Our Policy Agenda

Create opportunities for communities by making broadband infrastructure widely available
A wide-spread, broadband infrastructure has many benefits: companies can work more efficiently, communities can pursue economic development, youth can access educational curriculum, and residents can seek treatment from medical specialists located sometimes hundreds of miles away. To spur the deployment of broadband to all communities, policies should be adopted and incentives should be offered, especially to build broadband into rural and low-income communities.

Affordable access to broadband can be offered to underserved communities through Universal Service Programs, which must be preserved and revised to reflect the new ways of delivering advanced telecommunications services. CCTPG supports policies that would spread broadband throughout California at affordable rates.

Enable organizations to serve residents by improving the California Teleconnect Fund (CTF)
CTF provides discounts to schools, libraries, and qualified health clinics and community-based organizations for access to advanced telecommunications services. This program helps organizations afford high-speed networks to connect to the Internet, so they can provide academic enrichment or workforce development, and use services like telemedicine. A number of challenges have limited CTF's effectiveness in providing these discounts:

1) the state borrowed $150 million from the fund;
2) the program was nearly eliminated last year;
3) the approval of applications by CTF has been slow; and
4) telecommunications carriers have been resistant providing the discounts to approved organizations.

CCTPG has been and will continue to work with the CPUC, telecommunications carriers, and the legislature to address these challenges so that eligible institutions can receive these discounts as quickly and easily as possible.

Support important community services by sustaining community-based organizations
The existence of community-based organizations (CBOs) that use technology to carry out their mission rests upon continued funding. To support these organizations, there are several existing programs and possible funding sources that need to be freed up or augmented:

1) the Digital Divide Grant Program, which supports organizations that train residents in the use of technology, offer youth academic enrichment programs, and assist residents in the creation of local, online content;
2) the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which allows for supplemental educational services from qualified providers to increase educational achievement; and
3) the telecommunications mergers, which have a history of supporting CBOs. For example, in 1996, the SBC and Pacific Bell merger resulted in a Community Partnership Agreement worth $50 million dollars and led to the establishment of the Community Technology Foundation, which has awarded millions of dollars to build the capacity of CBOs to use technology and to accomplish their social missions through technology.

CCTPG will continue to help leverage these funding sources so that CBOs have the resources to continue to provide services to the community.