Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

And um we do have a board member Mark Wy joining us and um up on the screen. [Music] Oh, we've got enough people to vote. Yeah, we're good. So Mark, unless you object, we're not going to um vote you in uh and so to speak uh to make you official at this point. No problem. All right. Good. All right. So, um uh any public comment? No, we don't. All right. Okay. We're on to the consent agenda, which includes the minutes, uh the financial reports, and then the staff reports. Uh um is there any questions, concerns, any further discussion on any of those items? If not, I'd entertain a motion to approve. To approve. Thank you. Second. Thank you. All those in favor signify by saying I. All those same sign. All right. And we're now on to our uh presentation for today, which is uh Tony from the county on the access county broadband initiative. [Music] Tony, turn it over to you. Thanks, Carl, for the introduction. Hi, I'm Tony Grant. I'm assistant county administrator for Mlan County. Um, I've been blessed to have worked on the uh uh Mlan County rural broadband expansion project since 2022. So, we're into our third year of working on this. I did prepare a deck that's up there. I don't know. It makes more sense for me to sit up there so you can look at the deck as opposed to having to go back and forth. I think I'm going to do that. It looks like there's plenty of room on that end of the table as well. So, um that way at least my presentation is in the same direction that I'm sitting and providing content in. So, and I can drive. Thank

you. All right. So, I figured I would start with just a brief overview as I'm not exactly sure on what you guys have been briefed on and where your knowledge is. So, if you have some knowledge of what I'm talking about, my apologies if this is repetition for you. Um, but I can assure you there's at least one or two people in there that may not have all of this content. So, today I'm going to be talking about the Royal Broadband expansion updates. Um, those three points and then we're going to touch quickly on the digital equity updates and then whatever questions you guys have, I'm open to to taking those. So, I figured I would start by going through a timeline of how MLAN County got involved in a rural broadband expansion. Uh, in November of 2022, the MLAN County Board unanimously voted, and that was when the board was split between 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, and all 20 of our board members voted for us to do something um to expand access to highspeed internet in our rural parts of our county. This was triggered off of our rural residents receiving letters um from their current internet service providers saying that you can pay us for your service, but we can't guarantee you're going to have access to the service. Uh if it breaks, we're not going to fix it. Um and obviously this upset a lot of our rural residents saying we're paying for services and we're not getting those services back. So that got brought to our county board members uh who then went ahead and adopted this on November 10th of 22. And I knew immediately anytime that you can get 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats first off in a room together and then second off to have them all completely agree, we knew we had something that we needed to start cooking on. So from there um we did apply and Ray brought to our attention the opportunity to participate in this broadband breakthrough program that was is a 12week 14week boot camp essentially of all things uh broadband internet related. So, the county participated in that in January of 23 through May of 23. Then coming out of that, we went ahead and applied for a deck grant. And I'll

get into more details on that, which is for a feasibility study for countywide. So, we knew exactly what it would look like to see that every resident and every house and business in rural MLAN County has access to highspeed internet. Highspeed internet is defined as anything in excess of 100 megabytes download and 20 megabytes upload. Um, I can get into more words and all that in describing how this is all going to be built out. Um, but for now, I'm just trying to table set and if you have questions, we'll get into that because there are some levels of service that are underneath of what's considered served. Um, so as part of the broadband breakthrough, we did we did establish this accelerated access group um, which is made up of the county, a number of different members. We have the MLAN County Farm Bureau that's involved. We have Illinois State University that's involved. The economic development council is involved. Um we really went out. We've got the school districts that were involved. We have the regional board of education. All these members and some social service agencies all came together for this accelerated access group and we are still active today. As most of these type of work groups, some uh organizations more active than others, but they all are still part of the organization. Coming out of that, we did have a guiding principle that was set up here um which is accelerate access. MLAN County strives to expand access for all residents to quality choices for reliable, affordable and robust highspeed internet services to promote economic prosperity, foster educational opportunities and improve the quality of life. So this is our marching orders and our guiding light of how we are to move forward with our accelerate access. Coming out of that, we had five key strategic uh goals that we wanted to pursue. First one was continue our outreach to our local internet service providers. Uh if I had more time, I would have put a checkbox next to that because we have done that box. We've done that already. Um we would continue to develop a mapping of resources for our ISPs. I read the second bullet point underneath of that and it really shows

