ncIMPACT is a PBS North Carolina production and association with the UNC School of Government.

Funding for ncIMPACT is made possible by... - Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

- Some rural communities in North Carolina feel left out of the game when outside companies and institutions are deciding where to invest.

- It could go from beautiful to tragic at any moment, and I would still say after 20 years it's still worth it.

- We'll discover how three communities build the solutions themselves.

This is ncIMPACT.

Welcome to ncIMPACT.

I'm Anita Brown-Graham.

Providing internet service in a spread out rural community sometimes does not make financial sense for a private company.

In Northeastern North Carolina, a member owned electric co-op built the connection themselves.

We head there to see how they did it.

- For years, no internet company [engine whirring] would run a line to Dennis Bazemore's home.

[solemn music] It's happening in small towns all over rural North Carolina, places too small or too far apart for a big internet company to justify the cost.

So here in Northeastern North Carolina, the local power company did it instead.

Over 2,000 miles of fiber built by an electric co-op that has never sold internet before.

But can a power company actually provide reliable, high-speed internet?

[air whooshing] Dennis Bazemore's farm sits down a rural road in Ahoskie, North Carolina.

For years, no one would run internet out to his home.

He got by by using his cell phone as a hotspot, hoping it would work.

[engine whirring] - Some days it worked well, some days it wouldn't work well.

And sometimes you'd have something going and it'd be cut off, and then, of course, there was limitations to it at times, as well.

- So you didn't have any sort of connection out here whatsoever?

- [Dennis] No, sir.

- But two years ago, that changed.

Roanoke Cooperative, his power company, ran fiber down his road.

So it took 'em couple years, but now you're all connected, wired up.

What's kinda been the biggest difference?

- Well, connection is number one.

[laughing] Staying connected.

And we have.

They've done really well with having us connected.

[chicks chirping] - Now the alarm systems on his chicken house run over that connection.

If the water cuts off or the power goes out, he gets an alert.

What the co-op took on was a bill no internet company was willing to pay, and there's a reason they don't.

Why does it not make sense for an ISP to invest in an area like this?

- If you're a private or public entity, you obviously have gotta commit to creating value for your shareholders or owners.

There is no financial model, no calculus that you can use that makes it economically viable.

It's a 30 plus year ROI.

- [David] Roanoke Cooperative says running fiber costs about $50,000 a mile.

That line pays for itself with the customers who sign up.

Out here though, Coughlin says that's only about seven or eight houses a mile.

- Charlotte, you'll serve 20,000 people within five square miles.

Here, you'll serve 1,000.

And you'll spend the same amount of money.

[engine whirring] - [David] So the cost is the same either way, but the number of paying customers is different.

But none of that math mattered much to the people living out here.

They just wanted to get connected.

- The majority of the phone calls I received, particularly in my first year, were, "When are you gonna get this service to us?"

- [David] So the co-op committed to building it themselves.

A cooperative answers to its members instead of shareholders.

That doesn't make internet cheaper.

It just changes how long the co-op can wait to get paid back.

- If you're investing this $50,000 per mile in an area that may have five to six, maybe seven people for every mile, be prepared for that investment recovery time to be about a 30-year period of time.

- It's a long-term investment, but Roanoke Cooperative had something the internet companies didn't.

The co-op owns poles across its whole service area built for power.

You obviously had electric infrastructure in place.

How much of that translated to then building out fiber alongside of that?

- Yeah, it really made a lot of sense because the infrastructure has already been in place for 80 plus years, right?

We've built these vertical assets to get a service to member owners, and that was electricity back in the 1930s.

And so given the fact that we already had these assets available, it just made sense for us to just go ahead and tap on and attach where needed so that we can get the service of fiber available to all of our member owners.

- Instead of setting new poles, crews could hang fiber on the ones already standing.

Cherry says the build took about four to five years.

What were some of the biggest learning curves or challenges that you all experienced?

- Yeah, constructing a network, that's a huge challenge.

Some of the things I didn't see.

