The Iowa House is looking to consider a bill that Governor Kim Reynolds introduced to connect more Iowans to the internet.

House District 20 Representative Ray Sorensen tells Raccoon Valley Radio the broadband bill establishes targeted areas, with the most critical labeled as tier one. Sorensen notes these areas have a 25 megabytes per second upload and three megabytes per second download speeds. He points out the governor proposed a 100mbps/100mbps speed to access grant funds, which they reduced in the bill. 

“We wanted to allow some other technologies to the table, like fixed wireless and things like that, that could reach some of those harder to reach places. So we dropped the upload speed for 20-percent of those grants to 20 megabytes per second.”

Sorensen says the bill allows increasing the grant match percentage to 75-percent to incentivize technology companies to serve those tier one locations. He talks about another part of the bill that would put these grants into effect immediately if the bill becomes law.

“We wanted to get the OCIO, which is the Office of the Chief Information Officer emergency rulemaking authority, so these dollars would get out as soon as possible. We intentionally use language for transparency. We didn’t want them to just have over-reaching rulemaking authority.”

Sorensen adds because this bill is in appropriations, it can remain a viable bill for the rest of the legislative session.