UTA Threatening to Sue UTOPIA and Brigham City
Hot off of their misinformation campaign to residents, the Utah Taxpayers Association is now rattling their legal sabers at UTOPIA and Brigham City over the Special Assessment Area (SAA). The UTA is claiming that participants were deprived of due process because the terms were not explained properly and that there wasn’t a public hearing. These claims, however, are a matter of pure fiction. Many of the comments I’ve read indicate that the terms were explained and paper copies of the agreement provided via mail by the city. The initial meeting held in November to form the SAA was a public hearing and was well-attended.
What’s interesting, however, is that it was Qwest that initially filed FOIA requests with Brigham City to see the terms of the SAA, yet the UTA is the one making legal threats. My suspicion is that, after getting their butts kicked in court, Qwest wants to use the UTA as their proxy in these fights. The UTA refuses to disclose how much money individual members contribute or what influence any members exercise, ironic considering that they are protesting that there hasn’t been enough sunshine in the process.
The most galling part isn’t the lying and misrepresentation. At this point, it appears to be par for the course. No, what irks me the most is the UTA characterization of Brigham City residents as simple-minded fools just waiting to be duped by the first slick salesman that appears on their doorstep. I’ve met many residents and city employees from Brigham and I can tell you with complete certainty that they’re no dummies. They go to city council meetings, read the papers, and get informed on issues in a way that I wish their urban counterparts would consider trying out. (Seriously, I’ve found rural voters to be some of the sharpest tacks out there, especially when it comes to local politics.) How the UTA thinks it can simultaneously insult the intelligence of and purport to represent taxpayers is beyond me.
January 2010 Podcast is Scheduled
The next podcast will be on Friday, January 8 at 4PM MST. Our guest will be from Veracity Networks, the newly company formed after Veracity Communications and Broadweave Networks merged. We’ll be talking about iProvo and Veracity’s operations on UTOPIA. Join us by calling in, jumping in the show chat room, or contacting us on Twitter.
Will the Comcast-NBC merger mean stepped-up anti-piracy efforts?
If regulators sign off on it, the nation’s largest cable company will end up with a significant foothold in both the broadcast media and movie industries. Overnight, a content distributor becomes a content producer. Pre-merger, Comcast had little incentive to play along with the copyright cop ambitions of the RIAA and MPAA. This merger could change everything, driving Comcast into policing not just the distribution of its own wares but those of fellow studios.
Given how Time Warner Cable would regularly roll over for MPAA requests to disconnect service, both before and after being spun off from parent company Time Warner, this is a legitimate and pressing concern. The MPAA spends a lot of time trying to track down pirates and they often get the wrong person. The MPAA has also pushed hard for restricting what DVRs can record, locking down digital media to the point of near-uselessness, and wiping out net neutrality so that peer-to-peer programs can be blocked on a whim. None of these proposals are good for Comcast data or video customers and I do not think Comcast wants to unnecessarily restrict what customers can and cannot do with their connection.
That said, what will they do when Universal Pictures, a division of the merged company, has a competing interest? Which part of the company has their interests heard first? Will Comcast give Universal special access to routers and logs to track down pirates? Will they start using deep packet inspection? What can the falsely accused do about it?
This is why we should be very, very scared of the continued integration of media and telecommunications companies. The verticial monopoly of wholesale and retail telecom is bad enough, but when they control the content going over the pipe as well, it can get really ugly really fast.
Some Thoughts on the Future of the SAA
Now that the SAA has been approved in Brigham City and construction can start, we can expect that the same model will be executed in other member cities to help build out the infrastructure. Even neighborhoods not in member cities could get in on the action if they were so inclined. Even with how successful it was overall, I still have some reservations.
Articles on the Brigham City SAA Vote
The Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, and Standard-Examiner all have posted their articles on last night’s vote in Brigham City. According to the Trib, only about 70 of the over 1600 participants in the SAA opted to sign the UTA petition seeking to leave the SAA, a scant 4%. One of them admitted to not even reading the contract before signing up despite having been given the opportunity to do so. (There’s one in every crowd, you know?) Unsurprisingly, Ruth Jensen was the lone vote against it and tried several times to delay the meeting.
