[1st-mile-nm] "Wired to fail"

[Steve Ross]

Romm obviously went into this with zero knowledge and a chip on his
shoulder, put there by big ISPs. He complains that RUS was so careful it
might leave a tiny amount of stimulus money on the table, and so careless
that there is danger of default. The rules of the game: grantees have to
spend the matching funds before they draw down the RUS loan funds. The ISPs
that got grants and turned them down? About normal for any grant program
but low given recession environment. All the funds he worries won't get
spent, probably will. I complained (in my Hawk column) several times over
the years that RUS should have risked more to be stimulative. But to see a
tyro come along at the end of a complicated process and complain is frankly
annoying.
On Jul 28, 2015 7:34 PM, "Roger Snodgrass" <roger.sno at gmail.com> wrote:

> I assume this group knows all about this, but just in case:
>
>
> *"Wired to fail: * How a little known agency mishandled several billion
> dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural
> communities," by Tony Romm: "A POLITICO investigation has found that
> roughly half of the nearly 300 projects that [the Rural Utilities Service]
> approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full
> amounts they were awarded. ... If these networks do not draw all their cash
> by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other
> words, they altogether may squander as much as $277 million in
> still-untapped federal funds, which can't be spent elsewhere in other
> neglected rural communities. ...
>
> *"[S]cores of rural residents *who should have benefited from better
> Internet access ... might continue to lack access to the sort of reliable,
> high-speed service that is common in America's cities. Even RUS admits it's
> not going to provide better service to the 7 million residents it once
> touted; instead, the number in the hundreds of thousands."
> http://politi.co/1SKKGjg
> <http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=6899ff94fe0d350b4d966e6a6eef991e804ac2e62a5593e34907f6223d7a0b62>
>
>
> --
>
> Roger Snodgrass
> Twitter @pomotor
> https://twitter.com/Pomotor
> home 505-424-8366
> cell 505-920-3677
> l\lllllllll/llllll/\llllll\ll
>
>
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