$80.6 Million Louisiana BTOP Grant Returned to Treasury; West Virginia Project Faces Delay
Delays in broadband stimulus projects continued (CD Oct 3 p9). While NTIA expects a $126.3 million West Virginia project to be completed on time, it terminated the $80.6 million project managed by the Louisiana Board of Regents. The funds will be returned to the U.S. Treasury, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who worked with the Board of Regents to secure the funding, said she plans to work with interested parties to complete the project.
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West Virginia is playing catch up and is confident that its project, which must be completed by February 2013, will be done on time and on budget, Jimmy Gianato, director and homeland security adviser with the state’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, told us. The project was designed to connect schools and other public facilities. But recent letters by the state’s schools Superintendent Jorea Marple to Gov. Earl Tomblin and state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette cited lack of progress, a concern by education staff across the state. About 20 months into the project, only six miles of fiber had been built, according to the latest progress report.
A big issue is a fiber shortage, said Gianato, coordinator of the project. But the project has identified an alternate fiber vendor and additional fiber has arrived and is now being deployed, he said. The state is working with NTIA and Frontier, which is installing the fiber cable, to deploy “a mitigation strategy to get the project timeline caught up,” he said. As part of the mitigation plan, Frontier will assign more personnel and will work overtime and on weekends, a spokesman said.
Louisiana, however, was unable to implement the original project plan and fell significantly behind schedule, according to Strickling. It proposed major modifications to its original proposal without adequate technical and financial details and a viable schedule for completing the project, said Strickling. NTIA has worked with the state in the last several months to rescue the project but has now concluded that “we have to move on,” he said. NTIA, during a site visit in March, found that the project that should have been 12 months along in its implementation was already at least nine months behind schedule, according to a letter to the Board of Regents by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which works with NTIA on BTOP oversight. A corrective action plan submitted by the state didn’t address the regulators’ concerns directly and provided no further detail on what timetable the construction would occur, “alluding only to a series of bid packages that would be implemented concurrently to address the significant schedule delays,” NOAA said. Additional responses by the state appeared to be insufficient, according to the agency.
The lack of details and specificity effectively doomed the project, designed to connect public schools and libraries, Landrieu said. The Board of Regents will continue to look for outreach opportunities in the state’s rural communities as well as funding to improve connectivity to the existing LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative) network, said James Purcell, Commissioner of Higher Education. He noted that the Board of Regents’ approach, though rejected by NTIA, gained demonstrated support from the group’s public and private partners.