Please, please let the price set on the old Adelphia cable system by Judge Robert Gerber in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court allow local officials to come to their senses before it is too late. Davidson, Mooresville, Troutman and Cornelius are still sniffing around buying the system from Time Warner and running a government cable TV utility.
But Judge Gerber yesterday set the value of each subscriber at $3,810 — exactly where Time Warner had pegged it and some $1000 more than the towns had wanted. The towns thought they could buy the system for closer to $2800 and then flip it back to Time Warner for a quick profit. See? Simple.
This alone should kill off talk of buying the system.
However, there are evidently still some backers of a government-run CATV operation who actually want to spend up to $80 million to buy the rights to the 16,000 subscribers and try to run the system in-house. Why? I have no earthly idea.
But an end is in sight to this saga. The towns have 30 days to buy the system now that a price has been set.
Please, please let this end then.
Update: Whoa! There’s already spin on the numbers. Mooresville commissioner Frank Rader now claims that the $3800 per subscriber number is what the towns expected all along. That clashes with previous statements by Davidson Town Manager Leamon Brice, who pegged the towns’ per subscriber price at $2800. Who is right?
