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Feds deny recovery funds for Digital 395 |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 |
The Digital 395 project that would connect Barstow to Carson City with a high speed digital “backbone” was not selected to be funded during the first round of competition for about $7 billion of American Reinvestment and Recovery Act money.
The $101 million, 364-mile-long, high-speed, digital cable project is seen by many hospitals, schools, public safety officials, policy makers and more as the isolated area’s last chance to join the high-speed, digital world.
Although there is still another round of competition for the remaining money, the private-side project developer said the letter he got on Feb. 20 was very unwelcome.
“It was pretty devastating,” said Praxis Associate’s CEO, Michael Ort.
“Not one infrastructure project in California got funded and it was totally unexpected,” he said. All of the infrastructure projects that were funded were in the Rocky Mountain area, he said, adding that he did not know why that area got the funding. He acknowledged that the funding was very competitive. There were about 1,800 applicants and only 70 were funded, he said.
The final decision about who did (and did not) get funding was made by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunication and Information Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service.
The big problem now facing Praxis is that it’s going to be very challenging to meet all the new requirements of the second round of funding by the March 26 deadline.
“They are asking us for a level of detail that will be very hard to meet in such a short amount of time,” he said.
But Praxis is not giving up.
“We’ve been working on this for more than a year and we are going to do everything we can to get it done. We’ll do it,” he said.
Mono County Supervisor Hap Hazard has been the project’s most vocal public supporter in the county and said Thursday that he’s still hoping for the best.
The board of supervisors sent a letter Tuesday urging the feds to take another hard, look at the project.
“We told them that we are ready as a county to form a joint powers organization with several counties, that we can provide names of specific providers that want to tie into the backbone,” he said.
The state of California and other states that applied for, and were denied, grant money are not ready to let the subject drop, said Ort.
“The government is hearing from those of us in the West,” he said.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 12 March 2010 )
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