Meet Angie Bailey, NC
October 23, 2024
It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon in North Carolina Angie Bailey has been doing this for a long time. In fact, I’m not sure what she would do with herself if there weren’t rural broadband issues in her state that needed her attention. More than two decades after joining North Carolina’s efforts to reach rural areas with better broadband, Bailey and her team operate within the state’s Department of Information Technology in Raleigh. Several of the broadband office’s employees work remotely, which Baily loves because it brings diverse geographic perspectives. Bailey joined North Carolina’s Rural Internet Access Authority in 2001 which eventually evolved into the broadband office she heads. Her official title is director of the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office.“North Carolina has the second largest rural population in the country,” reports Bailey. “This makes broadband connectivity a big challenge in our state. Broadband providers have to be able to make the business case to build to sparsely populated areas.” More specifically, North Carolina, even if current investments knock locations off the map, will have more than 400,000 Broadband Serviceable Locations (BSLs) (~263,000 Unserved, ~147,000 Underserved) that will need to be reached. Fortunately, the state is receiving $1.53 billion in BEAD dollars. “People have to have access, there's no question about that,” says Bailey. “But it takes public funding to achieve that as it's not going to happen on its own.”Investment: Earlier than MostAfter speaking with nearly 30 states, it’s clear that unlike others, North Carolina has been investing in the connectivity problem since well before the pandemic made everyone realize that broadband is kind of important. “In 2018, the first program investing in broadband called GREAT (an apt acronym that stands for Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology) began with $15 million in state funds being allocated yearly. “And at the time, we thought that was a lot of money!” Bailey reports that many of the pre-2020 awards were five-year projects so many are just now finishing up.With the pandemic came American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA funds), CPF and SLFRF, and North Carolina’s legislature appropriated $1 billion for broadband infrastructure programs in November 2021.Bailey says that one program predating ARPA, the GREAT program, helped prepare her office for appropriations. “I think we already had an understanding in the state of why broadband is so important,” says Bailey. “Then we had a global pandemic, and policy leaders recognized the need and worked quickly to make funding available for necessary investments.” With the addition of ARPA funds, the state has now incorporated GREAT as one of four separate programs, including: GREAT for last-mile infrastructure builds. Scoring was based on locations and costs. CAB (Completing Access to Broadband) program which focuses on a partnership with counties to help develop and fund last mile projects. Counties have contributed funding to supplement the investment(s). There is still $283 million in CAB funds remaining to be awarded before the end of the year.StopGap is a line extension program to help cover hard-to-reach locations within small pockets. Pole Replacement where telecom providers apply for reimbursement of expenses paid to pole owners for replacement of utility poles when needed. Bailey says that both GREAT and CAB have had a good response as applicants have been able to choose the area(s) they will serve.The Elephant (Hurricane) in the Room Fast-forward to this year and I asked Bailey about Hurricane Helene, which hit the state extremely hard. This is thought to include significant damage to the state’s broadband infrastructure. Bailey says that Hurricane Helene will likely make a significant dent in the state's broadband coverage and changes in the state map, particularly in the many hard hit western counties, but she is waiting for official assessments. Many impacted areas are dealing with much more immediate issues like clean water, roads, electricity, and locating employees to ensure their safety. “We need to give the providers time to dig into exactly where the real impacts are. It is hard to think about getting to 100% access when you don't even really know what the underlying availability is post-storm.”She acknowledges the (new) challenges facing her state, but she isn’t looking for any excuses. “At a high-level, lots of different things happen all the time that may not be anticipated with our projects, including natural disasters. None of this is static.” Bailey reports that North Carolina may allocate funding that’s specific for broadband recovery needs. One challenge, either here or in the federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is that in rural, mountainous areas there are less roads that help facilitate fiber outlays.But is $1.53 billion enough to deliver the goal of universal access? “Our initial, pre-hurricane estimate was that we can reach most of our locations with fiber and still have money left over for non-deployment funds,” said Bailey. “The unknown now is how the hurricane impacts our estimates and BSLs needing service.”BEAD’s Just the Next (Biggest) StepBailey feels good about the relationships her broadband office has forged with the large and small carriers (including coops) in the state in anticipating potential BEAD subgrantee applications. “We've worked with these providers, many for more than two decades,” says Bailey. “The relationships we’ve built will be really important in being able to kind of jump into BEAD quickly.”With the additional hoops and regulations associated with BEAD, she’s less confident in the potential subgrantee applicant response level and does “…worry that BEAD is going to be cumbersome for some providers and I’m a little concerned about getting enough participants. We have to make the programs doable from a provider perspective. We [states] don't provide broadband service, so this all needs to happen as a partnership with our providers.”As the state approaches opening its subgrantee portal in 2025, Bailey is still fielding needed project area feedback from carriers. The plan now is for North Carolina to have nearly 30,000 hexagon-shaped, 2 square mile areas eligible to bid. “I think that with BEAD it is important to let broadband providers have some say in the project areas they're developing.”As an aside, Bailey applauds the federal government changing their measurement for universal access from census blocks to BSLs. In the past, if only one location in a census block was served, the whole block was considered served. “We wouldn’t be able to make these investments without the granular mapping available today from the FCC.”Tick Tock While ARPA dollars have taken 3 full years to completely be distributed, Bailey and her team have 365-days from October 10 to allocate every round of BEAD and its $1.53 billion. On the plus side, Bailey says that while she’s been running with four programs (mentioned above) for ARPA, at least BEAD is a single program design.On the other hand, she sounds like she was skeptical even before Hurricane Helene hit the western half of her state. “I think that 365-days to run a grant program and award to all 100% of locations is just not enough time to do it well. This is a once in a lifetime amount of funding, at least for our state, and it must be done correctly. I know people need this money for connectivity, but it takes time to get it done right.”North Carolina is also assessing the success of ARPA programs before it rushes BEAD as Bailey pushes back on the notion that the programs can run simultaneously. With the subgrantee portal not opening until 2025, the amount of investment and the short timeline have led Bailey to report that “North Carolina is in conversations with the NTIA about the (365-day) timeline.”Take Me to (Broadband) Church Bailey has spent most of her life in North Carolina, much of it working in rural broadband. She’s an outlier in a world of ‘newbies’ that have taken their respective state’s broadband reigns during the last 3-5 years. She said that her drive to improve the state’s broadband connectivity was boosted when she spent some time in Silicon Valley in the late 90s. “When I moved back to North Carolina, it was clear to me that we need broadband infrastructure here.”She loves her state and seems to have an insatiable need to get folks connected. “We have to connect everyone so each individual in the state can be economically stable and successful.” When asked to reflect on what she’s most gratified with recently as the broadband director, she gives praise to her team “…what I'm proudest of is the team that we have, all dedicated to the mission of connectivity. It's a huge amount of work, so we need devoted people that want to be here doing this work and have faith in our mission to bring broadband to all North Carolinians .” It’s clearly Bailey’s life’s work to connect North Carolina. It’s fantastic that she now has a dedicated ‘flock’ and full ‘coffers’ to make that happen.
