By ANN HINCH

Associate Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Efforts to connect rural parts of Indiana with higher internet speeds ramped up last week in a pair of announcements from state offices.

The Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA) said Friday it is adding a Broadband Readiness Plan component to the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. The idea is to educate communities on existing broadband (high-speed internet access) conditions, create a long-term vision for each area’s needs and find solutions for making that vision happen.

And the day before that, Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch introduced Scott Rudd in a small press conference at the Indiana State Fair as state government’s newest cabinet-level member – the director of Broadband Opportunities. Both actions are fulfilling a law set down by the state legislature last year establishing the program and the job.

Crouch said the director position – which is funded for now by OCRA and the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA) – was needed because various state offices were each doing “bits and pieces” to learn more about extending broadband service to rural areas and pursuing solutions, but there was no one concerted effort or person communities could turn to. Now there is.

“My career has always been focused on improving the quality of life in rural areas where I’ve been,” said Rudd, a Brown County native, where he most recently worked as the town manager and economic development coordinator for the county seat of Nashville.

He said rural Hoosiers deserve affordable broadband access, but one of the biggest hurdles to a community getting that is trying to figure out how to even start compiling information. In Brown County, one of the state’s first “Broadband Ready” communities, he said local residents worked hard to find ways to let potential internet service providers (ISPs) know they were ready to work in partnership.

Beginning in 2015, he said the Brown County Broadband Task Force he founded began partly by asking ISPs: “What can we do to help bring you to our county? How do we attract you here?”

Like a lot of rural areas, Rudd said the county doesn’t have much money to throw at the problem, but it does have rights-of-way it can grant for buildout of service lines; it has buildings and some infrastructure; it has the ability to grant tax abatements.

“We did anything we could to expedite our processes,” he said of trying to make it easier for ISPs and related investors to decide to sink their money into Brown County.

It is paying off. Rudd said the county has seen investments from small companies, REMC and even AT&T. The installation process is still near its beginning stages, but it’s further along than a lot of other rural areas. At this point his task force has secured more than $20 million in private investment to expand access to 7,500-plus homes and businesses.

“It’s no ‘one size fits all’” approach to getting each county Broadband Ready, Rudd said, describing the solution as less “silver bullet” and more “silver buckshot.”

When the new state job was established, he said, “I thought immediately, this is exactly what we need.”

Crouch said that Rudd – who holds a bachelor’s degree in public affairs from Indiana University – will work with ISDA to keep farmers abreast on advancing technologies, as well as with OCRA on things like the Broadband Readiness Plan.

This pilot program will award grants of up to $50,000 each to five communities picked by OCRA based on each one’s CBDG criteria, as well as location, geography, population density, its unserved/underserved broadband status and previous efforts toward securing access. The winning communities will get technical aid from the Purdue University Center for Regional Development, as well.

Representatives of interested communities need to complete the online survey at www.surveymonkey.com/r/BBPlanGrant18 by Sept. 4, and the five chosen will be announced on Sept. 12.

In addition, Rudd said one of his first tasks will be to plan and host a statewide “broadband summit” sometime this fall for rural communities interested in learning more.