Some of the permitting, I think we saw a lot of challenges there.

Some of the politics that even go with getting access to grants.

I mean, to me, electric cooperatives, by default, we're gonna serve a lot of areas that are unserved and underserved.

- [David] So the fiber was built out.

The question was who'd come along and use it?

Broadband is one of the things that attracts and keeps businesses and the people who work for them.

Community leaders say companies often screen counties on their broadband numbers before they consider expanding or moving there.

- A lot of times, we get eliminated before we even know they're looking.

- [David] One company outside Weldon almost left.

Scott says their internet couldn't handle the work, and upgrading it costs more than they could pay.

- I put the company and the group together, and six months later, they had the level of broadband they needed to run their back office operations.

And they had a Virginia location as well, and they were at the verge of moving those jobs to Virginia because that internet access was so important to them.

- [David] Roanoke Cooperative built the network, but it doesn't run the service anymore.

That job now belongs to a nonprofit called Encore, which leases the fiber from the co-op.

- So we'll leverage the infrastructure that you built 90 years ago to provide electricity to the communities that needed electricity.

We'll leverage that same infrastructure to deliver this new vital service called broadband internet.

That's it.

- You build it, we'll handle the rest?

- We'll take care of it.

We build it.

We do everything.

All we use is the poles that they've already got in place.

And that's it.

- There are 26 electric co-ops in North Carolina, and Cherry says only three of them sell internet.

Do you think this model is able to be replicated in other communities, whether across the state or even across the nation, who might be struggling with rural broadband connectivity?

- I would say if there's an area where there's a high population of under and unserved communities, yes.

But the key is making sure it's clearly understood that these are long investments because of the fact that these areas do not have the density that many of the larger companies may be pursuing.

- [David] Even where the lines do get built, Coughlin says some places still get skipped, [solemn music] pockets too small or too far out for the math to ever work.

- Regardless of the number of grant recipients or incumbents that provide this service, what tends to happen and what will happen is there'll be donut holes.

There'll be these vast areas that simply, again, don't provide the economic value required by the public entities to build into those areas.

[engine whirring] - [David] Dennis Bazemore is connected now, and so are many of his neighbors.

Plenty of others in rural North Carolina though are still waiting.

For "ncIMPACT," I'm David Hurst.

- Roanoke Cooperative built the connection its community was missing.

In Chatham County, what was missing was somewhere to give birth.

We head there to see how one hospital and a group of local family doctors made that possible again.

Across rural North Carolina, maternity wards are closing.

In fact there are 28 counties where there's nowhere local to give birth.

But one small hospital here in Chatham County reversed that trend and they did it without a single full time OBGYN on staff.

So how are they doing it and can other hospitals do the same?

Tyra Headen grew up in Chatham County.

In April of 2023, she was 26 years old and about to have a baby.

One night she started bleeding.

My co-host, Anita Brown-Graham, asked her what she remembered.

- Well, the whole night was a really big blur.

Originally, I was just hemorrhaging out really bad and I was panicking and I didn't... My phone was on 1% and I didn't call 911, unfortunately, but I called my grandmother.

- [David] She was planning to deliver in Chapel Hill, which is about 45 minutes away.

Seven minutes from her house though was a delivery room she didn't know existed.

That's where her sister drove her.

- Everything was going really bad and I just remember them telling me, like, "We have to get the baby out of you."

[helicopter whirs] - [David] Before the night was over, she'd be airlifted to Chapel Hill after all.

Tyra made it to a delivery room in seven minutes.

Across rural North Carolina, that's getting harder to do.

- Nationwide, specifically in rural communities, the maternity units are closing.

They're not able to birth in their community.

They do have to travel further.

And sometimes they actually don't make it to the hospital.

- [David] In 2024, nearly 12,000 babies were born to women living in counties with no hospital or birth center delivering babies.

Obviously, people in those counties still have babies, but some are driving a long time to get to a hospital.

Dr.

Iglesias will tell you that drive can be a medical problem.

