Rep. Joel Kretz delivers floor speech in favor of frontier counties legislation (House Bill 1835)

this is an idea we've been playing with for a few years and uh it it kind of came out of some of my frustration on when we're trying to reach the most remote uh parts of the state with uh funding or programs this and that and we've been using the the term rural for many years and it's just not tight enough of a definition uh you know it can range from uh 100 people per square mile uh down to a place like Ferry County where there's 3.3 people per square mile and they're all on the same playing field uh what this does is narrow the definitions down to Frontier 2 which is uh 50 people or less and Frontier 1 which is 20 people or less which uh it gives us more of a surgical ability to Target specific areas uh part of the frustration was uh you we were talking about uh uh getting the whole state connected on the internet and uh we've tried different ways of doing that you know we've got a lot of the Broadband fight fiber uh but we're always talking about the first mile set and the last mile is something that we've never figured out a way to get to uh and we had some work with with low orbit satellites which is appropriate uh out in the most remote parts uh but we weren't able to to Target a definition tighten enough and you know there's no real reason to use that technology uh in an area where there's already fiber but the frustration of not being able to get that out uh in areas that are really under served uh low income generally a lot of tribal folk that that just don't have any options and I think uh in the future this will give us uh a much better method of getting money out to uh some of our most underserved communities in the state appreciate your support