Local efforts to provide faster internet connection in Craig and Moffat County are gathering steam, even as neighboring Rio Blanco County prepares to light up new broadband connections in Meeker and Rangely this month.
Craig/Moffat Economic Development Partnership is leading the charge alongside the city and county and will soon hire an executive assistant, funded by the city, county, school district, Colorado Northwestern Community College, Memorial Regional Health and the Local Marketing District over the next three years.
Executive Director Michelle Balleck, Craig City Manager Mike Foreman and others have been meeting with neighboring counties to identify existing infrastructure and partnership opportunities.
"We want to… make a cohesive plan to start sharing resources across the region," Balleck said.
After meeting with Routt and Rio Blanco county officials, as well as Montrose, she's encouraged by the infrastructure that already exists, but sees a need for local government to fill in the gaps.
"What we're trying to do is make it conducive for a business to provide that service to a rural community," Balleck said.
Balleck will meet with local anchor institutions this month to assess their bandwidth needs and to consider pooling their needs to receive more competitive bids from service providers.
The hospital is most interested in better connectivity in rural areas for recruiting purposes and redundancy in the lines to ensure they don't lose connection if a line is accidentally cut, as happened twice last summer.
"We dubbed it 'Fiber-cut Tuesday," said MRH Vice President of Hospital Operations Jennifer Riley.
"It just so happened that in both of those incidents, we had a trauma in the community," she said, and one patient had to be flown to Grand Junction because the images from a CT scan could not be transmitted to radiologists working remotely.
Three years after launching its broadband project, Rio Blanco County's efforts will culminate in more than 400 homes and businesses in Meeker and Rangely going live with broadband connectivity this month, and the county expects to have more than 1,000 homes and businesses connected by the end of the year.
Funded through a private-public partnership, the project cost roughly $13 million, said Rio Blanco County Information Technology Director Blake Mobley. About half came from the county, roughly 30 percent through Colorado Department of Local Affairs grants, and the remainder from internet service provider partners.
Rio Blanco's service providers and network operator are very interested in possible partnerships with Moffat County as well, Mobley said.
The next hurdles for Balleck and city and county officials will be to identify the most economical approach to filling Moffat County's broadband needs, create a phase plan for implementation and secure funding sources.