Program linking schools to Net under fire

A federal program that U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, helped develop eight years ago to link schools and libraries to the Internet has come under fire for alleged waste and misspending.

Several federal audits and criminal investigations are focusing on the E-rate program, which diverts part of the telecommunications taxes that people pay in their phone bills to a federal fund used for the Internet hookups.

Federal auditors and investigators with the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on investigations found places where either the school districts weren’t spending the money as intended or were buying equipment that sat unused.

No problems have been reported in Maine, whose schools and libraries have received $32 million of the $13 billion distributed nationwide thus far.

“It’s been astonishingly successful in helping school systems and libraries around the country get on the information highway,” Snowe said. “We want to make sure there is proper oversight.”

Examples of waste cited by lawmakers and auditors include $58 million worth of computer equipment in Puerto Rico that went unused for lack of proper connections and $23 million in equipment that sat untouched on pallets in a government warehouse.

The Federal Communications Commission has adopted recommendations from auditors to halt that kind of waste.

U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine and a commerce committee member, called the testimony about Puerto Rico troubling. But he argued that it shouldn’t be used to dismantle a fine program, which has an unblemished record in Maine.

“I support efforts to root out and correct misuse or abuse of E-rate funds elsewhere,” Allen said. “I will, however, strongly oppose any attempts to dismantle this outstanding program or cut its funding because of a few cases of mismanagement in other parts of the country.”

Snowe and U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., created the program through a provision in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The program is financed through payments for phone service called a universal service fee. The fund generates about $2.25 billion per year.

The E-rate program is especially important to rural states such as Maine, where schools would not have gained access to the Internet as fast as urban areas without federal help.

Maine now has 100 percent of its schools and 97 percent of its libraries connected to the Internet, so the money maintains services and helps upgrade with new technology. The state gets about $3.5 million annually in federal funding, to complement $2.5 million from a similar state-level program.