you how little I really knew about the process when we first came up with this over two years ago. as we ended ind indicated coming up with a layer for our GIS that would have all of our current fiber optic cables and the one I'm really really showing that my navity on was the field tiles like there's a map that exists to where all the field tiles are doesn't exist it's not a thing but it was at the time you came out of it this was identified as a potential pinch point so we're like yeah we want to go forward with it doesn't mean that you can't invest resources in mapping and we have done that um but that one was a fool's and we realized that very soon as we started digging into that one. Third one is a conductive feasibility study. Um we have completed that which provided us so much information that's got us to where we sit here today. Uh we did explore a variety of opportunities to secure funding. Um we'll talk on that just in a minute. And then uh locating and improving processes related to permitting for the development of a high-speed government or network. Again, it's the find a way for us to make sure that the red tape doesn't get in the way of this expansion. That is the one that we're ongoing on now. That's the bullet point that we're currently are functioning on and we're continuing to move forward and as other opportunities present themselves. Um we are following up on it, but right now that is our key strategy um that we are currently focused on and I'll touch base on that here shortly. Just to finish the timeline of our efforts, we did get a DECA award um from the state of Illinois. ML County was the only county in the entire state that received a a grant to do a feasibility study so we could understand what the marketplace look like. Um, and I don't want to toot my own horn, but that's what you do in a situation like this. Um, is MLAN County is relocated as a leader. I've been told straight from the state that they wish more counties were as actively involved and as prepared as where we sit versus some of the other counties. Um, and we have been on this from day one as soon as that was passed through. Um, late

summer of 24, the feasibility study came in. In fall of 24, we issued an RFI that went out to all the internet service providers that are currently providing services in Mlane County, even if it's just a portion of it, and any that we thought would be interested in applying for funding to provide services in MLAN County. Um, coming out of that, we did find two ISPs that were identified as our preferred partner. I I'm just foreshadowing that because there's a slide that we'll touch on that a little bit later here. And then the final item that we have down here is right now we are in the process of doing our outreach to all of our townships which is intended to raise awareness and to ensure that there are solid permitting processes countywide. We're trying to get those to be as standard as possible as we did find that there were a number of our our townships that had not a single permitting process. And I'm personally aware of one of our townships where there had been two previous attempts from an internet service provider to bring fiber into their community and they could not get an application. They could not get a permit and they said the heck with it and walked away. Now there's a third organization that's trying to bring fiber out to that particular uh township. And I think uh I was alerted in October they had not gotten even an application for a permit at that point. And as of two weeks that I finally got an application for a permit. So from October to March, they were asking consistently for a permit, just an application, and they weren't able to get it. So this is what we're out there doing outreach for is to try to make sure that there's a process in place. ISPs are fine going through whatever red tape that's necessary, but they need to know what hoops they need to jump through to use that terminology. So that's what we're currently in the process of doing. So, how are we going to build out a highspeed fiber network here in rural MLAN County? Um, the federal government did pass um 42.5 billion towards an

infrastructure bill uh that's going towards broadband expansion. 1 billion of that is coming here to Illinois specifically. Uh the state of Illinois has also previously invested some of their ARPA funds into previous rounds of this connect Illinois. Uh and the fourth round of that is going to be funded through these federal monies. Um and there is also funding available as that is part of uh literacy digital literacy and getting computers into the homes and we'll touch base on that here momentarily. So this is the timeline that we're dealing with when it comes to the bead funding u that's coming from the feds. The state has a grant program. We have gone through wave one at this point and as you can see on this slide here, it was really focused to those that were hard to serve areas and you needed at least 10% of the areas needed to be hard to serve. In Mlean County, we've got just short of 3,000 total premises locations that are eligible for funding. We had a total of eight properties that were deemed to hard to serve. So if you do the math, that's definitely not 10%. So, our preferred is partner for our ISP said we'll apply for round two or wave two, which we're expecting to be in spring. I'm expecting to be late spring, early summer at this point. Um, but that will be when we expect to get grants coming in that we would uh review for MLAN County. We just not have enough um locations that were considered hard to serve. Again, like I said, the first applications have came in. Uh there were eight locations that were identified as hard to serve statewide. The state did receive a total of 238 separate applications for this funding does cover as you can see 86% of all the eligible locations 85% of the hard to serve project area units and right now they are only scoring and looking at those that are end to end fiber applications. That's fiber to the home. Um just uh to put that in a very blunt straightforward term there. This

