The Executive Office of the State of West Virginia made...
The Executive Office of the State of West Virginia made some missteps with its broadband stimulus grant money, the Commerce Department inspector general told House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus,…
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R-Ill. (http://xrl.us/bocbpv). NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program gave the state a $126.3 million grant to build statewide broadband infrastructure. It could have “better managed the execution of the grant,” the Office of the Inspector General said in a Wednesday letter released Friday. OIG identified three problems: The grantee “has not demonstrated that BTOP funds used to purchase routers were spent cost effectively, has not effectively managed and tracked router inventory, and did not administer agreements with community anchor institutions (CAIs) for the receipt of federal property.” The grantee could “conservatively have projected saving 2-5 percent on router purchases if it had purchased smaller, less expensive routers” and then didn’t keep track of its 1,164 routers, OIG added. There’s no “uniform centralized inventory management tool,” just three spreadsheets, it said, recommending the grantee “strengthen” its control. The grant application included no misrepresentations, OIG said. Some Congress members questioned grantee expenses last summer after media reports (http://xrl.us/bm7adj) of the project paying $22,000 per router, prompting the review. NTIA followed its defined processes “reasonably,” OIG found. The investigation showed the total cost for 1,064 routers as $24 million, which breaks down to $22,556.39 per router. The grantee received 100 routers free with this purchase from Cisco, OIG said. NTIA declined comment, and an official of the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which leads the project, was unavailable for comment. The grantee has begun to “develop an agreement for continued use which it will require all CAIs to sign” as a result of the review, the letter said.