- And so the outcomes are pretty clear that C-section rates are higher when you have to drive further.

The data is not as clear, but it very much does point to improved outcomes or less severe maternal morbidity when you don't have to drive as far.

- [David] Chatham County spent nearly 30 years as one of those places where mothers had to go elsewhere.

Chatham Hospital did run a midwifery program back in the '70s, but by 1991, it closed.

The hospital couldn't staff the unit or keep it financially viable.

- We knew there were 700 deliveries every year that left Chatham County and went and delivered elsewhere, except for the 10 or 12 that delivered in our emergency room, which is not the best place to deliver a baby.

- [David] Bringing it back meant solving the problem that closed it.

So in 2020, they tried something else.

They built the unit around family physicians and midwives.

Both cost less than OBGYNs and are easier to bring or find in a rural county.

Before they built it though, they asked women what they wanted.

What came back was that they hadn't felt listened to.

Dr.

Hannapel says that shaped how they treat people.

- I want you to feel welcome.

I want you to feel safe.

I want you to feel that you have agency, that you have decision making.

And if I'm ever speaking or not listening, you tell me to stop and I will answer your questions because you are the boss.

You are making these decisions.

I'm here to partner with you.

- [David] The maternity unit reopened in September of 2020.

It had five beds and no OBGYN on staff, just family doctors and midwives.

- Each time one of our babies goes home, we give the mom a pink or blue bead for the baby and then she drops it in the box.

- [David] Chatham is what's called a Level 1 Center.

It's built for low-risk births, and anything more complicated gets moved to a bigger hospital.

- A lot of people think, "Oh gosh, you only have 20 deliveries a month, so it must be easy."

It makes it incredibly more difficult.

You take whatever comes in the front door, and just because we're a Level 1 doesn't mean that 25-weeker is gonna come in the door and not be in labor and ready to deliver.

So you have to be prepared for all the things.

- Researchers looked at the unit's first three years and published what they found in January.

C-sections here ran about 13%.

Nationally, it's closer to 1/3.

And for low-risk births, the outcomes held up against UNC's hospital in Chapel Hill.

Dr.

Iglesias was one of the authors of the study.

What were your, kind of, takeaways from those outcomes?

Did it surprise you at all or... - Yeah, I think, you know, there's the... You get so deeply invested in something and there's the strong hope that you want things to look good and you want, you know, the numbers that you think we know on the whole to reflect what is happening in a day-to-day.

And then, you know, I'm also a scientist, so at the end of the day, whatever the data shows is what the data shows.

So I think it was just a lovely sigh of affirmation that the work that we're doing was all worth it in all of these hard times.

- [David] One of those hard times came about two years after they opened.

During late 2022, you couldn't have a baby here on a weekend due to staffing shortages.

- It was during the pandemic.

Nurses were exiting kind of left, right, front and center.

- [David] UNC Health put money into travel nurses to cover the gaps.

The weekends came back.

- But the lady's here.

- [David] By the spring of 2023, the unit was open seven days a week.

That's when Tyra Headen's sister pulled up to the door.

There was no time to prep for surgery.

- And their main focus was, "Let's get this baby out so we can save you as well because it might go bad."

- [David] They delivered her baby by emergency C-section, Aashi Elijah Corbin.

- But then I remember them telling me, like, "Your baby did not make it."

And I'm like, "Oh my gosh."

- [David] And Tyra was still bleeding.

The transfusions weren't holding.

- And I remember her saying like, "We've ran out of blood.

We've got to send you to... We have to airlift you to UNC."

- [David] She was flown to Chapel Hill.

She ultimately recovered and went home a few days later.

The people at Chatham kept checking on her and kept showing up.

- They gave me resources for grieving mothers and families.

Like, they did a great job just providing that love for me.

- [David] Three years later, Tyra is now in nursing school.

- I never knew what all it took to be a nurse, right, until I was put in that predicament and seeing the love that went behind it besides just the work.

And I was like, "I think I want to go into nursing."

