for broadband expansion.
County officials awarded the contract that CenturyLink has yet to sign back in early November 2020. The contract was for CenturyLink to move forward with the planning and design phase of a broadband expansion project, which was estimated would take about six to eight months to do. After which phase, construction would follow.
The funding for the project is largely coming from the RESTORE Act money, which derives from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the settlement that the federal government reached with the company in compensation for widespread environmental and economic damage that the disaster caused.
Jefferson County received $65,450 in RESTORE Act funding for the planning and designing phase of the project, with more RESTORE money to come later for the actual construction of the system.
At the time, the idea was to target select neighborhoods for first-time or upgraded Internet service, including U.S. 19 North in the vicinity of the former Jefferson Kennel Club; Asheville Highway and Aucilla Shores; Government Farms Road; Aucilla Forest; U.S. 90 West and Main Street; U.S. 90 West in the vicinity of Tallamont Drive; and Christmas Acres and Lloyd.