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Stories filed under: "boondoggle"

The Trump-Hyped Foxconn Wisconsin Deal Finally Falls Completely Apart

from the sucker-born-every-minute dept

You might recall how the Wisconsin GOP, with Donald Trump and Paul Ryan at the head of the parade, struck what they claimed was an incredible deal with Foxconn to bring thousands of high paying jobs to the state. Initially, the state promised Foxconn a 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested3 billion subsidy if the company invested 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. The amount of political hype the deal generated was utterly legendary, helping market Trump as a savvy dealmaker who’d be restoring technological greatness to the American Midwest.

Years later, and the deal continues to be exposed as little more than a taxpayer-funded bullshit parade.

After several years of reports making it very clear Foxconn never intended to live up to its promises (and a lot of half-truths and tap dancing by Foxconn), it finally acknowledged this week that the project was being dramatically scaled back:

“Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned 10billionfactoryinWisconsin,confirmingitsretreatfromaprojectthatformerU.S.PresidentDonaldTrumponcecalled?theeighthwonderoftheworld.?UnderadealwiththestateofWisconsinannouncedonTuesday,Foxconnwillreduceitsplannedinvestmentto10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former U.S. President Donald Trump once called ?the eighth wonder of the world.? Under a deal with the state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to 10billionfactoryinWisconsin,confirmingitsretreatfromaprojectthatformerU.S.PresidentDonaldTrumponcecalled?theeighthwonderoftheworld.?UnderadealwiththestateofWisconsinannouncedonTuesday,Foxconnwillreduceitsplannedinvestmentto672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000.”

Experts had repeatedly warned that the deal was too good to be true, and likely would never recoup the taxpayer cost as structured. Those warnings were ignored. And unsurprisingly, as the subsidy grew fatter, the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where it’s incredibly unlikely much of anything meaningful will be built at all. What does get built will be far, far smaller, and Wisconsin will dole out “just” $80 million in incentives, a thirty-fold decrease from the original subsidy package.

Like most boondoggles, this could have all been avoided with just a modicum of attention and skepticism. Outlets like The Verge had noticed that this deal was going absolutely nowhere as early as 2019, and Foxconn spent several years throwing around completely meaningless jargon to try and obfuscate that fact:

“Throughout its gyrations, Foxconn maintained that it would create 13,000 jobs, though what those 13,000 people would be doing shifted gradually from manufacturing to research into what Foxconn calls its ?AI 8K+5G ecosystem.? Other than buzzwords for high-resolution screens and high-speed cell networks, what this ecosystem is has never been fully explained. In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company?s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.”

While Trump called the Foxconn deal “the eighth wonder of the world,” it wound up being little more than a pile of taxpayer subsidized bullshit. And while scaled back, that’s all cold comfort now to the Wisconsin residents forced to move, or the hosting town forced to pay 160milliontobuypropertiesandrelocatefamiliesintheconstrictionzone.Orstateleadersforcedtopay160 million to buy properties and relocate families in the constriction zone. Or state leaders forced to pay 160milliontobuypropertiesandrelocatefamiliesintheconstrictionzone.Orstateleadersforcedtopay200 million on road improvements, tax exemptions and grants to local governments for worker training and employment.

Filed Under: boondoggle, donald trump, factory, jobs, lcd panels, paul ryan, subsidies, wisconsin
Companies: foxconn

Employees Say Foxconn & Donald Trump's Wisconsin Factory Scam Was An Absurdist Hellscape

from the empty-promises dept

Tue, Oct 20th 2020 06:30am - Karl Bode

You might recall how the Wisconsin GOP, with Donald Trump and Paul Ryan at the head of the parade, struck what they claimed was an incredible deal with Foxconn to bring thousands of high-paying jobs to the state. Initially, the state promised Foxconn a 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested3 billion subsidy if the company invested 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. The amount of political hype the deal generated was utterly legendary, helping market Trump as a savvy dealmaker who’d be restoring technological greatness to the American Midwest.

