Category Archives: Jeers

Bad news.

UTOPIA Proving a Popular Scapegoat for City Revenue Issues

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A lot of cities have been talking property tax hikes lately, and the most certain thing about all of the proposals is that elected officials are going to look for someone or something to blame. In UTOPIA member cities, blaming the fiber network has become the easy go-to solution, especially since so many mayors and city council members weren’t involved in the original decision. The problem, however, is that this blame is completely paving over a deeper problem of city tax structure that’s boring, doesn’t fit the anti-UTOPIA narrative, and is a much larger problem for city budgets. Let’s take the examples of West Valley City, Orem, and Taylorsville, the latter of which is not a UTOPIA member city. In all three cases, they’ve called for large (as a percentage) property tax increases to make up for lagging sales tax revenues. So if UTOPIA is the cause of property tax increases, why would a non-member city need to more-or-less do the same thing?

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Has American Fork fixed its broadband network woes? Hardly

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Back on March 15, I filed a GRAMA request to get some more details on American Fork’s sale of AFCNet, their municipal broadband network, to a private party. The request was dutifully filled exactly 10 business days later on March 29. The documents revealed the terms of the sale, what was sold, and the payment history on the network. The following day, after years of silence about American Fork’s broadband, the Daily Herald publishes an article asserting that the city has managed to turn their city-owned broadband fortunes around. This, however, is an obvious snow job.

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Zombie Bill: SB112 Substitute Sails Through the Senate

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As many bills up on capitol hill do, SB112 came back from the dead after some tweaking and passed the Senate on a 20-8-1 vote. It’s now with the House, though it’s not yet on the reading calendar for a vote. While the tax break for cable operators isn’t as large as before, the premise of the bill is still fundamentally flawed as it does not consider a franchise fee to be payment for right-of-way. Make sure you call your member of the House and tell them to oppose this bill!

Oppose SB112

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For the most part, the Utah Legislature has spent very little time focusing on telecommunications issues. From my stance, that’s usually a good thing as when they focus on the sector, it is almost always to promote an anti-municipal telecom bill. This year, however, brings a bill worth opposing. SB112, sponsored by my own Senator, Wayne Neiderhauser, seeks to cut the state excise tax rate for cable television without making any adjustments for satellite providers.

Sen. Neiderhauser explains the rationale behind the bill: cable subscribers pay more taxes because of franchise fees, so the excise tax needs to be reduced so that the total of excise tax and franchise fees is equal between the two platforms. This, however, is an entirely illogical basis for providing the discount. Franchise fees are paid to a municipal government as compensation for accessing right-of-way. This includes being able to tear up city streets and erect poles in order to deploy this infrastructure. It has no relationship or bearing upon the state excise tax.

The end effect of this bill is to give cable television providers an unfair advantage in the tax system, enjoying a much higher benefit for the same level of taxation. If you want to cut taxes, that’s fine, but doing so in such a manner as to create a greater inequity in the tax structure is absurd. I encourage you to write your legislator to ask them to oppose SB112 as currently written.

Utah County Association of Realtors Planning Anti-UTOPIA Meeting in Orem

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See below for update.  It appears that astroturfing isn’t just for the Utah Taxpayers Association anymore. The Utah County Association of Realtors, a very powerful lobbying group, has been organizing a “public forum” entitled “What does UTOPIA mean for your home?” and has been using robocalls to promote attendance at it. The call says that UTOPIA will be in attendance, but they never extended an invitation to them. They did, however, extend an invitation to the Utah Taxpayers Association and two anti-UTOPIA candidates for city council. Unsurprisingly, the low-scruples ousted Utah County GOP Chairman Taylor Oldroyd is the prime organizer.

I’d advise UTOPIA supporters in or around Orem to show up to the meeting at 1031 W. Center St. Orem on Tuesday October 25 at 2PM. There will no doubt be disinformation by the truckload that will have to be countered.

UPDATE: Per Chris Nichols, the president of the Utah County Association of Realtors, the Utah Taxpayers Association has been un-invited from the event. He stated that his goal is strictly to discuss the implications of transfer of title when a homebuyer has chosen to finance the installation including how it appears when doing a search on the property. He also made it clear that any attempts to derail the discussion beyond that would be thoroughly unwelcome.

Chris also stated that UTOPIA was invited, but the person whom he named as “someone who has done work for UTOPIA” was not a name I’m familiar with. Granted, I don’t know everyone on their payroll, but if the PR department doesn’t know anything about it, it kind of maybe didn’t exactly go to the right person. Sounds like they both had their wires crossed on that one.

For the record, he was pretty mad at me and spent over 10 minutes chewing me out on the phone. I tried to explain why I formed the opinion I did, but he had no interest in hearing it. The website for the event links straight to the light-on-facts UTA website and lists a smattering of candidates for city council in Orem, both of whom are anti-UTOPIA (though one of them is being a realist about the situation). These combined with questions that appear to imply that the UTOPIA contract causes significant real estate sale issues created a very bad public face. The website itself also has no contact information as to who the responsible party would be.

