At Monday’s meeting of the Ellsworth County commissioners, Allison Koch of H&B Communications gave a brief explanation on plans for broadband in the county.

Koch said new funds have been announced at the state level. Kansas will receive $83 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for broadband build out.

“There will be more, but this is specific to a capital project fund,” she said, adding the goal of the fund is to create fiber broadband.

The maximum award of the grant is $10 million. She anticipates the recipients will be announced in mid-September to early November.

The grant has a required match calculated on a sliding scale between 87 percent and 5 percent based on the cost per location passed.

“Based on our low population density, we anticipate anything being proposed would be down towards a lower percentage match just based on the fact that we don’t have a ton of locations that we will be passing,” Koch said.

Koch said this is much more generous than a lot of the grant programs H&B has seen.

“We’re planning to be pretty aggressive in how we pursue that,” she said.

The grant application has to be submitted by Aug. 19.

“There is a lot we have to put together in order to proceed with this,” Koch said.

Koch said this project will target un-served areas.

“We don’t know what the exact scale of our project will be,” she said. “We’re definitely crafting what it looks like.” Koch said H&B Communications is “cautiously optimistic” when it comes to the grant application process.

In other business:

• Commissioner Greg Bender said he and Carl Miller, county appraiser, attended the July 29 meeting of the Lincoln County commissioners. They discussed negotiating a new PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes) agreement jointly with Pattern Energy, the owner of the Post Rock Wind Farm in Ellsworth and Lincoln counties. The current agreement expires at the end of 2022.

Bender said he pro posed that both commissions present a combined front on this matter. The Lincoln County commissioners agreed.

Bender said the previous agreement was for $3,200 per tower.

He said that cost figure will be increased with the next proposal along with including an “escalator clause” which would provide for a 2 percent increase each year of the 10-year agreement.

“We all agreed that they (Pattern Energy) shouldn’t be saying they’re hurting for any money because the federal government is really pushing wind power,” Bender said.

He said possible figures for a new agreement will be calculated and later presented for approval by both boards of county commissioners.

• Approved a $3,879 bid from C&E Door to install a 12 foot by 14 foot overhead door at the Ellsworth County EMS headquarters building.

• Approved a $3,185.05 bid from Wenz Interiors to install two new windows in the bathrooms at the Ellsworth County Noxious Weed Office.

• Teresa Shute, noxious weed department director, said she is seeing a lot of trash being placed by the public in the recycling bins at the recycling center.

Shute warned if that doesn’t stop, Ellsworth could lose its recycling.

“We certainly don’t want to lose our recycling, but we don’t want trash in there either,” Bender said.

Signs will be posted both outside and inside of the recycling center to discourage the public from putting trash in the recycling bins.

The next meeting of the Ellsworth County commissioners will be at 9 a.m. Monday, Aug. 8, at the county courthouse.