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The Alabama Digital Expansion Authority held its last quarterly meeting of 2024 on Tuesday. Created as part of the Connect Alabama Act, the ADEA “advise[s], review[s], and approve[s]” the state’s statewide connectivity plan.
Expanding broadband access has been a major focus of state policy in recent years due to the number of households in Alabama’s poorer counties without adequate internet access. According to the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, 61 percent of households in Perry County are “underserved” according to federal standards, while in nearby Greene County a whopping 72 percent meet the federal definition of being “unserved.”
Tuesday’s meeting was primarily spent discussing the Alabama Digital Expansion Division’s recently released annual report, which boasts of a total of “$86,963,431.62” in Alabama Broadband Accessibility Fund money already awarded throughout the state since the fund’s inception. Around $24.5 million of that total has been distributed to already completed projects which helped create an estimated 31,074 new services.
Thanks to the billions of dollars in federal funding for rural broadband programs allocated by the American Rescue Plan, Governor Kay Ivey has been able to announce several rounds of grants this year despite the Alabama Broadband Accessibility Fund not receiving any state-level appropriations in 2024. (However, the ABAF was able to facilitate several grants due to past projects coming in under budget.)
During Alabama Digital Expansion Division chief Maureen Neighbors’ synopsis of the annual report, she quite accurately stated that “there are a lot of federal dollars that are flowing into Alabama right now.”
In October, the state’s plan for $1.4 billion in funding from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, or BEAD, was approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The funding is meant for investments in last-mile connections and, according to the report, “ADECA expects the BEAD funds will be available in early 2025.”
Just how much longer Alabama will be receiving significant allotments of federal funding to help pay to expand broadband access is an open question though.
One of the policies proposed by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign was increasing funding for rural broadband by restoring the Affordable Connectivity Program, which over the lifetime of the program spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on subsidizing internet access for low-income Alabamians. But how President-elect Donald Trump will approach federal funding for rural broadband programs like the BEAD Program remains unclear.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Joanne Hovis, a consultant, said “everything is very dependent on what might be coming in the new administration.” Hovis specified that there was “uncertainty in the current moment about whether the program might be tweaked or perhaps even substantially changed.”
“It’s late in the process for very substantial changes,” she hedged. “But we could certainly see tweaks to elements of the program that are not codified in the statute or in regulations.”
Hovis said that this uncertainty will diminish when Trump eventually announces a nominee to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a bureau within the U.S. Department of Commerce that oversees most federal broadband grant programs.
But, as Neighbors expressly acknowledged during her presentation Tuesday, Alabama began investing in rural broadband through the ABAF before the current wave of federal grant programs.
In an opinion piece published by APR earlier this month, Bobby Singleton, a state senator and member of ADEA, argued that the state should continue investing in rural broadband. “Elected officials, like me, must continue to support policies and initiatives that prioritize rural broadband,” Singleton wrote.
He specifically highlighted the potential of the Alabama Fiber Network, an initiative led by rural electric co-ops that has received tens of millions of dollars in grants, and said investing in statewide fiber is “investing in our people, our communities, and our economy.”
The Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs maintains a statewide map of broadband access and detailed profiles for each of Alabama’s 67 counties.
