USAC Recommends Denying Priority 2 Funding at 83% and Below
Message Posted August 5, 2008

Last week, the School and Libraries Committee of the USAC board voted to recommend to the FCC that FY 2008 Priority 2 requests (internal connections and basic maintenance of internal connections) at the 83% discount level and below be denied based on availability of funds.  The FCC now must approve this recommendation, which they are expected to do. This is disappointing considering the FCC recently rolled over $600 million in unused funds from previous years to increase the funding available for FY 2008 to $2.85 billion.

This does NOT mean that the SLD will be funding requests at 84% and above.  It simply means that SLD is confident they won't have enough funds to cover requests at 83% and below, and they are waiting to see if they can fund any requests between 84% and 89%.  In fact, the S&L Committee gave indications that there may not be enough funding available below 87%.  At the present time, only P2 requests at the 90% level are being funded.

If the previous years' P2 denial threshold is any indication, it appears unlikely that USAC will be able to fund P2 requests at or below the 80% level for the coming years unless the FCC changes its rules pertaining to P2 funding.  For those of you who keep track, below is a history of how far priority 2 funding has reached for each funding year: