PENDER COUNTY — U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue arrived at the Pender Commerce Park on Friday morning for the announcement of a $21.6-million grant to roll out high-speed fiber optic internet to more than 6,853 homes in Pender County — covering more than half of Pender County’s roughly 930 square miles.
The grant was awarded to Shallotte-based cooperative Atlantic Telephone Membership Corporation (ATMC), which began conducting preliminary engineering assessments needed to apply for the grant as early as last December. As part of the agreement, the state’s largest communications cooperative will contribute a quarter of the federal funds, roughly $7.3 million, to bring the project total to about $28.9 million.
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It’s worth noting that the grant covers the expansion of the infrastructure, not the service itself. In other words, customers will have to pay for internet access — but they will at least have the option of high-speed service, which wasn’t on the table before.
The 1-gigabit broadband internet access will also be made available to more than 285 businesses, 209 farms, 19 educational facilities, nine healthcare facilities, and 15 critical community facilities. Compared to data collected by the county as part of its Pender 2.0 land use plan, which showed a total of 27,071 housing units in 2015, the project’s scope consists of roughly 52 percent of all housing units in the county
The announcement came after the USDA revealed its second round of funding under its ReConnect Program in December 2018; the federal agency has more than $600 million available for grants and low-interest loans.
ATMC said it anticipates construction of the new fiber optic network to begin sometime in the summer of 2021 after necessary environmental studies and paperwork have been completed. The network will cover roughly 538 miles, including underserved rural communities west of I-40 to the Bladen County line like Atkinson and Currie, along with communities east of Burgaw and Rocky Point. A total of 17,424 county residents are included in the project’s scope.
The network will enable delivery of internet speeds up to 1 gigabit per second, according to ATMC, along with telephone, home security, and automation services.
According to ATMC Vice President Jody Heustess, the start of the construction process will depend on when the USDA approves the transfer of the funds, but he hopes to begin building the network by the first or second quarter of 2021. Once complete, he said the network will be capable of delivering the fastest speeds in the country.
“There won’t be a more advanced way of delivering internet in the U.S.,” he promised.
He also said Pender leaders — specifically Commissioner Jackie Newton and County Manager Chad McEwen — were “really instrumental in getting a good application together.”
Secretary Perdue: ‘It just ain’t fair folks’
Secretary Purdue arrived at the industrial park in a silver SUV, led by a Pender Sheriff’s vehicle, about 10 minutes before ATMC and county officials gathered in a tent next to the Acme Smoked Fish plant. Pender Commissioner Jackie Newton, who has pushed for infrastructure development in the rural western areas of the county since her election in 2016, responded when Purdue asked her how she was doing.
“Today, I’m on top of the world,” Newton said.
“How about tomorrow?” the secretary replied.
“Well tomorrow I hope we start putting fiber optic in the ground,” Newton said.
According to Heustess, there is still plenty of work to accomplish before construction begins. But with ReConnect in its second year of existence, he expects the turnaround will be faster than ATMC’s project in Columbus County, which began construction in recent weeks after funding was announced in December.
U.S. Congressman David Rouzer led the ceremony with a moment of silence for those who lost their lives this day 19 years ago, when planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, before introducing the secretary.
“In the beginning of this country, waterways kind of determined where development went,” Perdue told the gathered crowd. “And then we had the great railroad expansion from east to west, and development followed the railroads. Then in the early and middle 50s … you saw the development along the interstates.”
On the local level, he said commissioners push for the expansion of road and sewer development, but without internet infrastructure, any development is held back. He told the audience he hoped to see a major infrastructure push in coming years.
“It just ain’t fair folks, it ain’t fair,” he said of the limited internet access found in many parts of rural America.
The pandemic has shown people the importance of quality internet access, he said, “whether it’s distance learning, telemedicine, precision agriculture, e-commerce, or just an old grandpa like me facetiming with his grandkids.”
“The inability of rural communities to connect to the world is something we’re trying to solve place by place,” he said of President Donald Trump’s administration.
USDA Rural Services Administrator Chad Rupe thanked ATMC for financing the initial studies to determine the locations where internet infrastructure is most sorely needed.
“In the application, they talked about how places in Pender County have seen 19% growth since 2010, but the places that don’t have broadband haven’t seen that growth,” Rupe said.
ATMC CEO Keith Holden said the cooperative’s research showed nobody complaining that “they couldn’t watch Netflix or play Fortnight.”
“Everybody said, ‘My kids aren’t able to do schoolwork,’ or ‘I’m not able to do my job,'” he said.
This article has been updated to reflect the accurate grant amount.
