Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., took time Friday during a tour of northern Minnesota counties to discuss rural high-speed Internet access in Brainerd.

Klobuchar conversed on how the federal government can help improve rural broadband at a forum with members of the local telecommunications industry at the offices of Consolidated

Telecommunications Company.

The newly-arrived presidential election season makes it a more likely time for progress on broadband, Klobuchar said, because the issue is popular in debates and campaigns. However, there is a need for concrete action along with all the campaign talk, she said.

"We need to actually put ... the money where your mouth is," she said.

Brainerd-area attendees gave anecdotes about how the lack of broadband impacts the well-being of people who need it to get information related to health care, education and business.

Richard Schulman of Leech Lake Telecommunications Company described a drought of proper Internet access on the reservation. The two-year-old company is the first tribally owned telecom firm in Minnesota, he said.

"Probably less than a third of our households have broadband," he said.

Leech Lake Telecommunications tries to extend service to low-income families, but the lack of access is so dire that Schulman has gotten calls from customers who want to turn off their wireless Internet service because they can see clusters of kids outside their house trying to leech their Wi-Fi signal.

"That tells me that these kids are starving for broadband communications," he said.

In addition, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission organize rulemaking along county borders, which doesn't take the border lines of tribal reservations into account. As a result, he said, reservations are stuck with a complicated patchwork of providers.

Dan Frank with the Initiative Foundation said broadband was important during natural disasters for warning people and and organizing disaster response.

"There's a big public safety piece to broadband," he said.

Klobuchar said the FCC is working to reallocate federal money in the government's Universal Service Fund and putting it toward broadband Internet service. In May, Klobuchar sent a letter to the FCC along with South Dakota Republican John Thune urging the agency to make it easier to get money for broadband specifically in rural areas of the country served by small carriers. There are 61 senators in support of the measure, making it filibuster-proof in case the Senate decided to act ahead of the FCC, Klobuchar noted.