Of course experts repeatedly warned that the deal was too good to be true, and likely would never recoup the taxpayer cost as structured. Those warnings were ignored. And unsurprisingly, as the subsidy grew fatter, the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where it’s incredibly unlikely much of anything will be built at all. All now cold comfort to taxpayers who have already doled out a small fortune, or the local residents who had to move thanks to a factory that will likely never exist.

Last week, reports emerged that Wisconsin finally appears to be waking up to the scam, and would finally be blocking any more taxpayer subsidies from lining the company’s pockets. This week, The Verge (which has done a phenomenal job tracking this bottomless grift from the get-go) penned a great breakdown of the scam, which Trump initially called “the eighth wonder of the world.” Ultimately the project isn’t much of a project, much less a wonder of any real note:

“The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory ? about 1/20th the size of the original plan ? is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.”

Great, cool. Of course doling out billions in taxpayer subsidies to giant corporations in exchange for fluff and nonsense (then pretending to be really concerned about balancing the budget) is kind of an American tradition. Just ask the telecom sector, which routinely gets a massive fortune in tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for jobs and broadband investment that repeatedly, almost-comically, never actually arrives. Promising the Earth, sea and sky in exchange for bupkis is kind of a national pastime at this point. That’s certainly the case in Wisconsin, where any meaningful employment was largely theatrical in nature:

“Even the handful of jobs the company claims to have created are less than real: many of them held by people with nothing to do, hired so the company could reach the number required for it to get tax subsidy payments from Wisconsin. Foxconn failed at that objective, too: last week, Wisconsin rejected the company?s subsidy application and found it had employed only 281 people eligible under the contract at the end of 2019. Many have since been laid off.”

Effectively, the company hired just enough people to pretend to be hitting benchmarks. But with the whole thing effectively being a head fake, the few folks who were hired got to experience something that feels more at home in a Kafka-esque satirical comedy than actual reality:

“Soon, the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones. The reality of their situation became impossible to ignore. Multiple employees recall seeing people cry in the office. ?The best is when you?re in the elevator with somebody and then they just scream out of nowhere,? said an employee who experienced this several times. ?They?ve had enough, because things don?t make sense here.”

The whole thing is really worth reading, processing, and truly understanding on the off chance we might learn something. A year or so ago, the company routinely became indignant at the mere hint by The Verge that the deal was a farcical dud. Now the company won’t even offer a comment to the website’s inquiries. Meanwhile, taxpayers have doled out $400 million on land, equipment, and infrastructure that will never actually be needed. Numerous Wisconsinites were forced from their homes using eminent domain, and watched as their homes were subsequently bulldozed as part of a con they had to pay for.

You know, just another day in America.

Filed Under: boondoggle, donald trump, paul ryan, scott walker, wisconsin
Companies: foxconn

Wisconsin Gets Wise To Foxconn's Grift, Blocks New Subsidies

from the took-you-long-enough dept

Mon, Oct 19th 2020 10:55am - Karl Bode

You might recall how Donald Trump and Paul Ryan’s once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested3 billion subsidy if the company invested 3billionsubsidyifthecompanyinvested10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.

Last October, reports emerged clearly illustrating the ever-shrinking nature of the deal and the way Foxconn was just using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through. While the company hadn’t built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a “AI 8K+5G ecosystem” in the state to somehow make everything better. Shockingly, that mish-mash of buzz words wound up being effectively meaningless.

Fast forward to late 2020, and Wisconsin finally appears to be getting wise to Foxconn’s grift. Attempts to renegotiate the original deal understandably aren’t going so well, and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) has finally rejected Foxconn?s latest application for tax subsidies, correctly noting Foxconn hasn’t come close to fulfilling the promises in the original contract, which included spending 3.3billionbytheendoflastyear(Foxconnspent3.3 billion by the end of last year (Foxconn spent 3.3billionbytheendoflastyear(Foxconnspent280 million) or hiring 13,000 employees (they only hired 550).

