Just in time: $30M in NC broadband internet expansion green-lighted after negotiation
While Congress is talking about the next round of federal COVID-19 relief spending, in North Carolina they’re still making sure money from the last round is going to get spent.
The governor and legislative leaders reached a compromise Thursday to make sure broadband internet expansion still gets federal funding.
If the state doesn’t spend certain designated federal CARES Act money by Dec. 30, they lose it. And among that was $30 million for broadband internet expansion across the state in a year when thousands of students are learning remotely either full-time or part-time.
Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper found a way to still fund the broadband expansion with CARES Act money. It will come from unspent CARES Act money in the state’s general fund instead, using flexibility in the bill for spending money in that fund.
This follows weeks of back and forth between the Cooper administration and state lawmakers.
“I appreciate the work put in by legislators and legislative staff, working with Gov. Cooper and his team, to reach this agreement. Expanding access to rural broadband is a shared priority, and I’m glad we could successfully resolve this issue,” Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, said in a joint press release.
Cooper said in a statement in the joint release that the coronavirus pandemic has emphasized the importance of high speed internet across the state, and critical to rural areas.
“My administration is committed to following the law and getting maximum benefit from federal Covid relief funding, and I appreciate legislative leaders and my budget staff ensuring that funds can be used to expand internet access in North Carolina,” Cooper said.
House Speaker Tim Moore, a Kings Mountain Republican, also said that “rural broadband remains a top priority of this General Assembly and our state is fortunate to have continued revenue availability to meet this need and make flexible budget adjustments as federal rules may require.”
At issue was guidance from the U.S. Treasury about spending the CARES Act money and those broadband projects being completed by Dec. 30. This gives the projects more time to get going, and still follows the law about how to spend the federal money on North Carolina.
The General Assembly included rural broadband expansion grants in one of its COVID-19 relief packages this summer to spend federal CARES Act money. The grants supplement the Growing Rural Economies through Access to Technology (GREAT) grant program and was part of a nearly $1 billion relief bill the legislature passed in September and Cooper signed into law.
But the clock had been ticking and the money would have gone back to the federal government if this hadn’t been resolved. The legislature will formally appropriate the money in a bill in January, when it returns to Raleigh for its long session.
Until then, the Office of State Budget and Management, which falls under the Cooper administration, will review grant applications and start preparing contracts.
That process takes weeks, a Berger spokesperson said, so there won’t be an impactful delay.
Negotiations had been ongoing since November, after Republican lawmakers sent Cooper a letter protesting it being stalled over questions on Treasury guidance, and Cooper’s office sent a letter back with an explanation of rules they have to follow and worries that the money would be clawed back.
The week of Thanksgiving, Sen. Jim Perry told The N&O that he thought they would be able to work out a solution before the deadline that both sides would agree on.
Broadband is a unifying issue in the legislature — not necessarily how to fund it, but that it is needed to help close the urban/rural divide.
Dish Network was ordered to pay the state $14 million over robocalls, The News & Observer previously reported, and Attorney General Josh Stein suggested using the money for broadband expansion.
At a health care panel organized by The Insider this week, Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Forsyth County Republican, said broadband is a “tremendous problem for a lot of North Carolina.” She said students in remote learning are falling behind because they don’t have access to keep up with their studies.
“We’re going to continue to look for answers,” Krawiec said. “The GREAT program has been good. The problem is that we have so many rural areas that are really scattered and even with all the progress that we’ve made, there’s just not accessibility with neighbors miles apart, but we still have children there who still need to access the internet, patients there that need to access tele-medicine.”
“We’ve still got a lot of work that we’ve got to do,” she said.
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This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 12:15 PM with the headline "Just in time: $30M in NC broadband internet expansion green-lighted after negotiation."