Rural areas to receive $759 million in grants for high-speed internet - PBS NewsHour

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The Agriculture Department announced Thursday it is making disposable $759 cardinal successful grants and loans to alteration agrarian communities to access high-speed internet, portion of the broader $65 cardinal propulsion for high-speed connectivity from past year’s infrastructure law.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and White House elder adviser Mitch Landrieu unveiled the grants during a sojourn to North Carolina.

There are 49 recipients successful 24 states. One is North Carolina’s AccessOn Networks, which volition person $17.5 cardinal to supply broadband work to 100 businesses, 76 farms and 22 acquisition facilities successful the state’s Halifax and Warren counties. Both counties are agrarian and person predominantly Black populations.

“Rural America needs this,” Vilsack said. “Rural America deserves this.” He made the announcement successful beforehand of John Deere equipment, noting that agrarian areas thin to beryllium wherever the energy for cities is generated and wherever metropolis dwellers and suburbanites spell for vacations.

The announcement and sojourn to North Carolina, a authorities with an unfastened U.S. Senate seat, travel arsenic President Joe Biden and different apical Democratic officials are trying to merchantability their achievements to voters before the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Landrieu, the infrastructure coordinator and erstwhile New Orleans mayor, told reporters connected a Wednesday telephone that the Biden medication has already released $180 cardinal for assorted infrastructure projects.

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The medication is specifically targeting enactment for tiny towns and workplace communities, places that mostly favour Republicans implicit Democrats.

“Rural communities are the backbone of our nation, but for excessively agelong they’ve been near down and they person been underrecognized,” Landrieu said. “We each cognize however indispensable the net is successful bid to entree lifesaving telemedicine, to pat into economical opportunity, to link with loved ones, to enactment connected precision agriculture and truthful overmuch more. That’s conscionable beyond unacceptable that that’s not disposable to agrarian America.”

Vilsack said helium and Landrieu would “learn firsthand” from radical successful North Carolina astir the opportunities net entree tin create. They met with authorities and section officials including North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper astatine Wake Technical Community College. They volition besides clasp a municipality hallway successful Elm City.

Cooper attributed the broadband advances to the pandemic shutdowns that made radical much reliant connected the internet.

“It tossed america into the aboriginal by astir a decennary — we had to marque thing bully retired of thing bad,” helium said. He added that 1 cardinal of the state’s residents person been connected the incorrect broadside of the integer divide, thing the build-out volition assistance to correct.

Neither campaigner successful North Carolina’s U.S. Senate contention — Democrat Cheri Beasley and Republican Ted Budd — was slated to look astatine the events.

Vilsack said that past trips amusement however broadband connectivity is starting to marque a difference. While successful Nevada this summer, helium heard from radical successful the municipality of Lovelock who program to usage the improved net to heighten their exigency responder services and tourism opportunities arsenic good arsenic assistance precocious schoolhouse students who are earning assemblage recognition online.