CPUC technical guidance explains BEAD project-area rules, scoring and 90% pricing option for applicants

The California Public Utilities Commission released a technical-assistance presentation outlining how applicants should design project areas, how applications will be scored and ranked, and a new option to submit an alternate 90% coverage price proposal for the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Joanne Hobas, a member of the CPUC contract team supporting the BEAD program, said IPV 2 and the commission decision are “the 2 critical documents, that any potential applicant should have, at their side at all times in order to understand details regarding the rules of how the program will be administered.”

The guidance addresses three linked design requirements for project areas. First, project area units are census block groups or tribal lands; tribal-land boundaries take precedence where they differ from block-group boundaries. Second, units combined in a single application must be adjacent — except that intermediate units that contain no BEAD-eligible locations do not break adjacency. Third, applicants must include up to 50% of project-area units that the CPUC designates as “high need” (low-income or disadvantaged), where immediately physically contiguous high-need units exist; applicants may request a waiver only if no contiguous high-need units are available.

The CPUC provided illustrations to show compliant and noncompliant assemblies: a group of adjacent census block groups that each contain eligible locations…