Last week’s #KYGA Week 10 post from the Bluegrass Institute’s Government Affairs Director Sarah Durand included a quick mention that the Senate’s version of the state budget removed almost all of the general fund support for Kentucky Wired.

We admit, we didn’t see this coming, especially from that end of the Capitol.

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, established himself early on as a legislative champion of the project.

Kentucky Wired, however, also has long-time critics in the upper chamber, namely Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ryland Heights, chairman of the Senate Appropriations and Revenue Committee.

When the House passed House Bill 1 — the state executive branch budget — Kentucky Wired* was fully funded.

(*Kentucky Wired is identified in the budget by its state agency name, the Kentucky Communications Network Authority).

The Senate version of the budget stripped out $84.1 million of funding Kentucky Wired needs to finance its debt. The program, quite simply, will need to be shut down without that General Fund appropriation.

The Bluegrass Institute has long been Kentucky Wired’s fiercest critic. BIPPS President Jim Waters wrote back in 2018:

Supporters of the failed Kentucky Wired project along with those simply lacking the political will to pull the plug on this Utopian foray into the dreamy world of government-owned, run and controlled broadband try hard to convince themselves and others that the project is too big — and too far along — to fail.

Divorcing now before spending General Fund dollars — after which there would be no going back on a project that could eventually cost $1 billion — would protect Kentucky taxpayers from being forced into a long marriage ​to a real loser.

If the General Assembly would have listened years ago, Kentuckians wouldn’t have seen hundreds of millions of their hard earned tax dollars squandered on this broadband boondoggle.

Whatever the circumstances are that brought the Senate to the place where they’re ready to pull the plug, we hope they stand strong.

In fact, to make it easy, the House budget conferees should just agree with the Senate’s version and finally put the Kentucky Wired fiasco behind us.