Manchester residents express broadband frustrations to county commissioners

April 4th Washtenaw County Commissioners meeting in Sylvan Township. Photo from Washtenaw County website.

On April, instead of holding their regularly scheduled working session in their usual location in Ann Arbor, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners met in Sylvan Township Hall, south of Chelsea. They had a much larger turnout than usual, as residents from the western half of the county took the opportunity to attend, including some from the Manchester area who spoke during public participation on the topic of broadband.

Sharon Township residents and Bridgewater Township residents discussed their frustration with their inability to access broadband even if provider’s cables run near by their homes. They discussed the financial cost and time cost working around not having broadband in an age it is expected. Three township clerks, including Valisa Bristle from Freedom Township and Chelsea Mikel from Sharon Township, talked about the difficulty of providing same day voter registration which recently passed in Michigan and requires accessing a database as their township halls do not have reliable internet access.

State Representative Donna Lasinski, the leading advocate for rural broadband on the Democratic side of the aisle in the State House, discussed her efforts to reclassify broadband as a utility. If broadband was considered a utility, special assessment districts could be created and local broadband could be funded “by hook-up” ,,instead of based on property value through millages, which is one of the only tools available for communities to build broadband locally now.

Sharon Township resident Barb Fuller, who serves as vice president of the Michigan Broadband Cooperative and who served on the Washtenaw Broadband subcommittee,  along with president of MI Broadband Coperative and subcommittee member, Ben Fineman presented a summary of the Subcommittee’s report.

Read analysis of the subcommittee’s broadband report here. Read the complete report here.

The meeting was moved to Sylvan Township based on the efforts of Commissioner Shannon Beeman from Manchester who serves as commissioner for all of southwestern Washtenaw, and Commissioner Jason Maciejewski who represents all of northwestern Washtenaw. Commissioner Maciejewski talked about how the lack of access to broadband is a significant problem for 2 of the 9 districts in Washtenaw and how critical telemedicine will be in the future. Beeman talked about seeing the Manchester District Library parking lot full of cars some nights after it is closed as people park there to use the wifi for their kids to finish homework. She also talked about how damaging lack of broadband is to our area’s economic development. Commissioner Jason Morgan who represents central Ann Arbor explained that Commissioners Beeman and Maciejewski had educated the rest of the board on the issue and have made broadband disparity a top priority for the Board of Commisioners.

After the topic of broadband, the board heard presentations on youth mental health. The county is in the process of expanding mental health services to Chelsea and hopefully Manchester within the next month.

County Commissioners meetings are recorded and posted to the county’s website. Although it hasn’t been posted yet, it should be available soon at https://www.washtenaw.org/215/Webcast.

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by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.