is what MLAN County looks like from an eligibility perspective. I'll go ahead and uh call Thomas out here. He's the one who created this map for us. Um the gray areas that you are seeing here are what is referred to as a project area unit. Uh essentially it'll be a reverse auction for those particular areas entered by the ISP. ISP1 will say I can do it for a million. ISP 2 will say $850,000 and there's a greater scoring would go to the lower amount. Now I will be clear that's not the only metric that's going to be used. Community support is a huge part of this and is going to account for 10% of the overall scoring if they can show community support. At this time, there will be two internet service providers for MLAN County that can sh say that they will have community support through our entire processes. Does not mean other companies can't apply, but because they have that extra 10% boost on it, we feel very strongly that they will be the ones that are awarded any funding to help serve that. The purple triangles are actually the premises or the locations that are eligible to receive funding using bead. Um, and as you can see, most of ours are going to be western MLAN County, a little over here in the southern part, and then this northwestern area um of the county. We're really hurt bad out here. This is an improvement over the original maps. We did challenge and push back on the information that the FCC had um through a B challenge. I mean, we were able to gather most of those we were able to win. But the reason that this looks like this is a previous round of funding through an program that was called Ardoff. Um, another company has already made a commitment to provide services to those that are not listed here. So, just because they're not here, a property is not here, does not mean that they're not going to receive some type of highspeed internet, just not through this particular program that we're working on. Now, I know there'll be questions on that stuff, so please don't hesitate to

ask. Um, so our RSP updates that we have here, uh, October, we received the bids, four came in. Um, we reviewed the all seven, uh, we had seven reviewers, which consisted members of the AAMC group, county board members, and county staff. Based on the scoring, three were selected for interviews. Each of the interview was scheduled for an hour. And based on the submissions and interviews, two ISPs uh visions most closely aligned with the our vision and were selected as preferred partners. Those two were, now that I've teased it appropriately, of serving, central Illinois regional broadband network, which is right across the street here and is a blow to normal creation with the partnership out of ISU um and several other uh organizations. And the other one that was selected was Pablof Media. Palaf Media is another uh internet service provider founded in central Illinois um over in Champagne and those are two that were identified as our preferred partners and we will plan to work with them. We have been working with them and outreach efforts and we do anticipate getting letters of support out for them when they get their grant applications in which we have not seen at this point. when that does arrive, I would probably work with three to see if we can get a letter of support from you guys here as well for that to show that community support that they do have for this project. Um, our township outreach right now, we have uh we're doing outreaches to every single one of our townships. They have a booklet. Um, this is available on our website now that was just updated yesterday. Um, and I'll get to that in a second. Um but what we are it does go through a deep dive of everything that we have done to this point as a county has a history of the work we've completed. It has a quick primer on how broadband and works. Uh we have some internet survey results and speed test data that we share information about the ag benefits to agriculture mapping of what a fiber network could specifically look like and again Thomas over here was the one who worked on those maps for us as well and

