Maine Towns Team Up to Establish Municipal Broadband Utility

A group of Waldo County (ME) residents is working to create an affordable broadband utility that every resident in Searsmont and four other towns should be able to access. The task force has been collecting data from residents and mapping the community's level of current Internet service, which members believe is low. To address this problem, Searsmont and the neighboring communities of Liberty, Palermo, Montville and Freedom have formed the Southwest Waldo County Broadband Coalition, which has a long-term plan of creating a municipally-owned public broadband utility. The cost for this is likely to be between $7 and $10 million, and right now the hope is to pay for it through grant funding and, later, through revenue bonds. "The utility itself would be responsible for paying the bonds," said Searsmont board member Pete Milinazzo. "We want to emphasize the fact that we're not going to do it with taxpayer dollars." Another possible funding avenue, he said, is the federal stimulus money available through the American Rescue Plan Act. Waldo County has received the first half of the $7.7 million award, and county officials plan to invest roughly $3 million of that in upgrades to emergency services infrastructure.