HARDEE COUNTY, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Friday morning at a state college in Hardee County, announcing a $4 million award for a broadband access project there and previewing hundreds of millions more for similar efforts statewide.
Billed by the state as an investment to expand rural broadband access, a total of $223 million will be awarded to 54 projects in 33 Florida counties, at least $135 million of which will come out of the state’s Broadband Opportunity Program and $86 million from the federal Multipurpose Community Facilities Projects program, DeSantis said.
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“Today’s award brings our total investment through our state broadband opportunity grant program and all the other areas that we have to almost $700 million for 234 projects in 63 of 67 Florida counties, so that’s a really big deal,” DeSantis said.
Friday’s $4 million award was for the Hardee County Technology Economic Development and Workforce Training Hub project in Wauchula, according to DeSantis.
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The event at South Florida State College’s Hardee campus also featured State Secretary of Commerce J. Alex Kelly, who expounded on the awards’ impacts.
“Some of the awards that we rolled out are going to serve about 300,000 or so residences, schools, business and so forth. Today’s awards will take us to almost 40,000, again, residents, homes, businesses, schools around the state, and that really means something at a real human personal level. If you think about what that means, especially in our rural counties, especially those remote communities, even some of our urban counties, that’s kids getting to do their homework at night, that’s people getting to apply for a job — most job applications these days, most interviews these days are online,” Kelly said. “...For what we do, the Department of Commerce working with these grant programs, it’s a community partnership.”
South Florida State College is part of the Florida College System, 28 institutions where the use of public funds for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs was restricted last month by the Florida Board of Education. The board also replaced the course “Principles of Sociology” in FCS institutions with a general U.S. history course to “provide students with an accurate and factual account of the nation’s past, rather than exposing them to radical woke ideologies,” it said in a statement. The same changes came to public universities about a week later via Florida’s Board of Governors.
DeSantis on Thursday announced the Florida National Guard and State Guard would deploy to Texas amid what he calls an invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Watch Friday’s news conference again in the video player below:
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