California’s Senate Bill 740, introduced recently and read the first...
California’s Senate Bill 740, introduced recently and read the first time this week, would change how the state addresses universal service. It proposes three funds within the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) -- the Broadband Infrastructure Grant Account, the Rural…
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and Urban Regional Broadband Consortia Grant Account and the Broadband Infrastructure Revolving Loan Account. The state currently applies a surcharge to collect up to $100 million for the Broadband infrastructure Account, but this bill would bump up the amount significantly. “This bill would instead require that $200,000,000 be deposited into the Broadband Infrastructure [Grant] account,” it said (http://bit.ly/XjlUg6). “The bill would increase the amount of additional money the commission is authorized to collect to $225,000,000, with a sum total not to exceed $325,000,000,” an authorization the proposed law would extend till 2020. The Broadband Consortia Grant Account is to receive $10 million and the Revolving Loan Account $15 million. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla, D, would take effect immediately “in order to authorize the award of funds for the expansion of broadband deployment to unserved and underserved areas of California, to stimulate investments in infrastructure critical to increasing the state’s productivity, and to improve the quality of information available to all of the state’s citizens, as needed for the health and safety of those citizens,” it said. It added that “This bill would provide that, notwithstanding the requirement that moneys in the funds are to be used to compensate telephone corporations for their costs of providing universal service, an entity that is not a telephone corporation is eligible to apply to participate in the CASF program if the entity otherwise meets the eligibility requirements and complies with program requirements established by the commission.”