Talley

New York's ConnectALL broadband grants got $38 million more expensive and 34,000 connections smaller New York quietly widened the price tag on its two flagship broadband grant programs by roughly $38 million over the past two years — while cu ng the number of homes and businesses those same programs promise to connect by about 34,000, according to an analysis published August 18 by the Advanced Communica ons Law & Policy Ins tute (ACLP) at New York Law School. ConnectALL, the state broadband office overseeing the money, did not announce any of the revisions. ACLP says it found them buried in Empire State Development board mee ng packets. New York has commi ed more than $300 million in federal Capital Projects Fund money and state funds to two programs: the Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP), which funds open-access municipal fiber networks, and the Affordable Housing Connec vity Program (AHCP), which funds connec vity in affordable housing developments. ACLP director Michael Santorelli and researcher Alex Karras tracked all 34 awards issued under the two programs — 22 MIP, 12 AHCP — from July 2024 through July 2026, cross- referencing every dollar figure and loca on count against its original announcement. The detail that ma ers more for this industry than the headline number is where the money and the mileage actually moved: fewer homes passed, higher grants per project, and a scope-cu ng pa ern that lines up almost exactly with the same rising labor, materials, tariff and right-of-way costs that have been squeezing tower and fiber contractors on private builds for the past two years. This isn't an abstract state-budget story. It's a preview of what the publicly funded side of the buildout looks like when those same cost pressures hit a program with no matching-fund requirement and a hard federal deadline. The paper trail existed — it just wasn't published anywhere ConnectALL wanted you to look ACLP's report is blunt about how it found this: not through a ConnectALL announcement, a press release, or the agency's project dashboard, but by working through mee ng materials prepared for the Empire State Development board, which oversees ConnectALL. "New York does not report these grants consistently," the report states. "Rather than a standing record per project, cost and scope figures surface piecemeal across board packets, fact sheets, performance reports, and press releases, each sta ng a project's status as of that moment. No single source shows how a grant has changed over me." One line buried in the state's own CPF Performance Report, filed with the U.S. Treasury in July, confirms part of the mechanism: New York moved unspent AHCP funds over to cover a shor all in MIP. That's the kind of transfer that would ordinarily warrant its own line in a press release. Instead, ACLP found it in a footnote. Talleycom.com You Connect the World. We Make it Easy. ® 6 QUARTER 3 2026 SHEET®

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