Brigham City will issue a bond for $3.66M (rated A3 by Moody’s or low risk) and chip in $655K of city money of which either $294K or $482K will be to wire city facilities, depending on which article is correct. The remainder of the $5.45M total construction cost comes from residents who chose to pay up-front. That works out to over 400 residents who opted to front the construction cost, over a quarter of the total participants. A pleasant surprise is that the cost of the SAA went down to $22.50 per participating residence.
From there, there’s a lot of divergence in the details of the articles. The Tribune article takes a decidedly negative slant in line with their recent editorial. The Deseret News claims that 600 participants in the SAA won’t get service because of low participation rates, a claim that doesn’t jive with the other articles at all.
BREAKING: Brigham City Approves UTOPIA SAA
Despite some recent controversy created by the UTA and saber-rattling by Qwest’s legal team, Brigham City has signed off on the UTOPIA SAA and cleared the way to start construction immediately. This will add 1,604 customers to the network and opens the way for additional customers to join the network at a later time. The network will cover the entire city and be available to every residence and business. No word yet on when the construction will be complete, but there is a rush to get it done before the ground freezes.
Reminder: Podcast Tomorrow
Just a reminder that the return of the FreeUTOPIA Podcast is tomorrow at 4PM. Come listen in online and feel free to call in at (347) 838-8025. Our guest will be Bryon Wentzlaff of Prime Time Communications. Special thanks to Mike Graves of The Surfonics for permission to use one of his songs for the new intro music.
Brigham City Responds to UTA FUD
Brigham City has posted a thorough rebuttal (warning: PDF) of UTA’s false and misleading mailer sent to residents earlier this week. (h/t: Paul Larsen) It thoroughly shreds the UTA’s positions which are about the same as claiming that dihydrogen monoxide is a dangerous substance. Many of them are the same rebuttal points I offered, some are new or provide additional specifics I did not have. It proved that UTA is, once again, making stuff up to derail UTOPIA while saying they’re looking out for taxpayers. If they really cared about taxpayers, they would stop trying to derail the project and make residents in the member cities pay higher taxes.
Utah Taxpayers Association Uses Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt Ahead of Brigham City Vote
The City Council in Brigham City will be holding a final vote on the UTOPIA SAA on Thursday December 10 at 7PM. This vote will determine if the SAA will move forward or not. Ahead of this, the Utah Taxpayers Association has decided to start up a campaign of disinformation to try and get residents against it. The following mailer was sent out to all residents of Brigham City (no doubt at a considerable cost to the UTA).
UTA Postcard Side A
UTA Postcard Side B
In their usual style, it purposefully misrepresents the SAA and plays loose with the facts. Here’s a few highlights.
- Before UTOPIA came to town, private companies would not invest in Brigham City. Both Comcast and Qwest refused to provide broadband service to residents despite repeated requests from the city to do so. After Brigham City joined UTOPIA, both companies started to roll out services. Chasing away private capital indeed.
- Sure, your house could be sold at a foreclosure sale if you fail to pay your part of the opt-in SAA. The same thing happens when you fail to pay your property taxes, your mortgage, or any other expense associated with owning a house or taking a loan out against it. Yet, for some reason, the UTA doesn’t seem to think those items are unfair. Nice spin, guys, but not paying your bills will, surprise, result in consequences. No duh.
- The UTA has purposefully inflated and misrepresented the city’s share of the expenses associated with the SAA. Brigham City has chosen to pay to hook up all city buildings with UTOPIA service. That accounts for well over half of the money the UTA is talking about and provides a legitimate service to the city. It is also entirely unknown what costs, if any, the city will have to carry for the bond to go through. This is because it depends entirely upon the number of people who sign up. Unless the UTA has some kind of magic crystal ball that I don’t (which I seriously doubt), they’re just making crap up. Again.
- The UTA is actually calling it a negative point that you’re paying $25 and don’t get service included at that price. I hate to break this to them, but there isn’t a provider on earth that would provide even a single part of a triple play for just $25/mo., at least not without line subsidies (like Qwest and the USF). This is just a nonsensical argument. It’s like complaining that the taxes you pay for roads don’t include a car.
- The UTA also points out that the money from the sale of your home will be used to pay off the costs of the SAA. Again, duh? What, does someone expect that the bond magically disappears because you sold your house? It’s another nonsense argument.
The flier is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to derail a project with significant community involvement and backing. The UTA isn’t looking out for taxpayers; they’re covering for their members. Let Brigham City’s residents spend their money how they want to, m-kay?