Butler County commissioners recently told altafiber officials the company’s two-year delay of a project to bring high-speed internet countywide, was unacceptable, but stopped short of cancelling the $10 million project.
The commissioners have paid around $5.2 million in federal pandemic money so far to bring high-speed internet countywide, but altafiber is running roughly two years behind the contract deadline of Dec. 31, 2026. They had a sometimes-heated exchange with altafiber officials during a work session this week while deciding whether to cancel the contract or approve an amended deal.
Thus far, the internet provider has connected 26,206 of roughly 50,000 single-family units through the second quarter of this year, nearly 5,000 should be online by year’s end, leaving 16,253 unbuilt. Altafiber Market Development Program Manager Collin Taylor said the outstanding units are mainly in the Middletown area of the county — Madison and Wayne townships in particular — and the Oxford region.
Commissioner Don Dixon asked the vice president for Regulatory and Government Affairs, “what’s the guarantee that we won’t be here in two years and they’re not all done?”
Ted Heckman replied, “I don’t have a 100% guarantee for you sir, nothing in life is guaranteed.”
President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act into law March 11, 2021, and it allocated $350 billion to help local governments with pains caused by the coronavirus pandemic. When the commissioners learned they had nearly $75 million to spend, they invited other governments and agencies to pitch them ideas.
Countywide broadband was seen as especially crucial back then, when everything was shut down and people were forced to work and attend school remotely from their homes.
Butler County commissioners kickstarted the largest single ARPA project in March 2023, awarding the contract to altafiber. The caveat to the ARPA money is it must be fully expended by the end of this year. Altafiber is building the backbone of the system and individual customers decide if they want to hook up to it. The company needs to use power company lines to set up the internet system and getting those approvals have slowed progress.
Taylor said they have been dealing mainly with Duke Energy but also AES and Butler Rural Electric.
“We have signed a high-volume deployment with them which basically allows us to expedite everything to be done here. The issue was the amount of requests we had to attach to poles in the county was so great it inundated them with so much work,” he said. “We have had multiple conversations and they’ve all been really great with Duke to kind of expedite that process, it unfortunately did not get us to the finish line at the established end of the contract in 2026.”
He said there are some other minor hurdles to leap so they are shooting for full completion by December 2028.
Previously County Administrator Judi Boyko suggested they prepay the contract because of the ARPA deadline and noted if the job isn’t completed the company is obligated to return the money. Dixon balked at that idea and Commissioner Cindy Carpenter also voiced concern about the rural reaches that still don’t have internet access, hence the work session.
Dixon raised new concerns after Taylor admitted the company always intended to bring service throughout the county and even without the county’s money planned to finish in roughly two years., “It does not make a lot of sense to me that if you’re going to do it in two years and our plan is two years why don’t we let you do it with your plan and let us take our money somewhere else and help people quicker,” he said.
Carpenter said her main concern is getting internet to those in need in the hard to reach rural areas and asked Taylor if they still intend to connect those areas.
“Having these additional funds keeps it in the plan,” Taylor said.
“The goal is to do it but rural areas cost a lot and the money allocated from Butler County helps subsidize to get those areas faster,” he said. “While it is in our two-year plan, there is always the chance, right, you know corporate priorities overtake other things. So having this money allocated for this project helps us get this done in time.”
Dixon still favored cancelling the contract and redirecting the money, Carpenter disagreed.
“I think that it would be very easy from a high-level corporate decision to say hey, we don’t want to go crawling around on the Indiana border out there trying to hook up these little stretches of houses, we’re going to go do something else,” she said. “I think that would be the advantage of us continuing to hold to our end of the original bargain.”
Commissioner T.C. Rogers said he understands why there have been delays so he is “giving them the benefit of the doubt” and agreed to continue the contract.
Boyko said they have continued to negotiate after the pre-pay concerns were raised and altafiber tentatively agreed to a Sept. 30, 2028 deadline and she mentioned penalties if it isn’t done by then, “to kind of keep you motivated to do it.”
“I think we would have to restore some of those penalties that were removed by your attorneys,” she told Taylor. “Those would need to be included.”
Heckman protested the penalty issue saying that was part of the deal when the pre-payment option was still on the table. He said given the issues with the outside entities he can’t “guarantee” the completion date.
The plan now is for Boyko to finalize details so the county can reallocate the ARPA dollars — which is permitted — and the county will continue to pay altafiber $200 per unit as they complete the project.
Warren County ceases agreement
Warren County also had a contract with altafiber — using $4.8 million worth of ARPA money — to connect roughly 52,000 housing units. The company couldn’t complete the work by the ARPA deadline either, so the commissioners approved a mutual termination agreement on Sept. 1.
Deputy County Administrator Susan Walther told the Journal-News they were refunded roughly $3 million and the commissioners will be reassigning the money to another ARPA-qualified project.
Commissioner Dave Young said they have learned Spectrum has also been connecting a large portion of unserved households with high-speed internet so he was comfortable cancelling the contract.
“Spectrum had done a great deal in the county without us,” he said. “And altafiber did what they could and I appreciate that, but at the end of the day they were not going to hit those metrics so there was no sense in just letting the money go to waste so we got it back.”
The Journal-News reached out to altafiber for comment on why Butler County’s contract was double the price for roughly the same number of housing unit connections and it declined comment.