Wyatt's World
Speaking before the Stennis Press Forum at the Capitol Club in downtown Jackson, Brandon Presley was as wound up as a preacher at a tent revival.
He wasn’t preaching about Jesus, although his 40-minute talk had plenty such references therein. Presley was preaching about bringing high-speed fiber broadband Internet to the boondocks of Mississippi – indeed, every single home.
Presley says high-speed Internet is just as important today as electricity was in the old days. He’s on a mission to make it happen. And now, thanks to Covid-19 and unprecedented federal largesse, he’s got the money to do it.
Presley is no Johnny Come Lately to the broadband cause. It’s been his cause celebre as northern district Public Service Commissioner, a post he’s been elected to four times.
If this happens, and with all the money it’s very likely it will, Presley can claim a lot of credit. It could be a springboard to become the first Democrat governor Mississippi has seen in decades. He’s got the smarts, energy and style to make it happen. It’s hard to imagine a Democrat more likely to succeed than him.
Presley can also claim credit for being just about the only politician who saw the Kemper disaster ahead of time. One can argue that without Presley at the Public Service Commission (PSEC), Mississippians would have been left to foot the six billion dollar Kemper boondoggle bill.
Saving the state six billion and bringing high speed Internet to every rural hamlet in Mississippi? If that can’t get a four-term PSC commissioner elected to higher office, then I don’t know what can.
Presley had high praise for Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hoseman and House speaker Phillip Gunn, as well as Governor Reeves. With their help and leadership, he believes the rural broadband dream will become a reality. He’s a good politician and has few enemies. He’s gone out of the way to be middle of the road. His approach should resonate the old echoes of hill country populism.
Here’s what a good politician does. He sees me in the audience and goes out of his way to give me credit for exposing Kemper. (Not that I deserve it. Bigger Pie, Kelley Williams, Ashby Foote and many others were equally involved.)
“Speaking of the press, I want to point out one guy that’s in the audience today that played a key role during a time in Mississippi that I lived through and, Wyatt, we’ve got the battle scars to prove it.
“Wyatt Emmerich, who during the time many years ago y’all may recall a little incident called the Kemper power plant. Six billion dollars later we were able to save Mississippians that money.
“The press, particularly Wyatt Emmerich with your leadership, and Ashby’s and others, but Wyatt particularly as an old newspaper guy helped to shine the light on that incident and save the ratepayers of Mississippi six billion dollars. That ain’t something to sneeze at. And those of us in government should remember consistently, consistently, that the press has a duty and we have a duty to work with you.”
Now that, my friend, is a great politician. I might add that Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter, which rack in 90 percent of all the advertising revenue that used to go to newspapers, did not lift one single finger nor employed a single reporter that had anything to do with exposing Kemper.
If you would like to reward me for the six billion I helped save Mississippi, you can send a check to Wyatt Emmerich, PO Box 16709, Jackson MS 39236.
Now, after that shameless bit of personal shilling, allow me to get back to the matter at hand.
What’s got Presley really excited is the big federal bucks now ready to spend and specifically authorized for rural broadband.
“Thanks to bipartisan leadership in Congress by our Mississippi delegation, Congressman Thompson and Senator Wicker, Mississippi stands to reap somewhere between $500 million and one billion for broadband access. Also, in the American Rescue Plan, the legislature will have $1.8 billion dollars that can go to water, sewer, broadband, pay for front line workers, tourism and hospitality industry.”
“In addition to that Section 604 of the American Rescue Plan gave a minimum of $100 million to every state for broadband access and related projects. It accelerated payments based on demographics and Mississippi ended up with $162 million there. And we’ve already been awarded $495 million from the Rural Digital Opportunity fund.
“You do the math. Somewhere around the nature of $2 billion investment is being made both privately and federal funds made available through the legislature and there’s more on the way.”
Wow! That’s a boatload of money. Rural fiber here we come.
Presley continued, “We’ve got to be sure, and I want to be emphatically clear about this, that this money does not go to repeat the mistake of the past. What are the mistakes of the past?
We’ve got carriers, big telecom companies in our state, that have taken hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy broadband into rural communities and the service has been subpar if it’s there at all.
“And in the time in which some of the big telecom companies were promising universal service for everybody for a decade, rural electric cooperatives in two years 18 out of 25 coops have a broadband subsidiary.”
“And the difference between them and the rest is this: Under the Broadband Enabling Act they’re required to go to every single home. You can’t pick and choose the nice neighborhoods and skip the rural areas.”
During his speech, Presley eloquently described how Covid-19 displayed the importance of broadband connectivity. He described seeing cars and cars of parents in Wal-Mart parking lots using the nearby WIFI so their children could do their homework.
Presley believes that rural broadband access is one of the most important economic development issues — as important as rural electricity was in the last century. He’s on a mission to make it happen and now it looks like it will succeed.
This is going to be extremely exciting for our rural state and will greatly enhance our quality of life. Life in the boondocks will now come with high speed access to all the information and entertainment in the entire world. What a long, strange trip it’s been!
Wyatt Emmerich is publisher of The Northside Sun in Jackson and owner of Emmerich Newspapers.