After President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law in February 2009, during the depths of the Great Recession, the White House set up a website “to communicate up-to-date information on the state of the recovery in an effort to live up to the (legislation’s) promise of transparency and accountability.” If the case of the Vermont Telephone Co. and the millions of dollars it received under the provisions of the Recovery Act is any guide, transparency and accountability are concepts as ephemeral in the eyes of the federal government as the website itself, which now appears to be defunct. 

The Rural Utilities Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded VTel $116 million in grants and loans in 2010 to construct a wireless system that would provide high-speed internet service to areas of Vermont where it was unavailable and to build a fiber-optic system in the Springfield area, where the company is based. After it was reported earlier this year that VTel’s Wireless Open World system had signed up only 1,200 customers to date and CEO Michel Guite continued to stonewall in the face of requests to provide information about the extent and quality of the service provided, members of the Vermont congressional delegation finally wrote to RUS to find out what the heck was going on. And well they might, since they had been among the chief cheerleaders for the VTel project.

They now have their reply. In a letter earlier last month, RUS basically certified that VTel spent the money in accordance with the terms of the grants and loans, although that affirmation apparently was based only on information provided by the company. But the agency asserted that it does not have the capability to verify how reliably the wireless system is functioning. It also turned aside the delegation’s request for address-specific coverage information, which it said it does not have and which in any case is regarded as proprietary by most companies and cannot be shared. RUS did promise to conduct field tests on coverage and speed of service once the system is fully operational — which it apparently is not, though it was originally supposed to be in 2013.

Although the letter from RUS is in many respects opaque, it seems clear that while the federal government’s priority under the stimulus program was understandably to spend the money as promptly as possible to re-invigorate the economy, providing something of lasting value to the taxpayers in return was at best a secondary consideration. Thus, the fact that VTel has actually constructed the necessary towers is the agency’s benchmark of success, while verifying how good and how widely available the internet service is falls outside its purview (and perhaps inside no one else’s.)

Meanwhile, VtDigger reports that the state Public Service Department is now offering more than half a million dollars in grants to companies willing to improve internet speeds to about 68,000 Vermont addresses, including those in VTel’s Wireless Open World service area that were previously regarded as covered. The company has the opportunity to challenge the process by verifying that those addresses have access to high-speed internet service, something it has so far resisted doing, on the grounds that the data are unreliable. (VtDigger was unable to secure comment from Guite, who informed the news organization last month that he had added it to his spam filter to avoid getting its email inquiries about the project. From this we infer that he, at least, has internet service.)

This whole affair must sound familiar to Vermonters by now, after the state’s misconstruction of a wildly expensive and weirdly deficient health insurance website and the ongoing scandal surrounding the EB-5 projects in the Northeast Kingdom. The first of these failed for many months to surmount technical difficulties; the second suffered sorely from lack of government vetting and oversight. Vermont’s elected officials, at both the state and federal level, need to keep pushing the company and the bureaucracy for a meaningful audit of the VTel project, for reasons of — remember these? — transparency and accountability.