The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) cleaned up the in-box today, putting two more California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grant applications into the review process and tossing out two more. The grant request total shrunk to $239 million, still about $90 million more than is currently available from the CASF program.
There’s a smaller revolving loan program. The total requested from it now stands at $1.8 million, bringing the grand total for the February 2013 application round to $241 million.
The Shasta County Telecom proposal and the Humboldt and Del Norte Fiber project were officially posted, opening a three week challenge window. In order to be eligible, the service areas proposed have to qualify as “unserved” or “underserved”, and incumbents can challenge applications on that basis. The challenge deadline for the two projects is 15 March 2013.
Two proposals from Etheric Networks for $5.4 million in grants and $1.8 million in loans have been rejected. Etheric doesn’t have the necessary CPUC certification, and hadn’t asked for it by the application deadline.
The CPUC started with a total of thirty-two infrastructure applications in the hopper. One, from Cal.net, was quickly put into an “information only” category, also because the company wasn’t certified. Twenty-seven were deemed ready for posting, with a 4 March 2013 challenge deadline (except for one small, holdover project from the October round that had a shorter window).
The four remaining applications were not to spec and were marked as pending, until today. The Shasta County project appears to be unchanged from the original submission, but the Humboldt and Del Norte grant request was reduced from $23 million to $15 million during the fix-up process.
Tellus Venture Associates assisted with several CASF proposals in the current round. I’m not a disinterested commentator. Take it for what it’s worth.