did a fantastic job. Um, we've discussed the funding for a primarily a fiber network in there and what roles the townships can and should play when it comes down to that. Um, we are doing that now. We just had a huge outreach event two weeks ago at this point at the highway department um with all the highway commissioners. We were able to get around 20 of them to show up. So, it leads us about six or seven township commissioners that we have to get in front of to discuss the permitting piece. [Music] Um, each of our outreach events, I will note this, we'll have at least one county board member in attendance. There will be a representative from an ISP who is the grant funding build out within the township and there'll be a representative from the MLAN County Farm Bureau if they're available for that event as well. So, we're doing a full court press in all these townships because we think it's that important and we want to make sure that they understand how much work has gone into it and how we want to help when it comes down to it. So that's the side that addresses the infrastructure side which is probably the stuff you guys are most interested in. Last slides I'll run very very quickly through. The other side of the same coin is you have infrastructure but if you don't have if you have infrastructure, you don't know how to use technology then it does no good. So that's the other side of the coin is making sure that people have the resources and the knowledge and skill able to to use the new services. Um so digital equity means ensuring that all individuals and communities have necessary IT uh to participate in the society that comes straight from the state website. These are the areas that I'm most interested in for the digital equity side is really the economic opportunity and development. The access to the essential services and obviously civil engagement and social inclusion are huge benefits for individuals who adopt uh modern technology. Other things that digital equity can do is there are benefits to industry and business. Uh there's obviously some healthc care benefits to it, education

benefits as well as there are some agricultural adoptions that are benefits there as well. I could spend probably an hour talking on each of these topics, but for permitting purposes, I will not do so. Um funding for this is coming out of the digital equity act of 2021. The federal government did allow $2.75 billion to states and territories to help with this and Illinois is committed uh to providing its portion of funding via the Illinois digital equity capacity grant which has this goal here. Um they have $30 million they'll be receiving off of this. And again their entire goals here is to make sure that everyone has access to the skills technology and the capacity to reap the benefits of the digital economy. So, MLAN County knew that we did not have the resources to take the lead in this area and there's some question to whether it's appropriate for the county to take the role in digital equity work. Um, so with that being said, what we wanted to do is develop and stand up a team of leaders in the community that can take on this work because we understand the importance of that. Um, and with the assistance of Illinois State University, the Illinois Broadband Lab, we were able to to put together a consortium of libraries who are going to go ahead and pursue and move this work forward. Um, the Bloomington Public Library has agreed to take the lead in these efforts and they did recently submit a grant application requesting around a million dollars to shade under funding for these services to be provided. Um, again, the application while the Bloomington Public Library would be the primary or the applicant, they would actually be funding these throughout uh all the rural libraries in MLAN County. Um, as you can see, uh, we had 11 out of the 15 that provided letters of support. the four that did not are still supportive. They just were not able to get a letter of support at time was my understanding that I received. So, as you see, we have a huge swath of all of our libraries and then there are other nonforprofits as well that are supportive of this be working with as well um to ensure that people do the

skills that are necessary. So, these are the core programs that if MLAN County or I'm sorry that the Bloomington Public Library does receive its funding and we are pretty bullish that they will um is they're going to be working on digital digital literacy and skill building. They'll plan to offer classes and personalized sessions covering basic skills, online safety and resource navigation. There'll be some funds available for device distribution um which will also help for loanable hotspots and vouchers for laptop purchases for those who qualify. And then there will be digital navigator support which will provide funding for two trained digital navigators. We'll be offering personalized assistance um and training for individuals um so they can gain access to the technology that's available. Close with two quick slides here. one of these. I thought this was pretty eye opening uh slide. Um I did steal this from the state so I will go ahead and give credit where it is due. They came up with this infographic here. Um and as you can see um Illinois really fits nicely with the national average when it comes to the importance of having digital skills um to be able to do the work and jobs that are available in today's economy. And we have so much information that is available on our county website. Everything you reviewed here in much more granular detail. There's videos. There's all types of stuff out. If you had interest in learning more about what we're doing, you can access it off the county website. Hover over the government, you'll see accelerate access MLAN county listed here. You'll click that and then on the lefth hand side, there'll be a number of different pages you can visit with additional information that's on that as well. So with that, I think I hit my 20 minute mark is Ray said my limit. Um, but I will open up to any questions you guys might have. Again, there's so much more. I could share so much. It was kind of hard for me to get everything out in a

