Future of internet service in Spring Grove central to village president race

The future of internet service in Spring Grove is a central issue in the village president race for the April 6 election, with challenger Brandel Wicinski arguing it’s time for a new set of eyes on a longstanding problem with outages.

But incumbent Mark Eisenberg said he is making inroads with the village’s sole internet provider, Mediacom, on coming up with a solution to prevent temporary blackouts of home internet connections and to get the company to add a handful of properties in town that currently have no options at all to its network.

Eisenberg said he has been pressuring Mediacom to fix the issue that causes outages, which is that the area is served by only one cable provider without a backup feed to keep internet users online when the primary route goes down.

In recent months, though, he said there has been progress that hasn’t been made before through previous attempts by the village to find a solution.

The villages of Spring Grove, Ringwood and Hebron all experience a similar issue with Mediacom, and so their village presidents wrote the company and Illinois lawmakers a letter in January. Since then, Eisenberg said he’s seen positive developments in his talks with the company.

“I’ve been working on this with them quite some time, and we’ve finally got traction. We’ve gotten through to Mediacom,” he said.

He pointed to a letter the company sent this month to the Federal Communications Commission and the three villages in response to the village presidents’ letter.

“Mediacom local area management along with corporate executives have been working with Comcast in negotiating a lease of dark fiber to help with a redundant ring to help alleviate these communities from being on a single run,” Lauren Predmore, a paralegal for Mediacom, wrote to the commission, according to a copy of the letter shared by Eisenberg.

But Wicinski is not convinced Spring Grove residents want to stick with Mediacom.

She thinks a renewed attempt at bringing another internet service provider into the village could be fruitful with a new village president. Wicinski has not held elected office before but has worked for the U.S. government managing contracts, including currently for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Putting a fresh set of eyes on the numbers and the budget would definitely help maybe bring new ideas to the table and new ways forward,” she said.

Eisenberg, who has been village president since 2007, said other internet service providers have looked at expanding their networks into Spring Grove, but have so far determined the market isn’t viable enough to pull the trigger. The issue is that homes in the sparsely populated village are spaced far enough apart that more cable is needed to get them onto networks than dwellings in more densely populated areas.

“It’s been an ongoing battle to try to get someone else to come into our village,” Eisenberg said.

Wicinski said she thinks it’s not time to abandon the effort.

“I don’t accept that we’ve asked and we’ve tried. I’m the type of person that says your deal wasn’t good enough. There are options out there,” Wicinski said.

Both candidates said they would be open to discussing a possible referendum question that would ask voters for permission to take on debt to pursue a village-owned internet infrastructure project.

Eisenberg said a proposal to raise the village sales tax from 7% to 7.75% on the April 6 ballot could potentially help a little bit with such an idea if it were ever pursued in Spring Grove.

The funds raised from the increase, if approved by voters, could be used to address the village’s infrastructure needs, including road upgrades and repairs, as well as networking equipment if the village were to consider building the backbone of a new internet service.

Both candidates said they support the sales tax increase proposal on the April ballot.