BY ANDY GARDNER

North Country This Week

CANTON – The St. Lawrence County planning director says the broadband survey is complete and he believes they’ve gathered a good representative sample.

Planning Director Jason Pfotenhauer updated the Board of Legislators on the survey during their Monday, May 10 Operations Committee meeting.

The county contracted with the Development Authority of the North Country for the project. Residents and businesses owners had until May 7 to fill out an online poll of their access to broadband. 

Pfotenhauer said they received about 2,100 total responses. Legislator Larry Denesha, R-Dekalb, asked if that’s an accurate representative sample of the county’s 108,000 or so residents.

“I think it is. Its a pretty good sample. It’s far and wide ... it’s well dispersed,” Pfotenhauer said. “Some of the larger population centers had more responses just because of the higher population there.”

“The Adirondack Park area had fewer responses, less population, less access to broadband there. Overall, I’d say it was pretty well distributed,” he added.

While the public was completing their end, DANC sent a contractor to actually go out and look at all of the utility poles in the county to see where broadband cable is or isn’t, and where it could be added.

He said the consultant actually drove “a number of roads in the county and did a visual inspection of what’s on lines, what’s on cell towers.” That data will go into a geographic information system that will “really allow us to zoom in on areas of the county.”

“It will breakdown by road segment where there’s broadband coverage and where there isn’t,” Pfotenhauer said.

Once all of the data is organized, he anticipates giving a presentation to the county lawmakers sometime in June.

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