Needless to say, the WEDC isn’t particularly thrilled, since Foxconn’s original promises died long ago, and the company has been consistently intractable in efforts to renegotiate a new agreement:

“The Recipients are ineligible for tax credits because of their failure to carry out the Project,? WEDC wrote in its letter to Foxconn, quoting the passage defining the project as a Gen 10.5 in the original contract. ?The fact that the Recipients have neither built, nor started to build or operate, the required Generation 10.5 TFT-LCD Fabrication Facility (the ?10.5 Fab?) is not in dispute. The Recipients have acknowledged that they have no formal or informal business plans to build a 10.5 Fab within the Zone, and WEDC and the State of Wisconsin have corroborated that fact from observation, evaluations, and from industry experts hired to provide consulting services.”

For those keeping score at home, that’s yet another Donald Trump show pony proposal that wound up being more trouble than it was worth.

Filed Under: boondoggle, donald trump, paul ryan, scott walker, subsidies, wedc, wisconsin
Companies: foxconn

Foxconn Still Trying To Tap Dance Around Its Ever-Shrinking Wisconsin Promises

from the words-are-but-wind dept

Fri, May 17th 2019 07:39pm - Karl Bode

If you hadn’t noticed by now, Trump and Paul Ryan’s once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a 3billionstatesubsidyifthecompanyinvested3 billion state subsidy if the company invested 3billionstatesubsidyifthecompanyinvested10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew to $4.5 billion the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.

Reports last fall detailed the ever-shrinking nature of the deal, highlighting how Foxconn was using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn’t built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a “AI 8K+5G ecosystem” in the state to somehow make everything better. Those empty buzzwords were accompanied by the promise of fully staffed “innovation centers” around the state.

Back in March, reporters visited many of these innovation centers scattered around Wisconsin and found them to be largely empty. Apparently not liking the bad press, Foxconn executives like Alan Yeung attempted to claim that these centers were in fact not empty and that the reports contained ?a lot of inaccuracies.” But according to locals in the state these supposed innovation centers are, you’ll perhaps be shocked to learn, still empty:

“One month after Yeung?s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn?s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for ?smart city? initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn?s Green Bay building, either.”

So what are Wisconsin residents getting for their whopping $4.5 billion in taxpayer-fueled subsidies? It’s still not clear. There are thoughts that the state may see some kind of factory, but it’s going to be a far cry from what was originally promised, and there are still questions about whether the state will see even a fraction of the jobs that were originally promised:

“Even if Foxconn does build an LCD facility, many questions remain. The company?s current plan is to build a far smaller factory than it initially promised, one that will employ 1,500 people rather than over 10,000. The shortfall leaves both Foxconn and the state in a tricky position. Given the slower pace of hiring, it may be difficult for Foxconn to reach the hiring quotas needed to receive state subsidies. State and local governments, meanwhile, have been building infrastructure and acquiring land based on the original, far more ambitious plan.

Foxconn still seems to be claiming it will be hiring 13,000 workers in the state, but it’s getting harder and harder to find anybody who actually believes them.

Filed Under: boondoggle, donald trump, paul ryan, wisconsin
Companies: foxconn

Foxconn's Wisconsin 'Factory' Is An Even Bigger Joke Than Everybody Thought

from the words-are-but-wind dept

Fri, Apr 12th 2019 06:37am - Karl Bode

We’ve been covering for a while how Paul Ryan’s once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin quickly devolved into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a 3billionstatesubsidyifthecompanyinvested3 billion state subsidy if the company invested 3billionstatesubsidyifthecompanyinvested10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.

Last October, reports emerged clearly illustrating the ever-shrinking nature of the deal. They also highlighted how Foxconn was effectively just using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, showing that while the company hadn’t built much of anything meaningful in the state, it was still routinely promising to deploy a “AI 8K+5G ecosystem” in the state to somehow make everything better. Shockingly, that mish-mash of buzz words is effectively meaningless.

