I have been looking at local government match for MN Broadband grants (Border to Border and Lower Population awards) since the onset of the program. There’s a ton of information to slice and dice at the micro and macro level. In fact, there is so much information that I am going to break up the information into two posts:
- high level information on local government match for MN Broadband grants (this post)
- digging into information on which counties saw local government match, how much and for how many awards
The program has long tracked local match, but that could include provider investment. I tried to pull out local government (county, city, township, EDA…) match by county or tribal area. I feel like the numbers are reflective but may not be exact because I had to gather numbers from different places and experienced the difficulty in tracking down the exact amounts by investor.
Please: you see an error in my numbers, let me know! Many readers were/are on the frontlines and your help can only make the numbers better.
On a macro level I learned:
- Number of projects with local government match: 89
- Local government match total: $89,794,826
- Average gov match when there is a gov match: $929,487
That compares to all awards as a whole:
- Number of projects funded: 287
- Total grant awards: $317,575,309
The quick take (and rounding up) is that $317M in State grants garnered $90M in local GOVERNMENT matching funds. And this only looks at MN State Grants – not ReConnect, ARRA or other funding sources.
Supporting info can be difficult to read below but is also available as a spreadsheet: