Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania sound off on broadband funding challenges

States are poised to play a critical role in the broadband funding landscape, but each state has a different approach to selecting broadband projects and administering funds. State broadband directors from Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia delved into how they’re tackling broadband funding opportunities, namely for the $10 billion Capital Projects Fund (CPF). Virginia, which was one of the first states to get CPF funding. “We already had locations in the queue, we were actually finalizing our challenge process when the General Assembly allocated our CPF funds,” said Tamarah Holmes, broadband director for the Virginia Department of Housing & Community Development. “So we quickly had to work with the applicants.” In January, Georgia awarded more than $234 million in CPF funding to 12 service providers, including Comcast, Charter and Windstream. What Georgia did was look at each county to check if there were at least 2,500 unserved locations or if 20% of the county’s total locations were unserved. Pennsylvania has yet to announce CPF project awards. Brandon Carson, executive director of the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority, said his office is currently digging into the weeds of the program’s guidelines. The state is also working on standing up three programs to allocate those funds.