ATLANTA – State lawmakers agreed to give electric cooperatives a shot at providing high-speed internet service in rural Georgia, signing off on a proposal Tuesday after three years of debate.

The state’s 41 electric membership corporations will be given the authority to provide broadband service, although it remains unclear how many of them will choose to do so. The bill now goes to Gov. Brian Kemp, who has said he backs the idea.

Colquitt EMC is considering whether and how to expand into the service, General Manager Danny Nichols said Thursday morning. The devil is in the details.

“We want to help our members,” Nichols said. “We want to do it.”

The question becomes how to do it profitably.

“If it was doable in an easy fashion, somebody would already be doing it,” he said.

His thought is to partner with an existing internet service provider, such as CNS, Windstream or Mediacom, and he said this bill makes it legal for EMC representatives to “sit down at a table and talk” with those companies.

Just throwing out an idea, he said: Perhaps the EMC could build a fiber network that the internet service provider could use to deliver the broadband content. The EMC is looking for grants or low-interest loans that might help make such a plan possible.

“Going at it unilaterally, it would be a very costly business proposition for us to do,” Nichols said.

The first electric co-ops began in the 1930s in rural areas where power companies did not provide service — that’s why they’ve been discussed as a solution for a lack of broadband service in rural areas too. Colquitt EMC was founded in 1936.

Under a Georgia law passed in the 1970s, electricity providers serve residential customers in specified areas, so Colquitt EMC serves certain customers, the City of Moultrie certain others, Georgia Power still others, and they don’t compete for the property owners’ business.

Within Colquitt EMC’s footprint, though, many customers have access to broadband, especially in areas with denser population just outside of a city, Nichols said. For instance, on Tallokas Road just outside of Moultrie, residents can be served by CNS, Mediacom or Windstream, which do compete for those residents’ business.

“Those customers don’t need a solution from us,” he said. “The people who don’t have access today are in extremely rural areas.”

That makes it harder for a private company or an EMC to get a return on the expensive investment of installing a broadband network. The question becomes whether the details of the bill will allow for a business model that makes money.

“Those are the things we have to go through and look at,” Nichols said.

Everything, of course, waits for the governor’s signature, but experts in the industry are already dissecting the bill to see what’s possible. The Georgia EMC — a consortium of all of the state’s electric membership corporations — will meet next week, Nichols said, to advise its members.

Rep. Jay Powell, a Republican from Camilla who represents part of Colquitt County, said there is “no silver bullet for rural broadband” but that the change is another step toward a solution.

“This authorizes one of the main players in rural Georgia to provide a service that they are not legally authorized to provide now,” Powell said