MONTICELLO — With the new Sullivan County Jail being built, an emergency communications tower was erected near the site in the Town of Thompson. Using the tower, the Information Technology Services (ITS) Department will spearhead an initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to the surrounding area.

According to Lorne Green, Chief Information Officer with ITS, the tower is able to transmit a signal to reach approximately four miles in every direction. This would bring Internet access to the Village of Monticello, which Green estimates would provide potential service to 6,253 households and businesses.

The county has been working on this project for several months, and the Monticello tower will go online soon. After that, if the project is successful, they hope to expand the towers and service areas. They could then hand it off to another entity to run the project, perhaps forming a non-profit agency with a board of directors.

“We needed to provide some kind of communications ability,” Green told the county legislators at the Budget Committee meeting at the Government Center on Tuesday. That's how the project got started. In the event of a storm or other power outage (like the snowstorm last March), emergency services need to be able to communicate with each other.

Realizing the potential to not just help emergency communications but serve the community at large, the county took on the project.

It will be funded through grants and the county budget, which set aside $200,000 for the project in 2019. County Manager Josh Potosek said they hope to get a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, because the project will create jobs.

“The lack of reliably fast Internet access in certain areas of the County has hampered our growth both residentially and commercially,” Potosek said. “To be competitive and attractive to the next generation of residents and entrepreneurs, we have to invest in our communications infrastructure, especially when private companies are unwilling or unable to do so for us.”

If the Monticello pilot project is successful, ITS is able to use the same technology to provide wireless Internet to residents. For instance, they hope to expand the project to the Delaware River corridor, which is basically a dead zone for service.

Anyone can sign up using a low-cost subscription service. Potosek said the rates will be competitive and at a lower cost than existing high-speed Internet providers, which currently is mostly dominated by Spectrum.

In addition, wireless technology can be used in other modalities, Green said, such as public transportation.

The legislators commended the project and gave it their full support to move forward.

“For years now this discussion has been ongoing,” Legislator Ira Steingart said. “I think it's great that the county is taking the initiative to do it when we reached out to the state and federal [governments] and get a lot of promises but nothing's been done.”

Green agreed. “The county has its own communication needs, which is really the baseline for why this is happening,” he said. “But the extended benefit to the community and the public at large is going to be huge.”