- [David] Tyra says feeling looked after on the worst night of her life is the thing that brought her back.

- I'm a grandfather.

[sobs] Sorry.

I'm a dad.

My own wife, my own children have given birth.

To trust the system is really hard, especially, you know, as a man, you know, you're a provider.

How do you turn that trust over?

Someone you're just meeting, right?

This is significant and really important work.

- It's very hard work.

It could go from beautiful to tragic at any moment.

And I would still say after 20 years, it's still worth it.

- [David] For "ncIMPACT," I'm David Hurst.

When an old school building in Spruce Pine came up for sale no developer wanted it.

The local community college did.

What it built there looks like no college program you've seen.

We head to Mitchell County to see if it's working.

From the outside this looks like any boutique hotel you find in a small mountain town.

But it's not.

People at the front desk or college students the spa staff or cosmetology students the chef training in the kitchen is on scholarship.

This entire complex hotel spa and a 2000 seat arena under construction is owned and operated by the local community college.

But can a community college actually save a small town?

[mellow spa music] Joshua Silvers is a full-time Mayland Community College student.

He found his job by chance.

- My mother's wedding was hosted here, and about a week, the week after, I was looking for a job, they invited me for a interview and my first interview, and the same day I got it.

- [Melody] Joshua fields phone calls and welcomes guests when he's on the job as hotel desk clerk at Blue Ridge Boutique Hotel.

The hotel is owned and operated by Mayland Community College.

For students who qualify, the work comes with a full scholarship plus pay at $15 an hour.

The program gave Joshua options he could not afford without the scholarship.

- It would've been significantly harder, especially with my family standing.

I would've had to rely greatly on financial aid and I wouldn't have been able to pursue my degree that I wanted.

- [Melody] But the building that Joshua works in didn't start as a hotel.

The Blue Ridge Boutique Hotel you see today, terraced, with fire pits overlooking the Toe River, sat empty for decades.

First, a century-old elementary school, then a failed 1980s hotel.

Next door was a 60,000 square foot coliseum, abandoned by its semi-pro hockey team.

- A couple commissioners came to me and said, "We'd like to see Mayland have a bigger influence downtown."

The economy was getting bad, stores were closing, people moving out, and so they wanted to see if we could help turn that around.

- [Melody] At the time, Dr.

John Boyd was president of Mayland Community College.

The owner of both buildings wanted to donate them and Boyd said, "Yes."

- It's better than watching buildings fall down.

And so, we took it on.

- [Melody] What the college decided to do with two abandoned buildings was something no community college in the region had tried before.

To transform the complex, Boyd established the nonprofit Mayland Community College Enterprise Corporation.

The college used a feasibility study to secure federal funding and an economic impact analysis to make the case to their community.

- We had an event with all the chambers from the three counties at the college to say, "We're thinking about doing this with an event space that would draw people into the entire, all three counties.

What do you think?"

And the feedback was highly positive.

- [Melody] They call the area, "The Three Peaks Enrichment Center."

It includes the renovated 32-room Blue Ridge Boutique Hotel with a restaurant and bar.

The rooms kept what was already there, hardwood floors, wide windows, views of the Toe River.

Each room is named for a local feature in the Blue Ridge Mountains, like the Roan Mountain and Mount Mitchell.

The building's former boiler room will soon open as a bar.

Students will prepare and serve food in the restaurant overlooking the terrace.

- There's a feel when you're here that I think you really can't describe until you're here.

- [Melody] Right next door, the old coliseum is being repurposed to host an events arena with 2,000 seats.

[water splashing] And the college's Cosmetic Arts Center with spa and massage therapy is already open.

Community college students provide the workforce while earning their cosmetology credentials.

But does running a hotel, spa, and events arena make sense for a community college?

- The economic development side is why we're involved.

I think that, you know, community colleges in rural communities just need to take on that role.

- [Melody] For Boyd, that looks like integrating education directly into projects like Three Peaks.

