HB 1156 Summary

• Establishes the broadband service infrastructure grant program within the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism to award grants for deploying broadband service infrastructure to unserved and underserved areas of Hawaii.

• Defines unserved areas as lacking broadband service with minimum speeds of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, and underserved areas as lacking 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream.

• Requires applicants to contribute a minimum 20 percent matching funds from non-government sources, prohibits receipt of other federal or state grants for the same project, and restricts funding to new deployments rather than upgrades of existing infrastructure.

• Awards grants based on a scoring system prioritizing size of unserved/underserved area, applicant experience, necessity of government funding, matching fund proportion, and infrastructure scalability.

• Appropriates $5,000,000 from general revenues for fiscal year 2019-2020 for program establishment and administration.