Earlier this month I wrote about Sibley and Renville Counties (RS Fiber) and their plans to use a private co-op as a way to build out fiber to the farm. They were also recently featured in the MMUA (Minnesota Municipal Utilities Association) newsletter. Each rual area has it’s own assets and challenges, which they bring to a broadband effort. A coop approach might not work for everyone – but it’s definitely a strategy that deserves great investigation and it looks like RS Fiber may be poised to take the lead…

There has been a lot of talk about public-private partnerships for the provision of broadband service in Minnesota. Little has come of it. That may be changing 80 miles southwest of St. Paul, in a way that nobody foresaw when the effort began.

City and rural interests in the Renville and Sibley county areas are doing everything in their power to bring a fiber-optic broadband connection to every city and farm in a 650 square mile area.

The project took real form two years ago when the RS Fiber Joint Powers Board (JPB) was established with members from 10 cities and the county commissions of Renville and Sibley counties. Those cities included Buffalo Lake, Gaylord, Gibbon, Green Isle, Lafayette, New Auburn, Stewart, and MMUA member cities Brownton, Fairfax and Winthrop.

The original Joint Powers Board (JPB) ran into issues that gave birth to the co-op. The good news is that the work performed by the JPB is now supporting progress for the co-op…

Although the co-op is new, much of the business planning and engineering was already done by the JPB. All of the members of the new cooperative board were already working with the JPB. The cooperative version of the project will be almost identical to the JPB model. The two exceptions are financing and ownership. The cooperative project will be financed in cooperation with the cities and townships and it will be owned and operated by a private company.

Community leaders, who have been pushing for broadband are energized…

“It’s the deal of a century for the townships,” Erickson said. They will be asked to guarantee the same amount of money per home to build a fiber line to their house as the people in the city, yet it costs substantially more to build that fiber line to the farms.

“If they can’t be convinced to participate in providing the economic development loan process to the cooperative, they will never have another chance to connect their homes to a fiber network,” Erickson said.

It’s worth noting that local leaders have been pushing for broadband for many years. Mark Erickson has been leading the pack. It hasn’t been a smooth path as we’ve chronicled here and the path has come full circle. As I said, each rural community is different. A co-op approach may not work everywhere. But one constant in each community that successfully expands their broadband options is a community champion!