Because private internet providers won’t do it themselves, Mesa County is the latest government entity that is stepping in to help bring broadband to areas of the Grand Valley that either don’t have it, or it is so slow as not to be very useful.

As a result, the Mesa County Board of Commissioners has approved a $178,000 contract to design where middle-mile fiber lines should be installed that ultimately would be connected to homes and businesses.

The contract went to Glenwood Springs-based NEO Fiber Inc., which is to design a phased-in conceptual plan on exact locations for the fiber-optic lines that would tap into already existing first-mile lines along Interstate 70, bringing them to certain central locations in select areas of the county.

From there, private internet service providers would be able to tap into those hubs to bring fast-speed broadband services directly to residential and business customers who don’t yet have it.

“A lot of these areas that we are looking at aren’t really desirable for individual broadband providers to run that middle mile in order to provide that last mile,” Laura Page, director of the county’s engineering division, told commissioners last week. “So we’re doing that conceptual plan and a budget for providing that middle-mile fiber, and then we will use that plan to then apply for grants that are available through the state and federal (governments) to help us construct those.”

The communities already targeted for the first three phases have already been identified. Clifton and Orchard Mesa are phase one, portions of the Redlands and the northwest area of Grand Junction outside of the city would be next, with Whitewater and the Loma/Mack areas in phase three.

Page said that Palisade and Collbran are in the process of doing their own studies on middle-mile projects, and are expected to start applying for grant funding soon.

An increasing amount of grant programs are available through the American Rescue Plan approved by Congress that offers funding for broadband projects. At the same time, the Colorado Broadband Deployment Board and the Colorado Department of Local Affairs have grant money available for the same thing.

Late last year, Garfield County started a $1.4 million middle-mile infrastructure project to start building its own network of fiber-optic lines largely with state grants.

The Northwest Colorado Council of Governments also started a similar project that is being built off the I-70 first-mile lines to expand services in 10 counties and 14 local communities, a project that will tie in with what Rio Blanco County had started on their own in 2014.

Clifton and Orchard Mesa are phase one, portions of the Redlands and the northwest area of Grand Junction outside of the city would be phase two, with Whitewater and the Loma/Mack areas in phase three.

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