Across the digital divide

What a fine journalistic presentation that was on this newspaper’s front page last Sunday.

A lengthy, detailed article from veteran state-government reporter Michael Wickline revealed that the state had chosen to use $2.2 million in federal covid-relief money for rural broadband expansion to hire the highest-priced bidder and lowestperforming scorer.

The contract is to gather facts and develop a master plan on how best to get reliable high-speed Internet to folks dotting the state’s rural expanse. The winning company was local, Broadband Development Group of Little Rock, though its direct experience was narrow.

Its price was more than double that of two national-firm competitors, CostQuest Associates of Cincinnati and Deloitte Consulting, and its firstround score was half as high as those two.

But state procurement law allows for a second level of consideration based on whether the bids satisfy the needs equally. In this case, the lower-priced bids were found deficient by a review panel consisting of three Cabinet officers of Gov. Asa Hutchinson, while the hometown firm was found to be sterling.

State legislators had pushed for the winning firm, regurgitating the tired phrase that Broadband Development had proposed “boots on the ground” in rural communities to get to the bottom of real residential needs for broadband.

The narrower nature of the local firm’s experience turned out to be its selling point. State Sen. Kim Hammer had observed the firm performing a broadband study in the Sheridan area, and found its physical research in the area and community meetings gratifying. State Sen. Missy Irvin went on a radio show with Hammer and became enamored as well.

She wound up telling a rural broadband conference last week that rural Arkansas residents are treated inequitably in regard to vital medical, business and personal opportunities because rural high-speed Internet is generally unreliable or unavailable.

It was time, she said, to get down to ground level and design an informed and sensible plan to use these federal covid-relief millions to fix the digital divide for real.

Numerous legislators told the governor’s office that they preferred onsite vigor rather than relying on the national bidders’ existing maps and data. Those, rural legislators say, can make a place look thoroughly wired and modern even as the downloads freeze and the Zoom crashes.

Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Still, let’s be frank: Superficially, at least, this was all rather smelly.

I heard from many of you about the fishiness, some thinking they saw insider inappropriateness by the Hutchinson administration. I can assert with a high level of personal confidence that any odor came from the legislative branch and that the governor was in a passive, take-it-or-leave it position, albeit one he defends.

I’m counseled by a source close to the issue that rural Arkansas legislators often get defined by media commentators — and you know how they are — in regard to Trumpism, guns, abortion and vaccine and mask resistance, but that, if you polled them on their top concern, it would be that their constituents have grown weary of all the politicians, bureaucrats and service providers telling them they’re getting great broadband when they never do.

The source said broadband is to a rural Arkansas legislator what rural electrification was to LBJ in Texas. That’s probably a little hyperbolic and a lot insightful.

Then there is an unavoidable factor: This matter has to do with federal covid relief money, and this Legislature has wrested executive discretion on that from Hutchinson and made itself the final word.

So, when a state Commerce Department official working under the governor recommended the entire project be resubmitted for new bids to let everyone take a fresh crack at the full array of desired services, the Legislative Council executive committee said no and voted full speed ahead.

Hutchinson said he didn’t see any need for rebidding. He tells me that getting rural broadband done is a priority for the remainder of his administration and that legislators were right about the superiority of the community-outreach emphasis of the winning bidder. He said the matter is sufficiently urgent that vital time would be lost by starting over.

There is a major issue in all this about the imbalance of legislators over the governor in the separation-of-powers doctrine. But there’s also the issue of a local firm promising to come into your town and find out in person how your Internet performs and what you need so that you can stop coming out on the losing end of the digital divide.

The value of the highest-cost contract award will await the proof.

Will computer screens in homes in small rural communities across Arkansas uniformly perform in a very few years like city computer screens?

Could, for example, a man retreat to a backwoods cabin on the Caddo River and reliably get these columns transmitted to Little Rock, assuming anyone wanted to read them?