The Worthington Globe reports on the Lismore Coop’s MN broadband grant application and Nobles County’s support. It’s an interesting glimpse at all of the moving pieces involved in the application…

The Nobles County Board of Commissioners agreed to financially support Lismore Cooperative Telephone Company’s “Fiber to Home” broadband project and include the community of Bigelow in the project. The project aims to expand broadband access throughout the county.

Project director Chris Koneche of Finley Engineering said the project has seen its share of progress in recent months.

“We really appreciate working with you guys all these years,” he told the board. “We’ve made tremendous strides. The most recent win has been with the USDA Connect Round Four program. I think that’s about a $28 million project that would cover the vast majority of the rural areas in the county with fiber.”

However, Konechne said they were initially unable to include Bigelow in the project due to application restrictions.

“Because of the eligibility restrictions and the sporting criteria in that Round Four application, we didn’t think it would be a wise decision to put the city of Bigelow in that application. That application scores things on rurality … we would have lost or been graded lower in that category with USDA. Additionally, we would’ve had some challenge work with the speeds that Frontier was claiming at the time. For those two reasons and due to the size of it… when you look at this potential project with a budget of somewhere around $675,000, we didn’t think it was really worth the risk to a $28 million project to put that in there.”

Based on a scoring system, Lismore Cooperative Telephone Company Secretary Mark Loosbrock said that in order to obtain a higher level of eligibility for the 30% grant, financial support in addition to a letter of support was recommended.