Kentuckians were promised internet. What they got: $1.5B information highway to nowhere
The internet arrived in some parts of Eastern Kentucky’s Jackson and Owsley counties on the back of a mule named Old Bub.
Nine years ago, Old Bub trudged between the rugged counties' most remote utility poles, hauling the high-capacity fiber-optic cable intended to help bring Appalachian residents into the information age.
Today, Old Bub symbolizes something else — a poor state plodding along the information highway. Despite spending hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars, Kentucky still lags behind other states in providing high-speed internet access to its residents.
The state's signature effort to catch up — an ambitious statewide broadband project known as KentuckyWired that was launched with bipartisan support five years ago — is well behind schedule and more than $100 million over budget, a joint investigation by the Courier Journal and ProPublica reveals. So far, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has offered no solution to the boondoggle he inherited.
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Perhaps Bevin’s boldest move to dig the state out of its technological quagmire has been hiring an old Army buddy, Chuck Grindle, to advise him as the state’s IT chief at a salary of $375,000 annually, the highest-paid position of its kind in any state.
Read more: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/investigations/2019/05/08/kentucky-wired-internet-project/3238594002/