Administration, Public Utilities Commission turning COVID-era promise into reckless spending of billions of dollars
In the summer of 2021, more than a year into the pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom held a press event at a rural elementary school in Tulare County to tout his signing of a bill that he said would help close the digital divide.
The COVID lockdown and school closures had laid bare the struggles of residents of the state’s rural regions and low-income urban neighborhoods to access high-speed internet service that has become critical to our daily lives.
Now, two years later, his administration and the California Public Utilities Commission, whose leadership Newsom has appointed, have turned the governor’s promise of bridging digital inequality into a wasteful and reckless allocation of billions of dollars.
Unless Newsom rights this ship quickly, it threatens to become another shameful California boondoggle piled on top of the state’s botched effort to bring its computerized budgeting system into the 21st century, dysfunctional unemployment agency, and wasteful bullet train program.
Meanwhile, the state Legislature should demand an immediate audit of the internet program and the recent changes that undermine the stated goal of equitable access.
Well before the pandemic, high-speed internet was already critical for education, access to health care, conducting business and basic entertainment. COVID exponentially increased the need.
At that 2021 bill signing in Tulare County, Newsom laid out a $6 billion program to bridge the divide.
First, there would be construction of a state-owned “middle-mile” network, overseen by the Newsom administration’s California Department of Technology, to lay high-capacity fiber lines along the state’s major freeways and other thoroughfares.