Fast forward to this week, and reporters who’ve been visiting the state to determine the progress of the project continue to find its even lamer than everybody had initially worried. One local politician effectively compares the scandal directly to the Fyre Festival, and the piece is littered with disappointment by locals who say the company is being aggressively secretive and often misleading. Even many of the “innovation hubs”, which Foxconn promised would somehow be better than the ever-shrinking factory it originally proposed, are little more than empty buildings at this juncture:

I walked to the second building in Foxconn?s technology hub, down a street lined with lampposts mounted with speakers playing smooth jazz. At first, the six-story former bank seemed to be farther along. A yellow debris chute snaked out from a top window, and there were hardhats visible in the foyer in front of heavy circular vault doors. But there was also a sign in the window that said the building was for lease. I called the number and asked whether Foxconn was renovating the building, as it announced it would last summer. No, the person on the other end told me. The building never sold.

In short there have been endless promises but little to nothing of substance accomplished, all covered in a cloak of secrecy — which isn’t going over particularly well in Wisconsin. But for its part, Foxconn itself just keeps doubling down on meaningless jargon in the apparent hope that it will satisfy those concerned that taxpayer money may have been wasted on a glorified head fake:

Foxconn is building an AI 8K+5G ecosystem in Wisconsin because the positive impact we envision far surpasses that which can be achieved by building a factory or manufacturing site alone. We are creating Wisconn Valley, which will comprise an ecosystem, or a thriving community, of partner organizations that are intimately linked and interact with each other to develop technological solutions.

Again though, that’s a combination of terms that sounds nifty, but is utterly meaningless (the only thing lacking is a fleeting reference to the blockchain). While Foxconn has convinced a few folks an “AI 8K+5G ecosystem” is a real thing, the general consensus of the piece is that the company bought numerous buildings to use effectively as props to justify its massive handout, but then failed to do anything of substance with the lion’s share of them. Something will come from the massive subsidies being thrown in Foxconn’s general direction, but whether it’s more than glorified set dressing remains an open question.

Filed Under: boondoggle, factory, paul ryan, scott walker, subsidy, wisconsin
Companies: foxconn

Shocker: Billions In Broadband Subsidies Wasted As Government Turns Blind Eye To Fraud

from the dysfunction-junction dept

Mon, Aug 10th 2015 08:02am - Karl Bode

As we’ve covered at length, the United States’ 2010 National Broadband Plan was a bit of a dud. It paid a lot of lip service to improving broadband competition but was hollow to its core, using politically-safe rhetoric and easily-obtainable goals to help pretend the government had a plan to fix the nation’s uncompetitive broadband duopoly. But while the NBP was a show pony, the companion plan to use $7.5 billion of the Recovery Act stimulus fund to shore up last and middle mile networks was supposed to have been notably more productive.

Or not.

Of that 7.5billion(outoftheAct’s7.5 billion (out of the Act’s 7.5billion(outoftheAct’s840 billion total), $3.5 billion was set aside to help improve broadband connectivity in the nation’s harder to reach areas. The funds were managed by the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS), who then doled out the funds as needed to those who applied with sensible business models. But a recent report by Politico suggests that the program has what you might call a spotty success record:

“A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed. More than 40 of the projects RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place.”

If these programs don’t pull their full awarded amount by September, the awards are forfeited, and can’t be used by areas that would have otherwise benefited. Of course if you’ve followed the broadband industry at all over the years, you might recall that these broadband gaps aren’t supposed to exist in the first place. We’ve thrown billions upon billions in tax cuts and subsidies at incumbent companies like AT&T and Verizon over a generation, and the result has fairly consistently been broken promises, zero accountability, and a government that repeatedly makes it clear they’re ok with that.

And just like these programs of old, the RUS broadband effort threw money around without actually knowing where it was going:

“We are left with a program that spent $3 billion,? Mark Goldstein, an investigator at the Government Accountability Office, told POLITICO, ?and we really don?t know what became of it.”

