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Wed: Bad Connections
posted at 2010-06-02 23:58 | Last modified 2010-06-03 00:00
The state Senate is expected to hit the Pause button Thursday on an acrimonious battle over broadband. Various towns and cities around the state, frustrated by the absence of commercial broadband service, have started up their own public co-ops to provide public access.
This has not proven popular with commercial providers. The Telcos say the state’s 1929 Umstead Act forbids government entities from “unfair” competition with private enterprise.
After an unsuccessful bid to ban municipal broadband outright, the Telcos’ most recent effort would require cities to get voter approval for every step toward creating a public co-op, making the process so lengthy and expensive and politically fraught that most munis wouldn’t even attempt it. Problem solved, right?
Not so much. Broadband co-op defenders pushed back, winning a small victory today. The new, watered-down version of S1209 now mandates a one-year-ish moratorium on broadband coops that aren’t already in the works while lawmakers figure out how to regulate a service that’s gone from a luxury to a utility in no time flat.
Democratic Senator Joe Sam Queen (D-Haywood) represents several mountain counties where broadband still isn’t widely available. He says his constituents are sick and tired of waiting for it.
"They’re just frustrated that it’s not getting done by the cable companies, the network companies, whoever’s doing it. They’re just cherrypicking and leaving off so many of our citizens, and that’s just unacceptable. "
Queen says broadband access has become a necessity for economic development, and providing it statewide is a matter of equity.
"We have electricity to everybody, we have water to everybody… we should have internet to everybody in the 21st century. In my counties, we are still struggling to make that happen. Our children don’t have the virtual broadband educational opportunities that the y have in the urban areas. Our business owners don’t have the access to markets that our urban citizens have. "
Queen supports the new S1209. So does the League of Municipalities. And top AT&T lobbyist Herb Crenshaw likes it, too.
"Thought it was a good bill, a good compromise bill. Main thing is, it’ll bring everyone to the table to sit down and talk about the issues and hopefully resolve, you know, the questions on both sides. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But at least everybody’s talking."
Senator Dan Clodfelter (D-Meck), who helped negotiate the deal, patted himself on the back today at least as hard as he patted others on the head.
“This is not, I would say to you, a peace treaty. It is an armistice. And what the bill does is provide an armistice so that the shooting war stops and a conversation will occur among those people who’ve been meeting with each other in those conference rooms for the past week…Thank you all, because you did the grown-up thing, and I really appreciate it.”
It’s hard to say how much the various adults involved in the debate appreciated that compliment. But it had to have played better than Clodfelter’s comments before the meeting, intended for Senator Dan Blue’s ears, but inadvertently delivered in front of a live microphone.
“The -- what I call the crazies that circulate around this issue are not gonna like this.”
I’m sure Clodfelter isn’t the first lawmaker to think so, but most of them cover the microphone before they say it out loud.
Irony Supplement
The S1209 compromise also won the grudging support of Senator David “Business-Friendly” Hoyle (D-Gaston).
After telling Senate Finance that “Somebody, maybe a lot of bodies, needs to stand up for our free enterprise system,” Hoyle went on to knock the state’s biggest public utility co-op: “If anybody thinks that the experiment with Electricities was a resounding success, I’d like for you to raise your hand.”
No one did.
But after session today, quite a few of the Hons found their way across the street for free food and drinks provided by – wait for it – Electricities.
As one House Republican told me tonight, “If you can’t bash them and then eat their hors d’oeurves, you’re in the wrong business.”
No, sir, I’m not. But I'm thinking you might be.
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