Meet Nick, OR
December 11, 2024
Oregon’s Long and Winding Trail to Universal Access Nick Batz’s path to Director of the Oregon Broadband Office is one of public servant meets public need. He tells broadband.io in a recent sit down that his journey was never intended to land him in the telecom world. “My professional career spans 20 years entirely in the public sector and for the majority has been political,” explains Batz. “I have worked in elected public official offices that include a state legislature, US House Representative, and US Senator.” Batz credits his time (nearly a decade) in Congressman Peter DeFazio’s office for deepening his appreciation of rural communities, “You’d see communities that were natural resource dependent for their entire history dying. These are communities I care about, communities that are a great place to raise a family, and communities that need to remain alive and thriving for the sake of Oregon’s economic health,” says Batz. Batz transitioned to the state’s economic development agency, Business Oregon, in 2016 as its legislative director. During this time the state’s broadband office was also added to Business Oregon (2019), which turned out to need a significant amount of legislative assistance for the state to be able to disperse ARPA and BEAD dollars.Batz spearheaded this effort. Once he had successfully navigated the state legislature and “cleaned up” broadband statutory language, Batz found himself in 2022 with an Oregon broadband office that needed both staff augmentation and leadership help to disburse federal funds. Fortunately for Oregon residents, Batz was ready to lead connectivity efforts. “As I was working on legislation, I became increasingly more involved in broadband and it became clear that, to me, this [leading Oregon’s broadband office] was something I wanted to do,” says Batz. With two years under his belt, Batz now has a team of a dozen dedicated employees to the “broadband cause” with another six or so contributing as shared employee resources within the Business Oregon agency. It’s Pronounced Willamette… Damnit For those of you, like me, sadly who are unfamiliar with Oregon and its geography, Batz tells me the state confronts both geographical and geological challenges to reaching the unserved and underserved. The Willamette Valley, west of the Cascade Range, stretching from Portland to just south of Eugene, is the northwest population center of the state. Batz says connectivity in this area is “pretty good” save for some rural communities outside the metro areas. “Connectivity isn't great there, but we can make some headway. I expect to see a lot of fiber in those areas,” says Batz. Approximately 1/3 of the state’s western border is the Cascade (Mountain) Range, bisecting the whole of the state and creating a very rural and sparsely populated eastern 2/3 of the state. Here you’ll find most of the state’s ~130K unserved and underserved. The Cascades have, in effect, cut off much of the state from large and traditional ISPs who haven’t expanded into the eastern part of the state which Batz describes as a diverse geography of rolling plains, prairies, forests, and mountains. “The lack of density east of the cascades is why it's going to be so expensive to reach all of the unserved and underserved locations in the state.” Oregon’s rural communities aren’t different from many as they struggle to remain viable by bringing kids home after college. Recently, that’s been hard to do as job opportunities are scarce. More specifically, Batz explains that the shutdown of timber mills was the first domino in making it difficult for young adults to return home to economically struggling communities. “Broadband can transform what these communities look like,” says Batz. “You are no longer required to live in Portland to have a tech job. You will be able to telework… I telework. I can do my job where I want to live because I have a good, reliable, high-speed broadband connection.” An ARPA Rose Garden With Batz himself starting only two years ago post-legislative change, the state is behind other states because of the late start. Batz explains, “We were the last state to get ARPA CPF approved by Treasury because our statutory issues took a while to get fixed.” Oregon has $156.8 million in ARPA/CPF funding, being rolled out now with one tranche announced in November and the remainder slated for December. Oregon has dubbed the ARPA rollout the “Broadband Deployment Program” (BDP) with all funds going to infrastructure. Last month, 16 fiber awards/projects were announced, totaling $132.9 million. The investment will cover ~12,000 locations, 95% of which are currently unserved rural communities. Batz and his team are trying to get these awards out the door both because they want to connect residents as quickly as possible and because they’re a little behind the eight ball of a looming end-of-2026 deadline. “The deadline is right around the corner. I feel like I'm going to blink, wake up, and it's going to be the end of 2026.” Batz tells me that at first, a few carriers said they would not participate in ARPA because the program was ‘too restrictive.’ He laughs as he reports that “BDP received 63 applications that totaled $440 million. The overwhelming interest is indicative that there will be plenty of BEAD applicants, ‘restrictive program’ or not.” Initial ARPA awards provided extra points for carriers that included a low-cost option. While it wasn’t a requirement, half the first tranche of awardees will offer service for at least five years at $30/month for 100 Mbps symmetrical.Finally, the unserved and underserved numbers in the state are a bit of a moving target. When version four of the FCC’s fabric came out earlier this year, it took some Broadband Serviceable Locations (BSLs) eligible for funds off the map, resulting in the not-so-popular reduction in awarded funds. BEAD or Mt. Hood – Which is a Steeper Challenge?Oregon was allocated $688.9 million in BEAD dollars, an amount Batz says “will not be enough to reach all its BSLs with fiber, let alone have some nondeployments funds many states are ending up with. It will be a stretch to get everyone covered.”The state’s BEAD Initial Proposal Volume 2 was approved in early June, starting a 365-day window that Batz isn’t shy about saying Oregon won’t be able to meet. “Part of the challenge in this job right now is trying to stand up the ARPA program and BEAD concurrently and all the fun that entails,” jokes Batz. Six months from the state’s current BEAD final proposal deadline, Oregon is awaiting final BSL/challenge numbers. “I knew a year ago, in looking at the timeline for BEAD and the timeline for our ARPA CPF program, that they were going to intersect right around the time we were running the BEAD challenge process.” Batz says that he informed the NTIA, and while they were understanding, they did not commit to an extension. Oregon’s goal is to dedupe the ARPA-CPF funded locations from the BEAD challenge results before moving into pre-qualification and subgrantee selection. Batz is optimistic and hopeful that the state will be granted a waiver for the 365-day deadline.In the meantime, Oregon is currently onboarding a grant management solution platform for the subgrantee portal and to start the pre-qualification process. Slated to launch by end of year, 100 days of prequalification will wrap up in March. “Meanwhile, we're using this longer runway into the program to get as much technical assistance and education to prospective BEAD applicants that we can,” explains Batz.The first round of two subgrantee application portals is targeted to begin in March; round one of what Batz anticipates will be two rounds. Project areas are split by school districts, nearly 200 in all. He anticipates that many of the 63 BDP applicants will also apply for BEAD funds. While Batz thinks a more realistic finish line is to turn in a final proposal by the end of 2025, he will do everything he can to get through the process quicker. “The goal of the BEAD program is 100% connectivity. And if we need to take longer to get there, we need to take longer to get there,” says Batz. Oregon Native, World Traveler Nick lives in Bend with his wife and two daughters. In his off time, he and his family take their camper van throughout Oregon and western states to explore national parks. Most recently, he and his family spent 2 weeks at Glacier National Park. The first member of his family to go to college and receive an undergraduate degree, Batz applied his love for travel, the rising economic power of China, and the fact that a history degree was not the key to a good job, to his next life adventure. Batz left for graduate school in Australia for Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne. “It was either law school or graduate school, so I chose graduate school and to study abroad. It just sounded like something that would be a fun adventure, and it turned out to be exactly that.”I asked Batz to pin down his favorite destination of the myriad he has traveled to, and he recommends the southern islands in Thailand. Batz pinpoints his ‘why’ and motivation to tackle such a challenging position, “The challenges of the job keep me awake at night, but the work that I'm doing allows me to sleep like a baby. I like to solve problems, which is probably why I ended up in public service.”“For the first time in my career, I’m focused on one thing: broadband,” says Batz. “Universal connectivity is a huge problem to solve and will require everyone working together to make it a reality. And, like I said, I like solving problems.”Batz summarizes that “this is life changing work, being able to give thousands of Oregonians the connectivity they need to thrive.”
