California Gov. Gavin Newsom will divert funds from the January 2024 budget to restore a broadband expansion plan in low-income communities like East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles.

By Danny NguyenUpdated Sep 14, 2023 10:06 a.m.

California will reverse a decision to scale down the expansion of broadband to internet-deprived low-income areas like East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles.

In its original decision earlier this year, the state cited inflation and rising construction costs as reasons why primary broadband service expansions would be gutted from many of the same neighborhoods harmed by redlining, when resources like financial services were withheld from minority and low-income neighborhoods, said Patrick Messac, director for #OaklandUndivided, an internet advocacy nonprofit.

Where the state scaled back — urban areas including East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles were joined by Central Valley communities including Stockton and Wasco (Kern County) — became a source of discontent for digital equity advocates. That the state did not retract service expansions to wealthier communities only fueled more controversy among the advocates. The wealthier areas, they said, already had internet service in the area, according to publicly available data from internet service providers.

Inflation and rising construction costs still constrain the state’s allotted $3.87 billion for these expansions, said Liana Bailey-Crimmins, director of the California Department of Technology. However the state is still determined to universalize broadband service in California.

To reintroduce primary networking to needy areas, Gov. Gavin Newsom will divert funds from the January 2024 budget, Bailey-Crimmins said. This cash infusion, which the governor sees as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to universalize broadband services throughout California, will be enough to extend broadband services to needy areas as originally planned during the pandemic.

The revised budget will come with the general proposed budget for fiscal year 2024-25, said Amy Palmer, deputy secretary of communications at the California Government Operations Agency.

In 2021, the state established a $6 billion package to expand broadband to communities that lacked broadband infrastructure. Of the $6 billion, $3.87 billion was to be allotted to primary networking — the same networking the state previously scaled back — and $2 billion to secondary networking. The cuts were based on inaccurate data collected by the California Public Utilities Commission, which suggested wealthier regions in California had higher need for broadband services than poorer ones.

“I’m still concerned that the state isn’t doing anything to address the underlying issue, which is the discriminatory” data that the state used to identify which regions to scale back from, Messac said.

And the promised funding, which Messac said he is still not sure will come, leaves him unsettled.

“So many promises have been broken to Black and brown communities” — the communities Messac said would be disproportionately harmed by the state’s prior decision to scale back on broadband expansions — “that it makes it difficult to celebrate this moment.”

Danny Nguyen is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @dannyn516

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