The California Public Utilities Commission released a technical-assistance presentation outlining how applicants should design project areas, how applications will be scored and ranked, and a new option to submit an alternate 90% coverage price proposal for the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Joanne Hobas, a member of the CPUC contract team supporting the BEAD program, said IPV 2 and the commission decision are “the 2 critical documents, that any potential applicant should have, at their side at all times in order to understand details regarding the rules of how the program will be administered.”

The guidance addresses three linked design requirements for project areas. First, project area units are census block groups or tribal lands; tribal-land boundaries take precedence where they differ from block-group boundaries. Second, units combined in a single application must be adjacent — except that intermediate units that contain no BEAD-eligible locations do not break adjacency. Third, applicants must include up to 50% of project-area units that the CPUC designates as “high need” (low-income or disadvantaged), where immediately physically contiguous high-need units exist; applicants may request a waiver only if no contiguous high-need units are available.

The CPUC provided illustrations to show compliant and noncompliant assemblies: a group of adjacent census block groups that each contain eligible locations is compliant; excluding an intermediate block group that does contain eligible locations makes a single application noncompliant, although the separated groups could be submitted as separate applications.

The guidance distinguishes the high-need obligation from adjacency: empty census block groups (those with no eligible BEAD locations) do not count toward the 50% high-need calculation. Hobas emphasized that applicants will see low-income/disadvantaged status and eligible-location counts for each unit in the grants-management system while building applications.

The presentation also explained how federal designations affect match requirements. NTIA-designated “high cost” census block groups are outside state control; for those, the federal government waived the 25% match requirement and applicants will be able to exclude those locations from their match obligation in the portal.

On scoring, the CPUC selected two discretionary criteria — equity and resilience — each worth up to 10 points in the federal scoring rubric for BEAD applications (total score = 100). Resilience points require a higher showing where locations fall in tier 2 or 3 high-fire-threat districts. Equity points measure the share of eligible locations in low-income or disadvantaged areas within the entire proposed project area (not the share of project-area units).

The CPUC reiterated the federal technology prioritization order: first, priority broadband (end-to-end fiber); second, reliable broadband services that meet BEAD technical standards (examples cited: hybrid fiber-coaxial, DSL, licensed or hybrid fixed wireless); and last, alternative technologies (unlicensed fixed wireless or low-Earth-orbit satellite) only where no affordable or qualifying terrestrial offer exists.

Selection and affordabilty procedures were described in detail. Applications will be scored and ranked statewide. The CPUC will consider the highest-scoring non-overlapping priority (fiber) applications first and determine whether each is affordable within the statewide BEAD budget. If an application is affordable it will be preliminarily assigned and removed from further consideration; if not, the CPUC may attempt negotiations to reduce cost or remove it from consideration. Overlapping lower-ranked applicants may be offered remaining unassigned project-area units at CPUC-determined prices; applicants who decline or cannot meet those prices are removed from consideration and the CPUC will move to the next applicant.

As part of efforts to maximize fiber deployment within the limited BEAD allocation, the CPUC said it may allow revised project boundaries, negotiate price or consider applicants’ alternate proposals. One specific alternate mechanism described is a 90% coverage price option: every application must provide a price proposal to serve 100% of the eligible locations in the assembled project area, and applicants may optionally submit an additional price for serving 90% of locations. If the CPUC cannot fund a 100% proposal for a project area within budget, it may consider the 90% proposals and fund the highest-scoring, affordable 90% offers. Applicants using the 90% option must identify the specific locations they would exclude and submit a corresponding revised match commitment.

Hobas said the grants-management system will display eligible-location counts, low-income/disadvantaged status, and federal high-cost designations to applicants while they design project areas, and that the CPUC will publish additional technical-assistance videos to support applicants.

The presentation repeatedly referenced two governing documents applicants should consult: the CPUC’s decision implementing BEAD rules and the Initial Proposal Volume 2 (IPV 2) the CPUC submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA and U.S. Department of Commerce determine federal designations such as high-cost block groups and the overall federal prioritization requirements.

The CPUC presentation described the selection process as subject to final federal approval at the end of the state review process and framed several steps (scoring, ranking, affordability checks, negotiation and preliminary assignment) as sequential parts of the statewide award process.

The video concluded with an invitation for questions and more technical-assistance resources from the CPUC contract team.