Photo by Howard Owens.
An announcement today by Sen. Charles Schumer, while in Pavilion to talk about dairy farms and the pending 2023 Farm Bill, that he has secured $670 million for New York to expand broadband access is good news for Genesee County, said Shelley Stein.
A dairy farmer, Stein is also chair of the Genesee County Legislature.
She said the county is committed to spending $7.2 million to run wire to 1,578 addresses (of about 31,000 address points) in the county that do not currently have access to high-speed internet. The county already secured a $3 million grant to cover part of the cost of the project, and the Legislature was concerned it would need to take on debt to fund the rest of the project.
"For us, it means, perhaps, we will not have to bond the rest of that, which is great news today," Stein said.
It's the furthest reaches of rural Genesee County that don't have broadband, and a big part of New York's share of the broadband funding will go to rural areas, Schumer said.
"This is the largest single investment in broadband history in New York," Schumer said. "It's game-changing. For too long, residents across New York State, from Buffalo to Rochester to Albany to rural areas in particular, like here where we're standing in Genesee County, have lacked sufficient access to fast, reliable, affordable high-speed internet."
Ensuring everyone has fast, reliable internet is as essential to communities today as electricity was more than a century ago, Schumer said.
"Broadband is for the 21st century," said the Senate's majority leader. "You need it everywhere. Your kids need it to go to school, our local hospitals need it to do telemedicine, individuals need it for their small businesses, and farmers need it so they can keep up with the latest weather and other reports that they so desperately need. We have had too many people who either don't have broadband or when they do, it becomes too expensive, so they can't afford broadband."
The state will need to present a plan to the federal government on how the $670 million will be allocated throughout the state and the Commerce Department will need to approve the plan, Schumer said.
"I fought very hard to make sure that broadband was in the bipartisan (infrastructure) bill," Schumer said. "It started out as the old-time bill with stuff for roads, bridges, highways, rail. That's needed, and it's in the bill, but I said, we also need broadband because that's part of the 21st-century way of commerce."
