The pieces complement each other and “all fit together,” said Leelanau County Administrator Chet Janik. He added: “These things just don’t happen overnight.”

LIFT: Building unity, driving progress

In 2016, the Leelanau Peninsula Economic Foundation surveyed businesses and found one of the most critical barriers to business success and growth was a lack of high-speed Internet service. That led the foundation to create the Leelanau Internet Futures Team, or LIFT, a group of more than 20 stakeholders from public and private sectors, including business, agriculture, education, healthcare, technology, community development, county and township governments.

It's been a working committee on a mission, said LIFT chair Soutas-Little. “This is an action group. Our meetings have outcomes. We don’t just sit and talk.”

LIFT partnered with Connected Nation Michigan, a nonprofit working with Michigan state agencies to expand broadband, and work commenced on multiple fronts: Surveys of county residents, businesses, farms, education and healthcare providers and other organizations to identify broadband needs and priorities; and meetings with Internet providers, state and federal agencies, government and elected representatives, said Tom Stephenson, broadband solutions manager at Connected Nation Michigan.

“We helped them get their arms around all the various issues,” Stephenson said. “It was an all-encompassing thing.”

He became member of LIFT, which he said is “a strong group, a good mix, and that’s what you really need to pull everything together, so everybody’s working on the same page.”

For the next few years, Connected Nation Michigan continued to work with LIFT on some of its action items, like developing a program for the county to lease space on its towers to ISPs, Stephenson said. And, there were conversations with Internet providers about forming public-private partnerships with the county to boost service.

Stephenson, whose territory spans more than 40 counties from western mid-Michigan’s Newaygo County north to the Upper Peninsula, said Connected Nation plays a neutral role in bringing parties together. “But at the same time, I want to see broadband built out to all my people in northern Michigan,” he said.

Conversations ultimately bore fruit, bringing Point Broadband to the table at a time when the county had gleaned key data, assembled through a

2021 Leelanau-wide inventory of all broadband services, cabled and wireless. It was an exhaustive, parcel-by-parcel survey by DCS Technology Design LLC, hired by the county Board of Commissioners at LIFT’s recommendation. Chelsea-based DCS is a communications technology design and engineering services firm specializing in broadband mapping of rural areas.

Solutions from painstaking hard work

For some two months, DCS founder and CEO Chris Scharrer said he and his team drove about 700 miles of county road, gathering information on every occupied parcel “that could have a need for some type of Internet service” and determining whether and how that address was served or unserved by available and planned technologies.

There were challenges. For one, “there aren’t very many straight roads in Leelanau County, so you end up driving up and down the same road many, many times, to get to side roads,” Scharrer said. And the many hills and valleys meant that when DCS was measuring wireless signals, “within a matter of a couple hundred feet, the signal level could change drastically,” he said.

“There’s a lot of variables we try to pay attention to and take into account, when we’re putting the data together.”

Among many things, the study showed this: Of the approximately 22,701 occupied parcels in the county, a little over 22 percent – some 5,045 parcels – had no access to cable or fiber and little to no access to other high-speed broadband services.

It was crucial data, providing “the basis that we could actually create a plan, in terms of affecting service,” said Soutas-Little.

Talks ensued between Cherryland Electric Cooperative and Point Broadband, an ISP that entered the Michigan market in 2019 and has “been on a really fast growth track through these type of partnerships,” said David Ficken, vice president of strategic growth. Alabama-based Point Broadband operates fiber networks in eight states including Michigan, its second-largest market where it will be in nearly a dozen and a half communities by the end of the year.

Of the $17.4 million Leelanau project, $12.4 million is Point’s investment while the county will supply $5 million. Point will also spend about $1 million annually for ongoing operational customer support and network expense, Ficken said.

He said the project supports Point’s mission of bringing fiber to rural communities. Point expects at least 50 to 60 percent of the unserved Leelanau locations to sign up for its service. In addition, the company will be able to offer fiber-based service to other customers along the way that may be using coaxial or copper services from existing providers.

Ficken said Leelanau did “an exceptional job, a unique job, in assessing the situation in their county” through the work of DCS Technology. “With that study, they really laid out the road map, made it easier for somebody like us to come in” and see where needs are, he said.

Point and the county expect to sign the contract this month, after which Point will do about 90 days of engineering, permitting and site work and then begin construction, building into the fall and beyond as conditions allow. The project should be complete in 2023 and will entail about 180 miles of fiber run on Cherryland Electric’s poles and 150 miles underground, Ficken said.