time frame when you have three years worth of a project. Trying to bring everybody up to speed and then not overwhelm everybody as well. So I'll ask the quiz will be after you guys ask any questions. So questions. I have a question. Um so the service providers once they go through the process of getting the necessary permits from county and those townships and stuff is is there a requirement in their contract to provide the services to those people in that area. by within a certain time frame. Uh yeah. So and and if they have it and they don't meet that time frame, uh what what is the recourse that you have? Great question you asked there. There's a couple of different ways I can try to answer that. So I'll start with the big question. What happens if they don't? So they have five years to build out by the grant. Our preferred partners have indicated that they're going to build out within two years. That's a part of the reason of why they they were selected um as our preferred partners. Their intention is to start selling as soon as possible to those houses along the way. If the network's not fully built out, they'll plan to sell uh that service straight away. If somebody signs up for the service while the grant is going on, there's actually no installation cost. It's all free. So you can get fiber to your home, no cost, no out of pocket if you're in one of these qualified areas for that. Um, so that kind of addresses the grand sign. If they don't, there's the question that's ultimately the kicker and that's why right now in Eastern Mlan County, we do have concerns because of the AR funding that was previously released. Um, we had an engineer that was spent an entire week in Mlan County on the ground trying to find proof of Ardoff buildouts and he

could find zero, nothing was documented. There was no way that anything Ardoff was in place. Ardoff doesn't have any type of negative consequence if they don't. Same thing unfortunately applies with bead. Um, but there are permits that would expire if they didn't. So that's one way that you can try to hold them accountable to building out. The second thing is if they don't then they lose the grant funding. Um and right now it could be as little as 20 to 30% of the private money because the ISP has to put funds out. Um is all that they could be spending out of pocket if they they qualify for the grants. Um so if they don't build that within the grant time period, then they would be responsible for 100% of that cost. So there's another incentive that they have um to build out. So that there's not really a stick. There's some carrots involved. Yes. U but there's not really a stick if they don't build out. And that's why we've tried to work to be a very good partner with them. Um and I'm very confident between this the two that we have will get built out within the time frame. Um, we've they've been really good partners with us and we've also seen kind of a unintended consequence of us choosing a non-incumbent telephone provider um as ours because Bob off is just a broadband provider and so a servant. We've actually seen our incumbent telephone provider ratchet up the speed of getting fiber developed into some of our communities which is a great thing because they're losing that because they know that got a foot in. Correct. And they know that when this other company comes in and builds, now they're going to have competition. And that was one of our biggest things that we wanted to see at the end of this is a true robust marketplace that's going to drive down cost. I live in Danvers and I pay 140 to 160 bucks a month for my internet. If I was in Bloomington, it'd be 60 to $80 just because I have one provider and that's media account. So they can charge whatever. And we have

pretty good reliability, but not everybody has that. Um, so that's why we really want that robust marketplace. So we don't think there's going to be an issue but there are some carrots to provide the exhibit. Thank you. Other questions just couple general questions on construction are will that be a ground cable? I mean is that preference? That is our preference. So I can tell you that was another deciding point of why we chose the partners that we did. Um, Serbin is 100% um, uh, underground very fiber. 100% of their network is Pabluff Media. They have made a commitment to us they're going to do as much as they possibly can underground because that's their preference as well. But there are some runs that just might not make financial sense when you're looking at 50 to $60,000 per mile for bearing and you're looking at maybe 5 to 10 grand if you were to run an aerial on those power poles that are out there. So, we've got a commitment from Palloff Media. They're going to start with a completely underground uh design network and seeing what that pencils out as. And then they're going to go through and strategically if it's just too big of a number, then they will start looking at aerial applications. But their goal is to get as much underground as possible um for that. But there will be some areas that will probably be have to be aerial because of cost, especially if there's one house here and another house for another 10 miles down the road. you very well might have an aerial application there. Um, when all said and done, we would anticipate a wired solution and a wireless solution for everybody in MLAN County. At least one wireless solution, if not multiple because you could have cell with the 5G networks which could come up. You have your fixed wireless like beamed off with elevators and those kinds of things. Then as far as is of hookups off right away on is that is that provider or is that the homeowner's

