Where’s Sue Myrick when you really need her?
Mecklenburg County and nearby towns may take over cable services for some subscribers in the wake of Adelphia cable company’s bankruptcy, officials said Thursday.
The county would do so as part of a consortium that includes Davidson, Cornelius, Mooresville, Huntersville and Troutman, county attorney Marvin Bethune said.
The cost? Try $80 million. That is insane. Maybe the government should take over running the grocery stores too.
Let’s back out what this is all about. Recall that Mecklenburg County thought it was going to get a free, gold-plated, NASA-worthy communications system from Time Warner Cable. It is the kind of shakedown localities perform on their cable franchisees all the time; a straight-up mafia-style stick-up, nothing less. Except that Time Warner refused to play ball.
Time Warner told the county it was not going to get its dream system — a system the county does not need — and the county went ape. Even though parts of the county and the northern towns were saddled with the horrible Adelphia system and Time Warner was willing to take on those areas, the county stamped its foot and said no — no more franchises for TW until it comes across with the dream system. The county took TW to court. And there the matter sat for months.
Until it became obvious that once Adelphia goes away thousands of county residents will have no cable provider. And so rather than allow TW serve them, and the TW franchise in Charlotte gets pretty high customer satisfaction marks, the county is cobbling together a crazy venture to duplicate what TW already does.
Saying “duplicate” is probably a stretch, too. Unless the service the county stitches together also includes a phone service component it will lack a major service improvement TW has been rolling out across the county. Adelphia has no phone offering and no HD DVR offering either. Adelphia is going out of business for a reason.
Yet the county bureaucracy would rather continue to screw over 16,000 thousand county residents than let TW “win” a petty dispute over some communications gear the county does not need and does not deserve.
Pathetic.
