New broadband infrastructure will now be exempt from property taxes in much of Marshall County.
The county commissioners agreed Tuesday to designate all unincorporated areas in the county an infrastructure development zone.
The designation was made at the request of Marshall County REMC. The cooperative is teaming up with Rochester Telephone to bring broadband to the under-served areas of the county, according to REMC attorney David Fortin.
“It’s a very expensive and time-consuming pursuit to get broadband out in the county, so anything we can find like this would help us a lot,” he said. “The REMC initial investment in the broadband is about $10 million, so the benefit to us in this in property tax savings would be about $25,000 a year initially.”
Marshall County REMC CEO Mark Batman said that while that might not seem like a large cost savings for such a large project, it would take 35 fiber members to raise that amount in revenue. “We serve about seven members a mile,” he explained. “That’s about five miles of line in a $10 million build-out that you’re paying a tax on, that you’re not really collecting revenue to build.”
Batman added that Marshall County REMC has gotten about $1.2 million in grant funding from the FCC, but many of the other broadband grant opportunities are out of reach for this project.
“This first build-out we’re talking about in the Bourbon area is about 400 homes there,” he said. “We’re doing much bigger than that because you’ve got this little plot, you have to kind of, like you do with the electric grid, plan the whole, how you’re going to get to those 400. There are other census blocks to our west that we have. Those are really under-served. Those are the ones the FCC has isolated, saying nobody’s serving with anything or they can’t get anything.”
The tax exemption would be available not only to Marshall County REMC, but to any entity looking to build broadband infrastructure. County Attorney Jim Clevenger added that infrastructure development zones could also be used for water and gas lines, but this one will only apply to broadband.
The commissioners voted to suspend the rules and pass the infrastructure development zone designation ordinance on all three readings.
They also approved an initial list of 24 directional bores to take place under county roads as part of the project. Highway Superintendent Jason Peters said another round of bores will be requested in the future.