responsibility? So when it comes to rightaway um and easements and all of those things that all falls on the broadband company's responsibility to manage that. But as far as just hooking up to the home to the home um that will be up between the ISP and the home owner themselves. The ISPs will generally try to trench that into the home. That's the agreement that they've made and anytime I've heard them talk about it because it's the questions that are asked in our outreach sessions. Um they plan to stretch it up to the homes because that's the most secure way of doing so and it's the cheapest way versus like a horizontal conduit and do the the boring horizontal boring. So their goal is for that and again if they sign up during the grant time there's no cost to the homeowner but there could be a cost if they don't sign up during that time period. Thank I think that answers your questions. Absolutely. Great. Tony, you mentioned um that this involves federal funding. Are are they feeling pretty comfortable that funding will actually come through given the uncertainty that seems to be happening in DC right now? So, you're asking a bit to read some tarot cards or the tea leaves here and I'm going to do my best to do what I can and what I have been able to get filled in for. So, there is not an expectation that this is going to stop entirely. What we're hearing through the network is that there will probably be some changes to deemphasize fiber. There's going to definitely be changes that address climate change because there's some climate related issues there. There's going to be some changes probably when it comes to prevailing wage, union work, those types of things. Um, and then a deemphasizing of fiber. There's some estimates that say essentially what's going to occur is what they're going to do is shift it over where Starling, Elon Musk company is going to be eligible for up to 25% of the total funding. Um they're um which I think would be terrible if that were to occur and the only reason I share that is because we won't get the

infrastructure on the ground. Um and that's stuff that will last 50 plus years. Um same thing as our copper telephone lines that are out there now. They were better maintained. They would still functioning quite well. we wouldn't see any of that investment. And the sad thing about satellite internet is that the more people use it, the more it slows down. Internet's like a high-speed internet or it's a high-speed roadway. You have a two-lane road that, you know, done relatively cheaply. You can still drive on. You can get to where you need to go, but you're not going to be able to go very fast and especially if you have other traffic, you have to slow down. uh uh you know fiber internet is like your five, six, seven, 10 lane interstates and you can haul down on that even with a ton of people on it. But even with a ton of people, you have to slow down a little bit. If it's just you on the road and you're out in Montana, you can go 120 m hour with no consequences. That's the same thing as the internet. But if you have a 100 people on that road, you can't go so fast because you only have so much bandwidth that's on that. So that's the downside of not getting the fiber into the ground. And when it comes to economic development, um talking Casey Peterson was a huge proponent and helped with this while he was with the EDC and he told us point blank that every time that he has a conversation with a business about whether to invest in Mlan County, the very first question he says that he's asked is where's your fiber? And if that property that they're trying to doesn't have fiber, goodbye. Um, but that's one of the benefits of getting fiber in the ground is that encourages that economic development to occur. And this to me is why I'm so passionate about this. Growing up in a rural part of of McLean County and in the state, I'm an Olympia graduate. My kids are still going out there. Um, there's just no opportunity. I I see the downtown of Danvers where I live has been hollowed out since what it was when I was growing up there. Uh, we have a gas station and three bars. Like that's our business that we had at this point. When I was younger, we had a restaurant. We had an ice cream place. We had a drink parlor. There were all

these other businesses that all have left. What this provides an opportunity for is for the investment in those towns again because you can set up an internet based business relatively cheaply. Um, and you don't have to you could be anywhere. We know the cost of living in a rural part of our state is cheaper than an urban spot. Um, and bring some of that investment back into those communities. Um, think about remote u uh work. You can be anywhere and if you have high speeded internet, somebody could work in Chicago remotely, live here because they can hop on that train and write up whatever they are. If it's a State Farm type of situation where you go into office one day a week, you can take that train up very easily and get back if you have the highspeed internet in your house. So, we think there's an opportunity to build additional homes and we know how much of a need that we have here as well for that. So, that's what gets me excited about this from a rural perspective because I feel like we've been left behind. I want my kids to stay and none of them have any desire to stay in the area once they graduate. Um, so it's just personal point there. Followup question having to deal with the townships that didn't seem to be very responsive. Yes. Did you get any sense of why they didn't respond? Yes. Um, that you could share. At the end of the day, I'm just I'm going to be very general as I can. Everything that we do is personality driven. You know, if if I trust you and you trust me, we're going to be able to get along in some way. We might have disagreeances, but because there's that basis of trust, we can work through that. It doesn't always exist. And I think that's there's been some burning that's occurred, just transparency. Sometimes internet companies, they bring in out of state labor, they contract them to just put it in the ground and then they're gone and they might not do the best job. The two ISPs that are preferred partners, so they're plann to use local labor and if

