Taxpayer groups groused over the extension of “temporary” sales and income taxes — which originally were to expire in 2003 — in this year’s state budget, but little noise was made about new money for a state-funded nonprofit that was to disappear also.
The E-NC Authority, formerly the Rural Internet Access Authority, received another $1 million in operating funds for the next two fiscal years, which runs until June 30, 2007. Current state law forces the organization to be discontinue at the end of 2006.
The RIAA was created in 2000 with $30 million from the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, a technology research organization created in 1980 by Gov. Jim Hunt that was subsidized with up to $250 million from taxpayers through the late 1990s. The purpose of RIAA was to serve as a temporary state authority to facilitate the extension of high-speed Internet service to the state’s rural areas.
RIAA was originally planned to be dissolved Dec. 31, 2003, but the General Assembly instead changed its name to E-NC and extended its life until the end of 2006.
Also in 2003, E-NC had its authority expanded to help extend broadband Internet access to “distressed urban areas.” Then-state Sen. Virginia Foxx, now a Republican U.S. Congresswoman, said at the time that the RIAA had only “some loose ends” left to complete its original mission.
“What they’re creating is a bureaucracy that doesn’t need to be created,” Foxx told CJ in June 2003.
Officials for E-NC had also requested from lawmakers an additional $1 million to establish two regional “Telecenter” projects, which provide one-stop Internet access and computer resources for citizens and local businesses. However, the budget provided only the $1 million for E-NC operations. The original funding from MCNC has been exhausted, used for operations and grants.
A separate bill that would have extended E-NC’s life until June 30, 2007, and also funded the new Telecenters, passed the House Science and Technology Committee unanimously in April. However, the bill was never considered by the full House or the Senate.
Executive Director Jane Smith Patterson said E-NC “is a state authority, not a permanent state agency,” but that the needs to help extend high-speed Internet service to all areas in North Carolina are ongoing. In its January 2005 presentation to the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations, E-NC reported “there is much more that must be accomplished for information technology infrastructure in North Carolina.”
The authority, however, implied that its own existence might need to be permanent to keep technology up-to-date in rural areas.
“Technology turns over at a minimum every two years,” the E-NC report said, “and the rural areas must keep up with these technology turns in order to create and maintain competitive rural economies.”
Patterson said leaving the job to the private sector would leave holes in the state’s broadband Internet service.
E-NC, together with the state’s Rural Economic Development Center, received almost $2 million last year from the Assembly, in part for the development of four more TeleCenters. It has also received funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Golden LEAF, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal. Contact him at [email protected].