Coronavirus highlighted SC’s broadband problem. Leaders are under pressure to fix it
Achieving a longtime bipartisan priority for South Carolina elected officials — securing federal funding to provide more reliable internet access in remote rural areas across the state — is taking on new urgency amid the coronavirus crisis.
And with lawmakers in Washington, D.C., turning to negotiations on the next, massive funding bill to help people and the economy withstand the burden of the pandemic, pressure is building on members of the S.C. congressional delegation to fight for more money for rural broadband deployment as a part of that effort.
Lou Kennedy, the CEO of Columbia’s Nephron Pharmaceuticals and an active donor to Republicans statewide and nationally, is using her clout to urge delegation members to take this fight directly to Capitol Hill.
“I ask for your support for expanded rural broadband access as a part of any additional legislation the Congress considers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” she wrote lawmakers in an April 14 letter.
Swati Patel said the S.C. Chamber of Commerce — where she is executive vice president for public policy, affiliates and of counsel — will “in the days ahead” be reaching out to the congressional delegation to underscore the importance of more federal funding for broadband expansion.
“I think you’ll see a lot of support for that,” she predicted. “In terms of timing, I definitely think there’s an urgency there.”
So far, there is wide consensus across the delegation that this is something worth fighting for on Capitol Hill, as stay-at-home orders have hampered thousands of students’ ability to do schoolwork, prevented ill patients from taking advantage of telemedicine and stymied small business-owners looking to launch online sales.
In South Carolina, nearly half a million residents have little to no broadband access, according to recent data from the Federal Communications Commission. Of these residents, 94% of them live in rural areas, and 160,655 of them are without internet entirely.
Only a fraction of S.C. school districts have been able to convert fully to online learning in the pandemic, leaving many students with only a paper and pencil option.
There have been statewide efforts to expand broadband and woo providers into underserved areas. S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster proposed a $574,913 expansion of rural broadband in his latest executive budget. South Carolina has in recent years been the recipient of several grants from the FCC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Patel.
It’s also an issue that has united South Carolina lawmakers on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Conservative Republican U.S. Reps. Jeff Duncan of Laurens and Joe Wilson of Aiken are pledging to work with U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the state’s most influential Democrat and longtime champion of the expanding broadband and building political support for it.
Clyburn, who Kennedy and Patel both cite as the elected official who first brought the issue to their attention last year, recently told The State that broadband funding has to be a part of the next phase of legislative coronavirus relief.
“This crisis has revealed some faults in our system and this is an opportunity to repair those faults,” said Clyburn. “We are not going to have a delivery of health care in this country if we don’t have broadband deployment ... what happens with those students who are not connected to the internet, who are not online? They are going to suffer permanently because the ones who are online are the ones who are going to move on, graduate, pass the test.”
Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior Republican U.S. senator who grew up in rural Central, said in a local TV interview Tuesday that he, too, wanted broadband expansion to be part of any future coronavirus response package.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from North Charleston, understands that “COVID-19 has shined a light on how important it is for everyone from students to seniors to have access to reliable internet services,” said his spokesman, Sean Smith.
Gov. McMaster, a Republican, is cheering the delegation on.
“Governor McMaster has long fought to expand broadband to the state’s rural areas, and whether it comes in the form of coronavirus relief or through some other avenue, he will celebrate it and be grateful to South Carolina’s federal delegation that has worked so hard to make it a reality,” said McMaster’s spokesman, Brian Symmes, in a statement.
‘Down the road’
Still, there is no guarantee that the delegation’s unity will be a match for the political realities on Capitol Hill, with South Carolina lawmakers also vulnerable to fall into the trap.
In the Democrat-controlled U.S. House, it’s likely Clyburn will be successful in securing funding to expand broadband in rural areas around the country if infrastructure investments are on the negotiating table.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, has waffled on when Congress should consider big-ticket infrastructure items, saying at one point they must be included in the next phase of pandemic relief but then signaling something like broadband could be punted to a later bill. Clyburn will have to decide how to hard he can push Pelosi and other party leaders.
Republicans in both chambers of Congress, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of seeking to use the pandemic to advance policy priorities critics say are unrelated to the current health crisis.
GOP leaders have set particular sights on Clyburn as an example of a lawmaker who is putting his own ideological wish list ahead of more pressing needs, referring back to a comment he made in a members-only conference call that the crisis was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
In this environment, it will be up to Republicans to make the case that additional funding for rural broadband expansion is, in fact, directly tied to the health crisis at hand. It’s not clear if they will have the leverage, or be willing to expend the political capital, to convince their leadership of that fact.
Graham said specifically this week that he would advocate for expanded broadband funding in the next phase of coronavirus relief legislation.
Scott “intends to advocate for significant increases in federal investment” in broadband deployment “as the Senate negotiates future relief packages,” though his office did not elaborate on a timetable.
Duncan said in a statement to The State that “rural broadband is an important goal” that should be “a prime candidate for inclusion in a late-stage, economic recovery and infrastructure package sometime down the road.”
There’s no way to predict what “down the road” might mean for a legislative body that is still working remotely, with plans to return to Washington still in flux and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., now warning members that he is hesitant to spend more federal dollars on the crisis in rapid succession that has already received upwards of $2 trillion.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, the lack of reliable internet access is reverberating across the state in new, profound ways.
With schools shuttered but distance learning in effect, students who live in “dead zones” and need to complete their homework are driving their cars to parking lots to pick up internet signals from local fast food restaurants or “wi-fi busses” that have been deployed around the state.
According to the state Department of Education, only 19 of the state’s 79 school districts was able to fully transition learning online, while 45 more were able to enact a hybrid form of learning — online and paper packets — and 17 could not implement any virtual learning.
The state’s ability to respond to health needs during the pandemic also has been burdened by a lack of broadband access.
Between stay-at-home orders and doctors’ offices closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — and hospitals overrun with COVID-19 cases — telehealth has become crucial for patients who need medical advice, diagnoses and treatments.
But patients who don’t have internet access can’t take advantage of the services. That’s bad for patients, of course, said James McElligott, a pediatrician and executive medical director for the Medical University of South Carolina’s Center for Telehealth.
“This is a backup plan that’s working for a lot of people — jumping on video to do their doctors’ visits — but places that are known deserts for broadband availability, there is no way they have access and they are often people who have historically had worse health outcomes and access,” he explained.
It’s also bad for hospitals that need revenue now from patient visits, McElligott continued. Elective surgeries have been canceled across the country and the volume of in-person appointments has dropped substantially. Hospitals are laying off employees at a time when the pandemic necessitates full staffing and highest levels of care.
“MUSC has had to furlough a lot of people and cut a lot of hours,” he said. “If there’s no revenue, there’s no work, and there is nothing that a health system can do.”
Kennedy, meanwhile, said she was hopeful that South Carolina lawmakers would not make the exercise a partisan one.
“I’m concerned when anybody says anything against a child having the right to learn using the internet,” she told The State. “I want this to be completely out of the realm of, ‘is it an R thing or a D thing.’ This is a child thing. This is a patient thing.
“And yes,” she added, “every bill that comes out of Washington has something unrelated in it.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Coronavirus highlighted SC’s broadband problem. Leaders are under pressure to fix it."
