New York recently announced more than $70 million in grants for building government-owned (taxpayer-funded) broadband networks (GONs). Sadly, this plan threatens to bode quite poorly for taxpayers.

The state will award the funds through its ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program, which was created in January 2024. Taxpayer money will be spent on projects in the Finger Lakes, North Country, Central New York, and Southern Tier regions. All of it will go toward funding broadband infrastructure that is “owned by a public entity or publicly controlled,” according to the ConnectALL Initiative.

Projects in this round of Municipal Infrastructure Grant funding include:

—$26.5 million for Livingston County to expand its existing public-private partnership with Empire Access.

—$18.2 million for the Southern Tier Network, which will consist of open-access fiber for eight towns in Cheming, Schuyler, Steuben, Tioga and Tompkins counties.

—$10.8 million for Syracuse to expand its Surge Link fixed wireless service.

$8.9 million for a partnership between the towns of Caroline and Dryden. Dryden Fiber was another GON created as a pilot project that will be expanded with 125 new miles of fiber to connect to Caroline.

—$6.9 million for a partnership between the villages of Columbus and Sherburne for open-access fiber. Sherburne Connect was a ConnectALL pilot project, expanding the city’s electric utility to connect homes with fiber.

—$2.4 million for Franklin County to work with the Development Authority of the North Country for 36 miles of open access fiber. The private provider SLICFiber will provide last-mile service initially.

This is just a preliminary list of projects. The state earmarked a total of $228 million in funding specifically for the MIP program. More money will soon be spent.

The Biden administration has pushed for the creation of more GONs. As the Taxpayers Protection Alliance has documented in reports such as “GON with the Wind: The Failed Promise of Government Owned Networks Across the Country,” these projects often hemorrhage taxpayer money at an alarming rate. Several blue states have followed along with the president’s goal. California, Maine and Vermont created grant programs that centered on municipal broadband projects.

The money that New York will use for this initiative comes from the Treasury’s Capital Projects Fund. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will soon begin distributing $42.5 billion in federal taxpayer money through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program that can also be used for GONs. New York is set to get nearly $665 million from BEAD.

A common-sense budget amendment during the 2024 New York legislative session would have limited MIP grants to projects targeting only unserved and underserved locations to prevent overbuilding and taxpayer waste, but that amendment did not survive the reconciliation process.

Incredibly, New York City had considered using $156 million in taxpayer funds to build a large open-access fiber network within its borders before partnering with Charter on a $90 million project. Leaders pointed to low adoption rates of broadband by impoverished residents, but former New York City deputy chief technology officer Aaron Meyerson pointed out in 2022 that only one-fourth of the 2 million households eligible for federal broadband subsidies had applied. Clearly, the issue was more of education than cost.

New York revealed its ConnectALL program in 2022, with plans to close the digital divide in the state through new grants and education initiatives, before adding the unfortunate focus on GONs earlier this year. ConnectALL is administering a $50 million digital equity initiative with a focus on digital literacy and digital job readiness skills, which is clearly a better use of funds than duplicative fiber given the low adoption rates in New York City.