WASHINGTON – The Treasury released $99.4 million in broadband funding to Arizona Tuesday, money that officials said could bring broadband internet service to an estimated 127,807 households and businesses around the state.
It is the first half of $190 million the state is expected to receive as its share of a $10 billion pandemic-era federal Capital Projects Fund, a program for “critical capital projects that enable work, education and health monitoring in response to the public health emergency.”
That was echoed Tuesday by David Lujan, president of the Children’s Action Alliance in Arizona, who said a lack of broadband access has especially hurt Arizona’s Indigenous and rural communities. Grants in Arizona will be divided between the Arizona Broadband Development Rural Infrastructure Grant program – for projects in the state’s 13 rural counties – and the Arizona Broadband Development Urban Infrastructure Grant program in Maricopa and Pima counties.
Any service provider that gets money from the Capital Projects Fund has to agree to participate in the Federal Communications Commission’s Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides a discount of up to $30 a month for broadband service to eligible households and $75 per month to households on tribal lands.
Sperling said the project will help ensure that high-speed internet remains a “basic measure that every American family had to have to have equal educational and economic opportunity.”
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