Bug Tussel bond up for vote Aug. 20
By Kevin O’Brien
A major expansion of broadband internet around Marathon County is set to be completed by the end of this year, but only if the county board signs off on $12 million in additional borrowing at its meeting on Aug. 20.
Bug Tussel, the company installing fiber optic cable in a loop across the county, is asking board members to ante up on a previous financial commitment made in 2021, when the board issued $25 million in conduit bonds for 18 antenna towers and 190 miles of cable.
Under conduit bonding arrangements, Bug Tussel and its parent company, Hilbert Communications, are responsible for paying back the debt, with interest, on behalf of the county over a 30-year period. The bonds do not count against the county’s debt limit, and in the event of a default by both Bug Tussel and Hilbert, the county would take ownership of all the towers and fiber optic cable that has been installed.
Still, a few county supervisors have expressed reservations about increasing the amount of money being borrowed by roughly 50 percent and are questioning why Bug Tussel was not able to complete the project within the original $25 million budget.
At a pair of committee meetings last week, a total of four supervisors voted against motions to recommend the new bonding agreement to the full board for approval. In June, the board voted 22-11 (with five absent) to approve an initial bonding resolution, but the final resolution will require a two-thirds majority.
Scott Feldt, Bug Tussel’s director of public affairs, spoke to the Infrastructure Committee on Aug. 8 about the obstacles the company has faced when installing the fiber and towers, including factors that were “beyond our control.” The amount of thick bedrock the company’s contractor had to bore through delayed the work by three months and added $3 million in
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unexpected expenses, he noted as an example.
Feldt compared Bug Tussel’s project to other types of high-dollar infrastructure projects that result in unforeseen cost overruns.
“As a county, if you were to do a road project, and the cost were to be higher, I think it would be odd that the county would not finish the road,” he said. “Though it would cost more, you would put in the additional money to complete the project.”
Supervisor Chris Dickinson, however, challenged Feldt’s road project analogy.
“Roads are 100 percent necessary,” he said. “Broadband is not. It’s not quite the same.”
In response, Feldt said broadband is now considered by many to be the “fourth utility” – alongside water and sewer, heat and electricity. He noted that families and businesses often make decisions on where to locate based on the availability of high-speed internet.
Dickinson clarified his comparison by saying that he as a village resident in Stratford is connected to a water utility, whereas someone living a few miles out of town relies on a well, so the level of service is not always the same.
A portion of the new bonding request, about $3 million, would go toward finishing a broadband project in the Mosinee area (known as Leathercamp). Dickinson noted that the Leathercamp project was added a year after the original proposal for the fiber loop and towers.
“I’ve always been very supportive of the project,” he said. “I would like to see completion of the project that we originally agreed to.”
Despite the setbacks, Feldt said 16 towers providing wireless internet are currently live across the county and Bug Tussel’s subcontractor, Michaels, currently has six crews with 30 total workers installing cable at various locations.
Supervisor John Robinson, chair of the county’s broadband task force, spoke to his fellow supervisors about the current and future benefits produced by the county’s arrangement with Bug Tussel. These include $100,000 per year in revenue from basis points on the bonds and space on the company’s towers, which saved the county over $200,000 when it needed to relocate emergency response radio antenna from a failing DNR tower.
Bug Tussel has also rented some of its tower space to AT& T, which has improved coverage for those customers, and the county is hoping to use some of the towers near Athens and Little Chicago to cover gaps in coverage for police and fire communication, according to Gerry Klein, the county’s IT director.
“One of the benefits of constructing towers is that cellular service had improved, and there’s an opportunity to put equipment on,” Robinson said. “The focus, though, is on broadband access.”
The Wisconsin Public Service Commission has estimated that as many as 15,000 homes and businesses in Marathon County lack fast, reliable internet access, and until recently, the county had six different grant-funded broadband expansion projects in the works. However, Frontier Communications and Charter Communications have both backed out of projects due to cost concerns, leaving about 1,700 residents without future access.
In June, Bug Tussel’s attorney, Mitch Olson, said crews had laid over 200 miles of cable, and there’s about 50 miles to go between Stratford and Mosinee to complete the countywide fiber loop.
Marathon County is one of 10 counties being asked to issue conduit bonds, totaling $109 million all together, by the end of this month in order for Bug Tussel to complete broadband projects across the region.
Supervisor Randy Fifrick, chair of the Infrastructure Committee, said he agreed with Feldt on the importance of broadband internet in today’s world.
“For areas that don’t have it, there’s an economic disadvantage to those areas,” he said. “I think it is becoming as important as some of those other utilities.”
At the Aug. 7 meeting of Human Resources, Finance and Capital, supervisor Gayle Marshall wondered what would stop Bug Tussel from coming back to the county for even more money in the future.
“We’ve come to the well twice,” Feldt said in response. “You don’t come three times.”
Chris Dickinson
