Montana weighs applications for $200M+ in broadband grants

 State leaders are preparing to make their recommendations on how to distribute more than $200 million in funding to expand access to high-speed Internet in Montana. Now, the next question will be whether to tweak the criteria they’ll use to award the money.

Montana’s ARPA Communications Advisory Commission held a meeting Monday, where they took testimony on the initial rankings of dozens of proposed projects to improve or expand broadband service. Applicants praised the work that’s been done, but they had strong disagreements about the actual scoring.