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.

I was surprised, then, to see public libraries in small towns requesting the funds to buy 6 PCs, or 20, or 10.

The public library of Coshocton, OH, population 11,682 in the 2000 census, asked for $30,839 to buy 12 laptops and a smartboard.

The city of Grapevine, TX, a suburb of Fort Worth, asked for $59,954 to build a public computer center that would also teach English language classes.

The Chelmsford Housing Authority, in a relatively affluent town in Massachusetts, asked for $4,200 to buy 6 PCs for internet classes for seniors.

The Springdale Public Library of Springdale, AR, a rapidly growing town of 66,881 (2007) that is the headquarters of Tyson Foods, requested $66,746 to buy 31 laptops that would be served by wireless connections. The application says that 21 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home and over a quarter did not graduate from high school.

The government appears to fear — correctly — that some will try to steal or to misdirect stimulus funds. It seems to me that the use of cash in projects such as these should be particularly easy to track. I am strongly in favor of most — not all — of the 50 applications that asked for less than $100,000 being funded