The Fairmont Sentinel reports…

Celia Simpson, a community and business development specialist with CEDA, gave an update on the Martin County Broadband Partnership program during the Martin County Board of Commissioner meeting on Tuesday.

Simpson shared that she has been working with the broadband advisory committee.

“Their job is to facilitate access to a 100 download, 20 upload megabytes of internet service to all households and businesses within Martin County,” Simpson said.

She spoke some of the different challenges in different areas of the county. Simpson also spoke about the Martin County Broadband profile, done by the Blandin Foundation, which does a county broadband profile map every year looking at what investments have been made on broadband in different counties.

“Out of 87 counties in Minnesota we’re ranked 70th which is not where you want to be. You want to be on the higher end, closer to one,” Simpson said.

She added that according to those findings, only 21 percent of the county has access to 1,000 plus megabytes.

Simpson pointed out that Martin County has allocated $1.5 million in funding toward the Martin County Broadband Partnership Program. She also spoke about some of the various grants the county has gotten in recent years, including from Federated REA.

“Their goal is to provide to the rest of the unserved or underserved in Martin County. They got $8 million from the Border-to-Border 10 program and are looking at the Ceylon area, up to Welcome and over to Truman. They broke ground on that last Tuesday,” Simpson said.

She said 457 households, businesses and farms are included and of the $1.4 million award from the county, $780,000 of that went toward this project.

Commissioner Joe Loughmiller said he was supportive of these kinds of projects, especially when it comes to promoting Martin County and rural development in Martin County.

“If someone is going to be a remote worker, and I’m a remote worker, they need this 100/20 level of service. If we want them to build out here and build our tax base, these are the kind of investments that make sense,” Loughmiller said.