School broadband leads Idaho lawmakers’ agenda

BOISE – Idaho lawmakers are set to take action this morning on how to keep high school broadband service functioning in the state despite a morass of legal and financial problems.

“In order to protect schools, I think we’re going to have to move tomorrow,” Senate Finance Chairman Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, said Monday.

The late addition to the agenda for the Legislature’s joint budget committee comes after a judge last week reaffirmed his decision that the state Department of Administration issued the $60 million contract for the Idaho Education Network illegally. The contract went to two politically connected vendors, Education Networks of America and Qwest Communications, now CenturyLink. Another vendor cut out of the deal, Syringa Networks, sued.

Cameron said the committee’s leaders plan to propose “a fix, a partial solution.”

The proposal won’t include the Otter administration’s suggestion for a one-year “bridge contract” mirroring the current one, Cameron and Senate Finance Vice-Chair Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, said. Nor will it include the administration’s proposal to pass “legislative intent” language to allow the state to continue paying the current vendors under the voided contract.

Former Senate Education Chairman John Goedde, now an aide to Otter, told the budget writers earlier that he believes the state has a “moral obligation” to pay the vendors for services they’ve provided since September.

But Cameron said the state attorney general advised that paying on a contract that’s now considered void would be considered a misuse of public funds.

“Our legal counsel has strongly advised us, through the attorney general’s office, that the best long-term solution for the (Idaho Education Network) is to have a complete, clean break from the current system,” Cameron said.

The initial estimate from the state Department of Administration – that it would take $1.6 million to keep broadband and video-conferencing services to Idaho high schools running from now to June 30 – was an underestimate, and the full bill likely is closer to $2.4 million.

Cameron and Keough said they don’t think services for the remainder of this school year will qualify for federal matching funds that were supposed to pay for three-quarters of the service. The feds cut off the payments in 2013 out of concern over the illegally awarded contract for the education network. That has left Idaho paying four times as much as planned.

Close to 300 school trustees from around the state crowded into the Capitol on Monday afternoon for an update on the project.

“As you know, we’ve had a mess,” Senate President Pro-Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg, told them. “The contracts were not entered into appropriately.”

Hill told the school representatives there’s “a very good chance” that the network, including Internet, won’t be functional after the end of this month.

School districts are being asked to immediately apply for federal matching funds eligibility for next year, and to immediately begin negotiating for their own broadband services, in Cameron’s words, “Starting March 1 or whenever the service ends up going dark.”

Will Goodman, technology chief for the state Department of Education, said the department will assist any school district that needs help with the process.