And here’s the kicker: the Politico report doesn’t even highlight some of the worst fraud seen in the program. Earlier this year we noted how West Virginia was the poster child for this program’s dysfunction, with Verizon, Cisco and Frontier convincing the state to spend millions in broadband subsidies on over-powered, unused routers, redundant, useless consultants, and “upgrades” that appear to have benefited nobody. The state then buried a consultant’s report highlighting how companies and state leaders engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime. Nothing much has happened since.

While the continued failures of broadband subsidies will be used as an example that broadband subsidies don’t work, they’re more an example of how we’re utterly unwilling to fix campaign finance reform. Spending and tracking this money shouldn’t have been all that hard; we just aren’t willing to clean up a political system beholden to unaccountable giants before throwing billions of dollars into its angry maw. Meanwhile, when you have armies of politicians consistently and proudly running on the platform that government can never work, the fruit of this labor can’t be all that much of a surprise.

Filed Under: boondoggle, broadband, oversight, recovery act, rural broadband, rural utilities service, rus, stimulus, usda

Anatomy Of A Boondoggle: How The US Broadband Plan Led To WV Buying $20,000 Routers For A One Room Library

from the scam-scam-scam-scam dept

Back in 2009, we warned people that the President’s mega-hyped “broadband plan” really just looked like a massive gift to large incumbent providers, who were about to get an influx of taxpayer money, which would translate into next to nothing in terms of actual broadband deployments. Indeed, we’ve seen an awful lot of waste happening under the program, which is finally starting to come to light. Recently, the NY Times profiled widespread waste in the program, suggesting that hundreds of millions of dollars are either being wasted or are part of various boondoggles to squeeze cash out of governments:

Nationally, $594 million in spending has been temporarily or permanently halted, 14 percent of the overall program, and the Commerce Department’s inspector general has raised questions about the program’s ability to adequately monitor spending of the more than 230 grants.

Perhaps nowhere are the details more apparent than in West Virginia. Ars Technica summarizes a recent report that is incredibly damning. The smoking gun? A 20,000routerinstalledinaone−roomlibrarythesizeofanordinarytrailer.Butthat’shardlytheworstofit.Atleastthat20,000 router installed in a one-room library the size of an ordinary trailer. But that’s hardly the worst of it. At least that 20,000routerinstalledinaone−roomlibrarythesizeofanordinarytrailer.Butthat’shardlytheworstofit.Atleastthat20,000 router is being used (even if it’s under-utilized).

Part of the reason for buying that router, rather than a cheapo one that would have sufficed, was that it would enable other services, including things like VoIP. The state bought 77 of them. Turns out that 75 are just sitting around collecting dust. And none of them can use the VoIP system they need.

Ironically, the routers can’t even be used for VoIP in some key cases. The state police already have a VoIP-based phone system, but the new 3945 series routers did not come with “the appropriate Cisco VoIP modules” to work with the system. The state now has to spend another 84,768topurchasethosemodules;withoutthem,thestatepolicecan’tusetherouters,onlytwoofwhichareactuallyinstalledandoperating.(Forthosekeepingscoreathome,thismeansthat7584,768 to purchase those modules; without them, the state police can’t use the routers, only two of which are actually installed and operating. (For those keeping score at home, this means that 75 84,768topurchasethosemodules;withoutthem,thestatepolicecan’tusetherouters,onlytwoofwhichareactuallyinstalledandoperating.(Forthosekeepingscoreathome,thismeansthat7520,000 routers are depreciating in a state police warehouse somewhere in West Virginia.)

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, but when it comes down to it, this is not at all surprising. Throwing billions of dollars into the broadband space with little reasoning or oversight always leads to questionable behavior. So why do we keep doing it? Are there ways the government could spend on infrastructure and have it be powerful. Sure, but the Broadband Plan clearly was not it. And we’re only learning about the abuse and waste now, after the money’s been spent.

