By CHARLES H. FEATHERSTONE

Staff Writer

RITZVILLE — Adams County set up a task force to see what it would take to get the entire county wired for broadband internet.

The Adams County Broadband Action Team, made up of private citizens and government officials from across the county, met online for the first time Thursday with Russ Elliott, the director of the Washington State Broadband Office, part of the state’s Department of Commerce.

Team members said the poor quality of the internet in much of Adams County is limiting the ability of students to learn during the COVID-19 pandemic, inhibiting economic growth, and, if updated, could invite more tech workers tired of urban rat races to relocate to small towns.

“I have a degree in computer science, and did 10 years in IT consulting, and I want to be able to have more monitors and probes (in my fields) and connectivity to the outside world,” said Brian Baumann, a wheat farmer near Washtucna.

“People are able to work from home as long as they have a reliable connection, and Washtucna could be a great place for remote workers if infrastructure was in place,” Baumann added.

Elliott said in his previous experience improving high-speed, broadband Internet access in rural eastern Colorado, northern New Mexico, Wyoming and the Spokane Tribe Reservation, the demand for data-intensive high-tech agriculture drove much of the infrastructure work.

“There’s more data coming out of those farms than anyone can imagine,” he said.

Elliott said Washington state is committed to ensuring everyone in the state, no matter where they live, can access the internet at speeds of 150 million bits per second (mbps) by 2028.

According to the Commerce Department’s broadband website, current download speeds in much of rural Adams County are around 7 mbps, though they can be much lower in very rural locations.

That increase can only be achieved, Elliott said, by installing new fiber optic cables, not just in towns, but out in the country. And that infrastructure needs to consider the bandwidth that may be taken in future years by uses no one has thought of yet.

“We need infrastructure that can last, and not just patch a network,” he said. “It’s the most aggressive goal in the country.”

“Networks today were not built for uses today,” he added.

Doing that, however, requires money, and Elliott expects “more money coming down the pike than we will ever see” from both Congress and the state legislature for broadband projects across the country.

So the team’s goal should be to identify gaps in current internet provision across the sprawling, but sparsely-populated county, develop plans to address those gaps, turn them into “shovel-ready projects” that can apply for and spend that money, Elliott said.

“If we’re going to bring new industry into Adams County, we’ll need to improve our broadband,” said former Adams County Commissioner John Marshall. “It’s real important to us every day and important to Adams County to grow.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.