All year we’ve been hearing about those BTOP and BIP stimulus funds, but there hasn’t actually been any money involved yet – just bureaucracy and a whole lot of waiting. Well, that ended yesterday with the announcement of the first 18 projects and $182M awarded, just in time for Christmas too! I’d grumble that now we must likely also wait for the money itself to be passed out, but that would be too cynical. So who is on the first list?
Well, they’re dribbling that out too it seems, but so far we have the following winning projects:
- $39.7M for a middle mile infrastructure in rural upstate New York state
- $33.5M for a middle mile infrastructure in northern Georgia
- $25.4M for a middle mile infrastructure in rural Maine
- $2.4M for a middle mile infrastructure in rural north central Ohio
- Better library facilities for Arizona
- A 4G wireless network in rural Alaska:
- An FTTH project in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
The successful projects thus far thus have quite a bit of funding for middle mile projects, but at the moment have not gone to any of the larger companies seeking funds. On the other hand, each of these seems to be something of a no-brainer, even a poster child of the whole stimulus concept. Perhaps they’re just doing the easy ones first. $182M is just 2.5% of the full $7.2B pile of gold, so we have a long way to go yet.
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Brilliant strategy…trickle out winners daily/weekly keeping the other 300-400 in second round of due diligence waiting to see if they are selected the next day/week. Only 74 more days!