China broadband funding application denied

by The Town Line staff

Bob O’Connor

In an e-mail to The Town Line newspaper, Bob O’Connor, chairman of the China Broadband Committee, stated, “I am disappointed to report that our Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) Grant “Connect The Ready” for China / Unitel/DC was not approved in this round.

Jayne Sullivan, at Unitel/DC, forwarded this letter that Daniel Parrish from Direct Communications / Unitel received. O’Connor stated, “I look forward to the follow-up and to resubmitting our application in the next funding round.”

O’Connor received the following e-mail from Sullivan: “Thanks for taking my call this morning. While we are disappointed to receive this news, we will keep moving forward and hopefully have great success in the next round. It will be interesting to see which towns were approved once that information is released.

“We are in the process of scheduling a meeting with MCA to discuss China’s application and get further insight on the application. We should schedule a conference call soon with John to discuss further.”

In an e-mail to Parrish, from Brian Allenby, of Maine Connectivity Authority, he stated, “Thank you again for all your hard work in preparing a Connect the Ready application. As you may know, we received more than $105 million in proposed projects, which is an amount well beyond the available funds for this round. Unfortunately, application CTR-0000000033 proposed for [China] was not selected for this round of Connect the Ready funding. I am sorry for what is inevitably disappointing news. We appreciate how much work goes into these applications and would welcome a dedicated conversation with you and/or your partners to discuss any questions you might have, hear your feedback on the application process, and talk through options for a path forward.”