It wasn’t looking good for Virginia Beach Councilman Ben Davenport, who has championed extending a ring of high-speed broadband fiber across all of Hampton Roads.
He sat in the audience while the regional GO Virginia board, in charge of doling out a relatively small pot of money to projects promising jobs, was told that a committee had recommended giving the project just $130,000 to get started – far less than the $870,000 hoped for.
Jim Spore, executive director of Reinvent Hampton Roads, which administers the GO Virginia board, said the committee determined, among other things, that the total cost for the project’s second phase to actually construct the system would be more than GO Virginia could ever supply, indicating the General Assembly might need to take it on directly.