Now the community hopes audiences attending arena events, tourists coming to the college's Earth to Sky Park and Observatory a few miles away, and visitors to the Blue Ridge Mountains will frequent local businesses in Downtown Spruce Pine.

- We thought, "If we can make this work, it will have an impact on the rest of the community."

And I think it has.

- [Melody] But will success on top of the hill at Three Peaks translate to success below in Spruce Pine, where Hurricane Helene shut down shops and restaurants for nearly a year?

- Literally the water down here was at the base of the awning, so the entire lower street was flooded.

And we didn't know for a day and a half that we had lost everything because we were trapped in our house.

- [Melody] David Niven owns DT's Blue Ridge Java Coffee Shop & Cafe on Locust Street.

It sits along the railroad tracks and the Toe River.

Cafe customers have views of the renovated hotel and the Three Peaks complex.

David marked his cafe's walls to show where flood levels reached, and he also put the names of people who donated to his shop's recovery.

- The restaurant itself, you know, we're considered the living room of Spruce Pine.

That's kind of how we've been labeled for the last, you know, 25 years.

And that's how we feel.

And that's how people made us feel.

The day of our grand reopening, it was the damnedest thing I've ever seen.

I never seen that many people except for having a festival downtown.

But hundreds of people came down, you know, to welcome us back.

- [Melody] The Mitchell County Development Foundation stepped in to create a small business resiliency fund to help local businesses recover.

- And over the course of about 16, 18 months, we were able to generate about a million, five, and we had a process by people that, businesses in Mitchell County that needed cash.

They didn't need another loan, they needed cash.

- [Melody] Before Helene, a footbridge connected Three Peaks directly to downtown.

Visitors could walk from the hotel into town in just minutes.

The bridge is gone.

Construction plans are under review.

- It's all a piece of the puzzle, you know, as far as, you know, when.

You know, we never knew when Mayland did this how it was gonna go.

- Got it.

- Okay?

And it's been a blessing.

You had John Boyd there, visionary, okay, between, you know, this and the planetarium.

There's been a lot of things that are good.

And anytime you've got something good, thank God the hotel wasn't affected, you know, so it's been able to remain.

But it is good.

It's nice having it downtown, you know?

And I think that's huge.

- [Melody] David says his cafe is seeing more business from guests at the spa and hotel, guests served by students like Joshua.

- After the storm, I lived in town and it was rough, but this place has brought a great amount of business to the area and just general happiness to the area, I like to believe.

- [Melody] But Boyd says the real numbers that point to success for the community, the economy, and the workforce will take time.

- I've always told the college that we're on the 20-year plan.

You know, we're doing things now that will have people move in or people stay here, raise families, they start going to K-12, and in 20 years, we'll see the results of what we're doing here.

- [Melody] Mayland Community College turned two abandoned buildings into a hotel, a spa, and a workforce.

Whether that's enough to turn a town around, Spruce Pine is still finding out.

For "ncIMPACT," I'm Melody Hunter-Pillion.

- Every story on this show starts the same way.

People in a community see a problem and decide to take it on together.

That's the magic, pure and simple.

That's what ncIMPACT is about.

Thank you to the local leaders featured in this episode.

You so generously allowed us to share your story.

And thank you to our audience for watching and engaging.

I want to hear from you.

Tell us what your community is doing or how we can help.

Because that's what we do best in North Carolina.

We work together.

[Music] ♪ Coming up on ncIMPACT.

- It was still stressful, but we chose to stay and make repairs, replace the flooring.

We're like, "Oh, it's not going to happen again."

But in 2024, when Hurricane Helene hit, it was a whole another ballgame.

- Communities in North Carolina are losing farmland, fighting contaminated water, and buying out flooded homes.

- Ironically, it was put in for environmental treatment.

And then now we found that it's causing a different environmental problem.

- We'll discover how three communities are taking on what's happening to their land and water.

♪ - ncIMPACT is a PBS North Carolina production in association with the UNC School of Government.

Funding for ncIMPACT is made possible by... - Quality Public Television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[Music]