Earlier this year, reports emerged that West Virginia had become the home of the $22,000 router. Using federal stimulus money, state officials decided to install more than 1,000 public institutions with enterprise-grade Cisco routers, according to reports in the Charleston Gazette. The sites included rural libraries with just a few computers, which could have been just fine spending less than $500 on a router, if not less than $100.
Now it turns out that not only are officials in the Mountain State spending big sums on high-powered routers; they’re also richly rewarding the consultants in charge of planning the whole fiasco. A story published today in the Gazette reports $1.3 million has been spent on consultants hired through a contract with Verizon.
The highest-paid one, Perry Rios, was paid $196 an hour, for a total of $731,770 through the end of last month. Rios, who lives in Colorado, made $512,000 in 2011 and is on track to earn another $329,000 this year.
Rios isn’t the only high-dollar consultant hired by the state. Two network engineers were paid $252,075 and $143,490 under $150-an-hour contracts. Two in-state project managers were paid $99,661 and $97,500 respectively, under $250-an-hour contracts. The five consultants were paid $1.3 million in total. All of the payroll information is based on a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Gazette.
None of the five consultants appear to have spoken at any public meetings, including monthly meetings of the Broadband Deployment Council (BDC). Rios has met twice with the BDC’s chairman, but none of the five consultants have filed any reports with those agencies. For his part, Rios also meets regularly with the “Tiger Team"—a group charged with ensuring public facilities get their upgraded routers and fiber-optic connections—and participates in conference calls with the federal agency that distributed the funds.