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SEMO Electric awarded $16.6M grant to expand its fiber services
SIKESTON — Over $16 million has been awarded to SEMO Electric Cooperative to improve internet access in rural southeast Missouri.
As part of the $261 million Broadband Infrastructure Grant Program of the Missouri Department of Economic Development, or DED, SEMO Electric Cooperative has been given $16.6 million.
On Monday, March 20, the Missouri Broadband Office director and team had their official award announcement and luncheon at their cooperative headquarters in Sikeston.
SEMO Electric is one of 60 recipients of the competitive grant process. Three broadband grants have been given to SEMO Electric Cooperative to help them expand their services in rural Southeast Missouri.
SEMO Electric will use the money to bring fiber-to-the-premise internet to parts of Stoddard and Butler counties.
Loyd Rice, who is the senior manager of fiber services at SEMO Electric, introduced the people who spoke at the awards ceremony. Among those was Peter Coutavas, who is the director of the Industrial Development Authority of Stoddard County.
Coutavas father was a Greek immigrant; nonetheless, he said, he has lived in Southeast Missouri for almost 20 years and likes it.
“I’m in my element down here; I love the people, and it’s just a wonderful place to be, except for the internet service,” Coutavas said as the guests giggled. “It is the worst service I have ever seen that you can get from AT&T.”
Coutavas ended by saying he is excited to see this project go through in the rural areas of Stoddard and Butler counties.
Rice then introduced Missouri Director of Broadband Development BJ Tanksley.
“You know, we say it all the time at the office of broadband, but we want to do these things so people can live where they want to live without having to worry about what services are available,” Tanksley said. “You know it’s one thing to bring service to the next highly populated area, but that’s not what we’re doing here; we are truly bringing service to places that otherwise wouldn’t be served.”
SEMO Electric currently provides fiber broadband services with more than 1,800 miles of fiber to some 8,450 homes, businesses, farms, churches, and schools in their service territory. This equals 12,000 total services, which include fiber internet, telephone, and television.
Chief Executive Officer of SEMO Electric Sean Vanslyke closed the celebration with a speech.
“Imagine for a moment that you ask your board of directors to invest $40 to $60 million,” Vanslyke said. “Back in March 2017, the board of directors met—12 directors and myself in a room. We made this decision, and one person was a holdout, and they finally said, ‘I’ll go with it because I have faith in the team.’ And we all stood up at that time, and we gathered around our board table, gathered hands and we prayed over this project.”
Vanslyke went on to say how this is a major deal for them and how the board took the risk for this project.
“The No. 1 question I get when I travel and speak all over the country is this: ‘Why aren’t other cooperatives doing it?’” Vanslyke said. “It takes courage, it takes risk, and it’s really a lot of hard work. We’re doing two businesses now with basically the same group of people we had when we started.”
Vanslyke continued by saying when he travels, there are people who ask for money for internet fiber while carrying a piece of it in his hands to show the size of it.
“Now when I tell people this is the fiber, the size of horse hair, and you can feed 32 homes with all those fibers.” Vanslyke said. “And the first time we went to Washington to meet, they had never seen fiber, and they asked if they could keep my sample.
He continued: “There are people out there asking for legislation, for money, for laws or whatever, but they didn’t know what they were talking about, and back in 2017, we didn’t either, but I’m so proud I’m ‘team SEMO’ because we didn’t go out and hire somebody to build it; we built it internally.”
GoSEMO officially began connecting fiber users in 2018. The cooperative’s fiber affiliate, GoSEMO Fiber (gosemofiber.com), now provides the services through three local offices in Bloomfield, Advance and the main campus in Sikeston.
Vanslyke explained they needed to continue helping Tanksley and thanked him.
The grants cover three unique project locations, with construction planned to begin in late 2024 and completion due in late 2024. With the funds, approximately 2,081 residences and small companies will now have access to 440 kilometers of fiber network. By the end of next year, the installation should be complete.