Sharon misses out on broadband reimbursement grant, again

SHARON — Sharon has once again been largely left out of a sizable pool of state funding meant to further develop Connecticut’s internet infrastructure.

The office of Governor Ned Lamont announced on Tuesday, April 22, that the second round of funding — totaling $10 million — from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s ConneCTed Communities Grant Program had been allocated. Internet service providers Comcast and Frontier Communications will use the funds to bolster broadband connection at 3,802 residences and businesses across 44 municipalities.

The following day, the Sharon Connect Task Force issued a release stating that the town’s application to reimburse $1.2 million of the $1.6 million it spent on a 2023-24 campaign to bring broadband to every underserved residents in town had again been denied.

Jill Drew, who serves as co-chair of the all-volunteer Task Force, said that this denial was largely due to a technicality that wasn’t apparent when the town applied for the grant.

DEEP upheld that the town failed to adequately document that the service it built out in contract with Comcast in the 2023-24 project meets the minimum 100 mbps download/100 mbps upload speed that the state requires to qualify for funding.

In a previous application, Sharon was denied because DEEP claimed it would not reimburse projects that had already been extensively built out, though eventually allowed the town to reapply after the Task Force protested Sharon’s exclusion.

Drew explained that because the town contracted directly with Comcast, the ISP had control over which service to advertise in town. Drew said that she and others involved assumed it would be the same level of service it would implement with state money, but never received written proof that it would be above the 100/100 standard.

“It’s so frustrating because we led the way in getting people who were unconnected connected,” she said. “It’s just this one benchmark where we did not provide sufficient proof that we met it, so now we don’t get anything.”

Drew said her qualm is not with Comcast: “They did more than they promised at the beginning, and they didn’t charge us any more.” Plus, she said, residents are satisfied with the service.

“The state just felt that we didn’t provide enough proof.”

Drew said that the Task Force has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see how Comcast is building out elsewhere with state funding. She also contacted the ISP directly but has yet to receive a response.

Drew said that while the work has already been done, the lack of reimbursement means funds that could have been allocated towards other important capital projects will not be coming back to the town. While the news is discouraging, she said, she is grateful that the town “ponied up for its residents” when it did to get everyone connected.

“We and Sharon did this for our neighbors.”

While the town is out of luck with Comcast for the time being, Sharon did end up on the receiving end of another ConneCTed Communities Grant allocated to Frontier to lay fiber optic in town. The ISP was assigned $5,076,560 to install cables in Sharon and several other Northwest Corner towns, including Cornwall, Warren and Litchfield.

While Drew was frustrated that Frontier received funds to essentially build over the connections laid by Comcast in 2023 and 2024, she welcomed the benefit that competition would bring to Sharon residents.

Frontier, though, can pick and choose certain houses and neighborhoods to service, which was never the Task Force’s plan for Sharon, Drew said.

“That wasn’t how we set up our project. We were doing it so everybody would have access.”