He said the combination of county leadership, an outside consultant working on behalf of the county, a private Internet provider, a “very cooperative” electricity supplier, and Connected Nation Michigan form a template other counties could note.

“What makes Leelanau unique is the cooperation and partnership of all the necessary players to make a project successful,” Ficken said. “Other counties will look at this effort and say, how can we do it that way.”

The county board: driving partnerships, unity and commitment

Melinda Lautner, a Cherryland Electric board member and Leelanau County commissioner, said that while Cherryland’s first mission is electricity, affordable and reliable Internet service is also something its members want. The Point Broadband project enables Cherryland to provide that, at no cost to members, she said.

“We have the poles and wires, and we have the membership. And the membership wants this. It was a natural progression,” said Lautner, who is a LIFT member. “We want content and happy members in our cooperative.”

And, she said, “if it works very well, Cherryland could be interested in going to other areas that are underserved in our service territory, if we could find a third party like Point Broadband.”

Managing the project through December 2023, is DCS Technology’s Scharrer. He’ll oversee contractor activities and make sure that project design meets long-term goals, working as a liaison between Point and the county. DCS will also work to find provider alternatives for the four townships with unserved areas that are not part of the initial Point buildout.

Scharrer said that as the county has tackled the Internet issue and moved toward solutions, it’s been open to ideas and creativity, which “is very important, very helpful in being able to move these projects forward quickly. Because it’s a big, big undertaking.”

In totality, with all the pieces planned or being considered, “I think Leelanau’s going to be a model project that others should be paying attention to,” he said. “They were willing to move quickly, they’ve made a lot of decisions, and they will soon be known as an area if Internet is important to your livelihood, your family, your education, your healthcare activities, Leelanau is going to be very friendly to that.

“There’s so many areas left in the state of Michigan that are so far away from that.”

This spring, the Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to put $3.2 million of the county’s $4.2 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars toward broadband. The action came after community survey, asking people to submit input and proposals on how to spend the ARPA money, said the county’s Janik. He invited people to contact him personally by email or phone and of the approximately 130 responses, some 75 percent urged broadband and/or cellular upgrades.

“The residents really spoke loud and clear that they wanted this as a priority,” Janik said, adding that the Board of Commissioners has been united in its support.

Now, the project is also getting an assist from Venture North Funding & Development, which is helping with fundraising toward the county’s share of costs for Point Broadband and other high-speed Internet possibilities. The target is to raise $4.8 million.

“This project is all about the prosperity of Leelanau County,” one of 10 counties served by Venture North, a Community Development Financial Institution, said Venture North consultant Tim Ervin.

Venture North provides capital and resources to help small businesses, with a focus on economically distressed communities and their health and prosperity. Venture North “understands the impact of high-speed broadband when you have it, but also when you don’t have it,” Ervin said. It is as “imperative” to businesses as it is for families considering moving into a community, to the benefit of school systems, businesses and the local economy, he said.

With building community a goal of Venture North lending, Venture North is looking at other services it can provide, like helping the county close the gap in the broadband effort, he said. “While Venture North does not typically take on a project like this, the readiness of the County along with all of the work and funding completed to date were key factors in our decision to lend a hand.”

Point Broadband’s Ficken said Leelanau deserves credit not just for work leading up to the present but for making its goal a reality, when such initiatives can easily stall or fall apart. “They deserve as much credit for actually doing the project as they do for all the preparation and planning they’ve done,” he said. Janik said Soutas-Little has been a driving force, keeping momentum going. “This wouldn’t have happened without her vision and leadership,” he said.

Echoed Stephenson: “She’s really stuck with it. She’s held in there, she’s been very dedicated to it, and she’s finally getting rewarded for her efforts. When I come into a community, I always hope I find somebody like Patricia.”

Soutas-Little said expanded broadband opens up opportunities and can “change people’s lives in so many ways” as well as “be a big economic boost to our communities. I think that this is going to enhance our capabilities to become an even more thriving community than we are right now.”

As for her role, Soutas-Little is modest. “I’m a facilitator,” she said, “trying to bring people together to get the job done. Get them to the point of ‘yes’.”

Amy Lane is a veteran Michigan business reporter whose background includes work with Crain Communications Inc., Crain’s Detroit Business and serving as Capitol correspondent for nearly 25 years. Now a freelance reporter and journalist, Lane’s work has appeared in many publications including Traverse City Business News.