The letter recommends some of the most expensive proposals. Central Management Services, which manages a fiber network serving over 8,000 schools, is requesting $120 million to upgrade the network to serve 69 counties with 3,838 anchor institutions. It’s a massive project.

The City of Rockford requested $70 million for another massive fiber middle mile project.

Clearwire asked for $30 million to support a $62 million project. Parts of the summary were redacted.

The governor even supports an applicant from out of state (though Evansville IN is not too far away): Norlight Communications. The company is applying for $22 million for a massive middle mile fiber project. I interviewed the company’s president seven years ago and was very impressed. This conservatively-managed company has an interesting profit sharing scheme and is doing many things right that bigger companies are constantly getting wrong.

The letter also recommends some large “sustainable broadband adoption” projects. Across the U.S., these vary widely, from projects in public housing to telemedicine to training for young people and seniors. I find them difficult to judge. The federal government has to hope that the states will pick established entities that will do what they claim they can do in their grant applications. Of the four projects recommended by the governor, two are from the University of Illinois, which seems to me to be the kind of trustworthy non-profit that the stimulus act is designed to fund.

But the letter ignores some of the smaller grant applications, such as those from the cities of Lincoln and Quincy. It’s a sad fact that the state reviews are likely to privilege the larger projects, as they will cover a greater land area and bring in the support of a larger number of state and federal representatives.

The letter does recommend one public computer center application for $100,000 submitted by the Zion-Benton Public Library District of Zion, IL. I hope that these small applications, which appear to be easy to judge and worthy of funding, will survive a process that seems geared to favor larger plans. According to Wikipedia, the population of city of Zion is young and nearly half non-white but is not poor. Its ballpark, built by Kevin Costner, will open in 2010.

No politician — or federal agency — will find it easy to choose between providing service to remote towns, to native Americans, or to Alaska’s islands.

I found the island applications the most interesting. It’s a little-known fact that the Aleutian Islands are the one piece of the USA that was occupied during World War II (by the Japanese). The application to connect the Aleutians by fiber to the mainland would require over $250 million dollars.

North of the Aleutians, in very hostile waters known to any viewer of “Deadliest Catch”, is St. Paul Island, a small community for which one application requests about a million dollars for a satellite uplink and fiber connections to about 125 homes.

But Alaska may not be given even $251 million. Even if the stimulus were divided equally between states, and all of it were available for infrastructure, 1/50th of $7.2 billion would be $140 million. If the stimulus were divided out according to land area, Alaska would get a lot, but the stimulus is more likely to be divided out according to population — and votes.

The governor’s letter notes that there are over 150 communities in Alaska that cannot be reached by road. It’s true that Alaska may have more expensive needs than the rest of the nation … but I doubt the federal government will help. It would be nice if Alaska recinded the payout to Alaskans and used the money instead to build a broadband infrastructure, but that would be politically difficult.

So … the government has some difficult choices to make. I’m not surprised that Alaska’s politicians want to avoid blame for whatever decisions the federal government makes.