not the wrong workforce, ones that are Illinois based. Um, so I think this commissioner probably had been burnt in the past, has been very cautious. Um, so I think that's what drives it because at the end of the day it's personality driven, you know, and that's why I think it's hugely important and why we're out championing have a documented process. Um, writing goes a long way. The the township uh road commissioner doesn't use email. Everything's verbal. So, how do you hold how does each party hold each other accountable and then it gets into a he said she said or he said he said or she said she said type of situation. Um, I think some of that is is given there. I would definitely echo what Casey told you with regards to fiber. Uh, companies need require fiber. They're not looking for to go to any place that doesn't have right here in Right. So, and that's again that's one we heard that early on. I'm glad to hear that. I'm not lying when I'm out championing that. I say that at every single one of my outreach events. That's one of my talking points that I use because this is the all the human side of the stuff is fantastic. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to minimize that by any means, but to me it's this is economic development. I honestly believe that ML County is the best county downstate. Um we have it is really a synopsis of America as a whole and then the state of Illinois just is a perfect smallest example of that. I think we're highly desirable, the place to live, and I want us to continue to thrive and to move into the 21st century as a leader. And that's what drives here is because I want that development to happen. And I know if we can get as much fiber in the ground as possible, it's going to make all of our jobs, let's be honest, we're all in our roles for a short period of time. Someone's going to stand on my shoulders at some point and continue to move things forward. And I want to leave it better than I found it. Um, and that's kind of what drives me in this type of thing is this is one of

those projects that it's the electrification of rural America that happened in the early 20th century. We saw how much that changed. And my grandma who grew up in Watika, I remember hearing a story from her when they first got electricity in their house and her friends came over and they danced a little dance party and cute little story to hear. But I'm It's a similar type of thing. We get one bite at the apple and we got to get this right. Yeah. Any other questions for just a comment? Um, I'm shocked at how many people don't how if we don't have it. Okay. Was I have a farm in Minnesota that's an hour from the Canadian. Yep. It's literally like 10, 15, 20 miles between homesteads. Okay. Like you said, not easy to do. No. That entire area, thousands of square miles, completely covered by fiber and we have excellent internet service. Yep. Yeah. And it didn't cost us a thing. I brought it in, company came in, boom, done. Fantastic. I can go there and work. I do if I'm retired, but when I was working, I could go there and work like I was sitting I'm shocked that it's just that was crazy. Yeah. You don't know what you don't know until you know it. And then once you do, it's like we got to handle it. And Minnesota is one of those examples that were talked about quite often. Vermont was another one that was is recognized. But there's a certain level of progressiveness that does exist in both of those areas. It promotes what you're saying. I mean, does it bring back cities? I don't know. No. Okay. Who knows? You know, there's a there's a lot of factories there, but it

sure makes it a lot easier for all kinds of services to happen and for people to live there and for businesses to be there and there are businesses there in the middle of nowhere. There's, you know, businesses you wouldn't even think would exist there, you know. So, yeah. Great. Any other questions? Well, Tony, thank you so much for your time today. very much appreciated. Thanks for all the work that you've been doing and I hope we can start to see the network build out quickly. I am hopeful that there will be a press here sometime later this year with an announcement of the award that'll be coming and everything that's going to come out of that because this has been a lot of long work, but it's getting to that point where you actually see, oh, there's light at that end of the tunnel. I actually know what that looks like. So, excited for that. Pass out my card. If you guys have any questions, you want to circle back on anything in the future. Yep. I want the voter sitting here. Yep. And if you like to remain at the with with us, please feel free to do so. But if you want to head home, that's a great thing. Or back to the office, get stuff done. No problem. Yeah, I think I will probably head back to the office. Um, as I was out unexpected these last two days, I had a family emergency. So everything turned out fine, but still, you know, I'm trying to dig out. I think somebody this morning like, "Sorry, I haven't got you the PowerPoint. I've been out." So take care. Thank you again for the opportunity to talk. You're welcome. Uh on to regional housing initiative update. Good afternoon everyone. I have the regional housing initiative updates for the month of April. Under local updates, uh MCRPC facilitated the regional housing initiative affordable and supportive housing or ash coming committee meeting on March 17. We will also be hosting the staff committee meeting on April 24th. We've also

