The Communications Workers of America (CWA) released a report Thursday rating broadband projects in 14 southern, northeastern and midwestern counties on how well they integrated transparency, equity, and labor standards into their selection processes. All projects were funded by the American Rescue Plan Act’s Capital Projects Fund, and State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. Guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department on broadband work helped shape grading categories, the report said.
The report calls attention to metrics including how easily counties made their projects known to the public, equity requirements like affordability of consumer Internet service plans, and whether the counties required grant recipients to pay prevailing wages.
The CWA aims to set the conversation around these topics as states begin the process of distributing funding from the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a massive $42.5 billion federal initiative to fund the expansion of broadband.
“I think we have a lot of potential audiences in mind. But the key one that we think of for this year is states that are making decisions about how to implement the BEAD program,” Ceilidh Gao, CWA senior research associate, said about the report’s overall message and mission.
“It’s sort of a natural experiment for ‘lessons learned’ that can be applied for this next round of larger federal funding for broadband, the BEAD program,” she added.
States and counties developing broadband funding policies around principles like government transparency or equity can have a wider impact well beyond the actual projects, Gao said.
“I think these are a lot of good governance, responsible procurement principles that can be applied in a lot of different situations,” she said. “We had our eye toward broadband, in particular, and in particular with all of the federal funding that is coming down this year and next. But I think it’s broadly applicable both to other kinds of broadband projects, and other kinds of public contracting for infrastructure.”
The counties evaluated — with information gleaned largely from public records requests — include Kenton County, Ky., which scored 20 out of 20 points. The county made project agreements easily available online and contracted with the company Altafiber, which employs a union workforce. These were among the moves that earned it high marks, the report said.
Conversely, Putnam County, W.Va., scored poorly in the labor standards category — in part because its contractor, Mountain State Fiber, does not hire a unionized workforce. The county also made only limited information about the broadband project available, and then only via an audio recording of a meeting — “prohibitively difficult to find for residents,” per the report.
CWA also wants the research to raise awareness of the need for better pay for workers in the telecommunications industries, Gao said, indicating wage stagnation has been problematic and has contributed to the labor shortage.
“There are workers for these jobs, but they want good jobs,” said Gao.