WHITEHALL — The county board voted 12-4 last week to commit $410,000 in matching funds toward a state broadband expansion grant, siding with residents who say the coulees remain effectively unserved despite official coverage maps that count them as connected.
The match supports an application by Tamarack Valley Telecommunications Cooperative, a regional provider based in Osseo, to run fiber to roughly 900 addresses in the towns of Ettrick, Hale, Pigeon and Preston. If the state awards the grant this fall, the cooperative has said construction would begin in spring 2027, with the first customers connected by the end of that year and full build-out by late 2028.
The dispute at the center of the vote is cartographic. State and federal broadband maps, which determine where grant dollars can flow, list most of the affected addresses as served. But supervisors heard more than an hour of testimony that the service on paper does not exist on the ground — DSL lines installed decades ago that slow to a crawl by suppertime, and fixed-wireless signals that the maps assume can reach homes sitting behind 400-foot sandstone bluffs.
“The map says I have 100 megabits,” said Roger Byom, who milks 140 cows on a farm in the town of Hale. “What I have is a modem from 2009 and a co-op field man who has to drive my milk-quality data into Whitehall on a thumb drive when the upload times out. That is not broadband. That is a pen pal.”
That is not broadband. That is a pen pal.
Roger Byom, town of Hale dairy farmer
Jenna Skogstad of rural Ettrick told the board her two children in the G-E-T district do homework in the parking lot of the Ettrick library. “We are told to challenge the map,” she said. “We have challenged the map. The map does not answer its phone.”
Supervisors who opposed the match argued the county should not spend levy dollars to correct what is properly a state mapping failure, and noted the finance committee will face a tight budget season beginning with hearings Sept. 3. Supporters countered that waiting for the maps to be fixed could push the coulees to the back of the line for a second grant cycle.
The county’s match is contingent on the state award; if the application fails, the money is not spent. Tamarack Valley has said it will file formal challenges to the coverage designations for the project area regardless of the grant outcome, a process residents can join by submitting speed-test evidence for their addresses.
The cooperative plans public information meetings in Ettrick and Pigeon Falls in August.