My take? He wasn’t holding a tight enough leash on his employee Oldroyd who then worked with the UTA to try and sneakily co-opt the event for his own political purposes. My publicizing of it was very embarassing (and understandably so) and he needed to take it out on someone right then and there. Hey Chris? No hard feelings this time, but maybe try to be a bit more understanding of where someone else is coming from next time around. A lot of bloggers wouldn’t be as gracious as I am to heavily update an article to show both sides.

Comcast’s $10 Service is Smoke and Mirrors

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One of the conditions placed upon Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal was to start offering a cost-conscious Internet plan for low-income households. This also includes a plan to offer cheap PCs to those families so that they can actually use the service. As with any deal, though, the devil is in the details. Upon closer examination, it would appear that Comcast has simply found a way to create a new revenue stream with some great PR. Combined with the stringent terms of use, it’s obvious that the entire thing is puffed up well beyond what it actually is.

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Re-writing Reality: Utah Taxpayers Association Spins on iProvo

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It’s almost become too easy to pick on the Utah Taxpayers Association when they get a story so very, very wrong. The latest work of fiction is thacceir tortured stance on iProvo, one in which they perform twists of logic to support how things have unfolded with iProvo and yet continue to vilify what UTOPIA does. As usual, this requires a point-by-point breakdown of where they lack any kind of consistency and twist or invent facts to support their weak sauce arguments.

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Comcast Can’t Shake the Anti-P2P Legacy

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Yesterday morning, the Internet went into a total tizzy when Comcast users found themselves unable to access the infamous torrent site ThePirateBay. Almost immediately, the accusations of intentional blocking spread like wildfire despite Comcast’s insistence that they aren’t doing anything. This reveals a pretty telling truth: Comcast’s foray into filtering traffic has done permanent and incalculable damage to the brand, even years after admitting to the blocking and putting an end to it.

Is Comcast blocking anything? I doubt it. They took such a big PR black eye the first time that they’re unlikely to be dumb enough to try it again. That the stain persists years later, however, shows what a bad move it is to manipulate user traffic. Let that be a warning to all service providers of the lasting consequences of abusing users.

Exclusive: Payson Not Showing at UTOPIA Board Meetings

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For quite some time now, Payson has seemed to be afflicted with a huge case of buyer’s remorse about UTOPIA. Back in 2008, they opted to not participate in the new round of bonding and later punted on joining the UIA. (Who knows if they’ll even come up with the matching funds to participate in the federal stimulus either.) The biggest shocker, though, comes from a review of UTOPIA board minutes. A review of these shows that Payson’s UTOPIA board member hasn’t been showing up to many of the meetings, even when one was held in Payson at what I can imagine was great inconvenience to the members of the other cities.

My review of the minutes shows that in 2009, Payson did not attend nine of the monthly board meetings. In 2010, eight meetings were missed. Neither of the 2011 board meetings with available minutes show that Payson was in attendance, and I’m willing to bet that the others that I don’t have minutes for would show a similar pattern. Making it to just five meetings in over two years is abysmal, especially when there’s the option to participate via phone.

Given the large amount of stranded investment in the city and Payson’s large financial commitments to the network, this seems like a total abdication of their responsibility to city taxpayers. Shouldn’t they be making an effort to get the network covering both operational costs and debt service? Wouldn’t it be prudent to set aside money for participating in the UIA, money that is guaranteed to be paid back by subscribers and utilize infrastructure already in the ground? Why would Payson do an ostrich impersonation in the face of the harsh fiscal realities?

If I were a resident of Payson, I’d be out for blood. Contact Councilman Brad Daley and let him know that if he’s going to be on the board, he has a responsibility to show up to meetings and do the people’s work, especially since he voted for UTOPIA in the first place. If he won’t do it, it’s time to pressure Mayor Rick Moore to find someone who will.

Connected Lyfe, Disconnected

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Word on the street is that the plug is being pulled on Connected Lyfe (or Lyfe Communications, or whatever company name they go by now). Several sources have confirmed that the video head end they purchased from UTOPIA has been returned as they are no longer able to make the payments. I’ve also heard that, unsurprisingly, most of their difficultly came from an inability to negotiate needed video licenses from programmers to roll out their ambitious video product.

I can’t say I’m too surprised. Technologically speaking, they had all the right ingredients. Most of the guys who founded Connected Lyfe had been working for Move Networks, a company that made some impressive video streaming products that could dynamically adjust the video bitrate depending on current bandwidth conditions without a bunch of annoying buffering. Where they went wrong, however, was thinking that programmers would line up to stream their shows to any and all screens they could support. I mean, the networks literally own Hulu and even they can’t get too disruptive. Combined with the rapid burn of investor cash, I couldn’t see this one going much of anywhere.

I hear, though, that UTOPIA is working on some stringent new requirements for new providers so that these kinds of things start happening. I understand they’ve been in the works for a few months and still aren’t finalized, but hopefully we’ve seen an end of shining star new providers that flame out.