updated our area median income white paper and that updated version should be available on our website sometime this week. Just to give you a brief overview, area median income basically is the midpoint of an area's income distribution. Half of the county earns more than the AMI. Half the county, half the households in the county earn less than the AMI. So for 2024, Mlan County's AMI is 109,400, which is at 4.8 4.87% uh lower than the 2023 AMI. Uh for MLAN County in a four a fourperson household making 32,800 is considered extremely low income. 54,700 is considered very low in very low income and 87,500 is considered low income. Moving on to our housing dashboard, MCRPC has actually updated our housing dashboard. Most of the data has already been updated, but we're still working on like um fine-tuning um how it looks like and everything moving forward. Um for the 2025 2029 consolidated plan, the city did not receive any public comments, but they are currently waiting for HUD approval before they can proceed down. They um they started their public comment period on March 21st and will be accepting comments until the 20 until April 21st. Moving on to other uh updates, MRPC staff attended the screening of the movie No Address on March 25th at the Heartland Community College. So this movie is actually about um a group of homeless people what led to them to experience homelessness and their struggles to survive. Uh this screening was organized by the Salvation Army together with home sweet home ministries path central community action and the central and the center for human services. So after the screening, a panel discussion with the organizers followed and this movie is actually going to be streaming um starting April

4th through Amazon and Apple TV. Those are the updates that I have. Um if you have any questions, okay, thank you Jennifer. Um the human services transportation behind this. So the last meeting of the regional committees was in March on the 17th. Uh and it was not hugely attended but we did have some good conversations between the counties about how they will move forward over the next year and beyond um and how we are going to sort of facilitate communications and further discussions on how to cooperate uh between the three cooperating counties that we have been established. So that's Livingston in the lead for them Ford and also with King Key County and Mlan County. So that's what's staring us in the face. Um our upcoming activities over the next three months include and this is the execution of our agreement with to provide the coordination services. um a media and public information campaign in all five of the region's six counties and in cooperation with a new service provider in in Clay um to leverage the provider transition itself in Mlan County uh to improve public awareness of services available all across region six and where they come from. Uh they'll also continue establishing priorities for implementing the regional human services transportation plan for week six to look at immediate needs, things that need to be addressed right away and organization issues because that's come up in our previous prior meetings. Um and then we're also doing something we've intending and planning to do for a long time and have budgeted for in our HSTP agreement. um which is to reach out to the county boards and others in the region who has reestablished MCRPC as

their one-stop shop for assistance, information, and education about the region 6 planning process and the benefits it provides to their constituencies. Uh we'll be doing ongoing assessment of plan implementation priorities as we work through u goals and objectives established in the HSTV plan and we'll continue with committee recruitment and continuing outreach to participants and partner organizations to push engagement and regional participation. And that's it. Any questions? Thank you. Thank you. Great. Veterans Parkway quarter uh quarter plan uh the PSC the project steing committee they last met uh two days after you last met uh uh on March the 14th and the consultants present uh on the engagement report and went through uh presentation also on the need and opportunity analysis. Those two draft reports are now available uh for final review by staff and then they're also they're also in in between kind of phase two and phase three of the project. Uh if you recall there are like four phases of of the project. So phase three is going to be longer by a year but they're doing more analysis and uh looking alternative on settlements you know along the whole corridor. So the next meeting uh which will be May uh so they will back in touch with the project steering committee with more information and and look at the analysis. So that's kind of the update. Okay. Is there anything else that needs to come before the committee today? If not um our next meeting is in um May have the date in front of me.

Uh let me see it'll be May seven. May 7. Um so um if there is anything more I entertain a motion to adjourn. So second. Thank you. All those in favor sign. I thank you Mark. Appreciate you participating. Thank you today. Byebye. [Music]