After almost 4 hours of public comment, the Layton city council approved the resolution authorizing the new UTOPIA bonds by a 1-vote margin. This was a battleground meeting, too: Qwest had the room stuffed with employees and sent Jerry Fenn, President of Qwest for Utah while the UTA sent their point man, Royce Van Tassell, to stump for them. The public testimony was about as split as the council vote with a number of residents expressing frustration at both incumbent providers. My favorite part? When I got to spell out in excruciating detail the trail of broken promises and outright lies from both Qwest and Comcast. Those watching him said that Jerry Fenn looked very uncomfortable as I spelled out their $1.4B Telco Act of '96 fraud and their plans to use the FTTN upgrades to shut out competing DSL and phone retailers.
I'll be sure to post more when I find out how the votes in Brigham City and Perry went.
Was an interesting meeting, 2-3 local business showed up and spoke, one of them brought his 4.5k T1(1.5meg line) bill from qwest, others talked about how qwest and comcast have not rolled out service to many important business centers in town.
Brigham City – Tabled the decision for another day.
Perry – Voted Yes
Great! Glad we’ve got someone with the facts straight to let everyone know all the details and make educated choices!
I wanted to attend the meeting (I live in Layton) but family issues prevented me. I’m very glad to hear our city council made this decision.
Thanks for reporting this!
I heard your comments. You were not that impressive to me. Glad you impressed yourself. I am not employed by a company with a dog in this fight.