BTOP Grants Needed More External Evaluations, Efficient Use of Funds, Say TPI Paper Authors
NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program didn’t properly evaluate grant proposals on their cost effectiveness, said Gregory Rosston, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research deputy director, at a Broadband Breakfast webinar Tuesday. He co-wrote a Technology Policy Institute paper on “The Broadband Stimulus: A Rural Boondoggle and Missed Opportunity” with Scott Wallsten, TPI vice president-research. Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition Executive Director John Windhausen said in response Tuesday, as he had before (CD Nov 20 p22), that November’s report shows a lack of understanding of the purpose of the BTOP grants to serve unserved and underserved areas and community anchor institutions.
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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided money to NTIA and the Rural Utilities Service to develop broadband infrastructure, said Rosston. The RUS mandate was to provide service where the highest proportion of residents don’t have broadband, while the BTOP programs were scattered and NTIA was only told to grant money to projects in all 50 states, he said. “NTIA could have distributed the funds in an efficient way through congressional districts,” said Rosston. “We recommended that NTIA create competition, because in rural areas you could have just the provider, and if you gave them money you would have a monopoly.”
NTIA didn’t have a systematic way of evaluating BTOP grant proposals, and the FCC Mobility Fund auction (CD May 3/12 p1) showed how money could be given out efficiently, said Wallsten. “Providers bid for subsidies in predefined areas that the FCC determined,” he said. “The FCC used dollars per road mile to order projects from most to least cost effective, and they awarded grants until they reached the budget constraint of $300 million.” Although BTOP was a “one-time deal,” the BTOP projects should be evaluated, he said.
NTIA awarded a nearly $5 million grant to ASR Analytics to complete an evaluation of BTOP, but this evaluation doesn’t satisfy the needs of Rosston and Wallsten, they both said. “An agency should not be in charge of evaluating its own program,” said Wallsten. The BTOP evaluation focuses on “case studies approved by NTIA,” and so focuses on “success stories,” said Wallsten. “NTIA did not do a good job on evaluating” projects to fund, “and now it is baking the cake on how to evaluate itself,” Rosston added.
While government programs should be as efficient as possible, Windhausen said the TPI paper missed the mark on who BTOP serves. Unlike the RUS program, BTOP wasn’t necessarily meant to serve rural areas, he said. “It’s not a subsidy program, because it was a one-time investment program to provide a infusion of cash to build new facilities or upgrade facilities.” Instead of efficiency analysis, Windhausen said economic stimulus analysis would be more helpful to evaluate BTOP. “It would be useful to see how many providers were using the middle-mile network, the number of jobs created, businesses helped and how carrier access is stimulating the economy,” he said. “Broadband investments have other ramifications than just the network.”
BTOP projects underwent a “thorough evaluation” to ensure they would deliver on the program’s goals, an NTIA spokeswoman emailed us. “The projects were designed to meet the unique needs of the communities they serve, while also meeting the Administration’s goals of expanding access to high-capacity affordable broadband,” she said. “Our projects have not only met but exceeded the goals we set.” Through 2013, she said the 230 BTOP projects have collectively: Deployed or upgraded more than 110,000 miles of broadband infrastructure; connected more than 20,000 community anchor institutions to broadband, generated approximately 625,000 new broadband Internet subscribers; and installed more than 46,000 workstations in public computer centers.