Filed Under: boondoggle, broadband plan, expensive routers, routers, west virginia
Companies: cisco

Shocker: More Than Half The Money Paid Into High Cost Universal Service Fund Not Going To Provide Universal Service

from the how-do-you-spell-boondoggle? dept

For years, we’ve pointed out that the “Universal Service Fund,” is a huge boondoggle. Basically, we all pay a tax on our phone bills that’s supposed to go towards this “universal service fund,” which telcos are supposed to use to provide phone service to rural areas. But, as we’ve been pointing out for over a decade there’s little evidence that’s what happens. There’s almost no oversight of the program, and there are many stories of waste and abuse. The latest, in a long line, is that 59 cents of every dollar that goes to the big telcos from this USF… does not go towards universal service. Instead, the telcos just take that money and do other stuff with it. So, basically, this is a way for the telcos to hide much higher rates through a bogus government “tax,” that isn’t used for its expressed purpose. That seems like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

Filed Under: boondoggle, telcos, universal service fund

Connected Nation, Created By Telco Lobbyists, Gets Millions In Gov't Funding To Hide Broadband Data From The Gov't

from the well-that's-helpful dept

While many were surprised that the first few grants of broadband stimulus money did not go to the telco lobbyist boondoggle known as Connected Nation, you knew it had to come eventually. There were cases where Connected Nation was given deals despite being more expensive and having less experience. Or, in the case of Minnesota, the governor just decided the state should go with Connected Nation, before a state task force (appointed by the governor to explore this issue) could even weigh in.

So it should come as no surprise that (right before the holidays) it’s been announced that a big chunk of broadband stimulus money is going to Connected Nation (including, of course, in Minnesota). It’s a really sweet boondoggle. The operation was set up by telco industry lobbyists, with the claim that it will accurately map broadband penetration (an important factor in figuring out a broadband plan). But, rather than actually mapping the data, and actually revealing the details, Connect Nation basically hides and obfuscates the data in a way that protects the telcos. Aren’t you glad that your taxpayer money is now being used to support this effort?

Filed Under: boondoggle, broadband, broadband policy, broadband stimulus
Companies: connected nation

Connected Nation Bails On Its Home State Of Kentucky

from the oddity-of-oddities dept

The bizarre story of Connected Nation continues. While the telco-backed broadband mapping organization that politicians all seem gaga over has been able to sweep politicians in Minnesota and Florida off their feet, despite dubious qualifications and/or reviews, Connected Nation has apparently decided to bail out on bidding for the broadband mapping opportunity in Kentucky. This is significant, because Connected Nation is from Kentucky. It was originally Connect Kentucky, and it was the group’s supposed “success” in mapping broadband deployments in Kentucky that led to the formation of Connected Nation. In other words, not only does Connected Nation actually have experience in Kentucky (unlike those other states), it should already have the maps. And yet it’s suddenly claiming that it can’t meet the deadlines laid out in the proposal? Art Brodsky questions the claim:

Is the deadline issue what chased Connected Nation out of Kentucky? Perhaps. There may be other factors at play, including that the Commonwealth wanted the vendor to work with all providers, and two of those significant sectors — cable and municipals — are not happy with the telephone-dominated nature of Connected Nation. It’s also worth noting that the Kentucky state government, aware of the criticism of Connect Kentucky’s efforts, was planning a very strict follow-up procedure for the stimulus mapping program. The Request for Proposals mentioned there would be a third-party verification of “any and all data at any location.” That condition would seem to conflict with the general Connect philosophy of controlling access to the information. But we digress.

Given all this, it’s worth asking: does the state of Kentucky have the broadband mapping data that Connect Kentucky did for it earlier? Can it give that data to other providers? Or must those providers start from scratch as Connect Kentucky takes its data and goes home?

Filed Under: boondoggle, broadband, broadband policy, kentucky, mapping
Companies: connect kentucky, connected nation