LA City Votes For Municipal Fiber Network

An anonymous reader writes "On Saturday, Lafayette, Louisiana voters gave BellSouth and Cox the collective finger and approved a municipal FTTH network by a 62% to 38% margin. The Daily Advertiser has coverage of the vote and possible repercussions. The hotly-contested vote was prompted by a lawsuit by BellSouth and Cox Communications, who bitterly opposed the plan. BellSouth threatened to close a Cingular call center if the plan passed, and the companies employed push polling, including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming and block religious channels."

Comments

Re:La not LA

[Mahou]

yeh http://www.netstate.com/states/links/la_links.htm LA is for postal and La is traditional abbreviation.

Re:Religious channels

[Akai]

It's a big bit of puffed smoke.

The seperation of church and state is not the exclustion of all religion from the public space, it is the avoidance of sponsoring or establishng a state religion.

In you public grounds example, if a local government were to allow a christian group to hold a christmas pagent, then they legally would be oblidged to allow the local pagans to celebrate the soltice on the same or comparable grounds.

For TV, that's another thing, because religion on TV is a private enterprise function, not a government function. A municiple cable company most likely would be governed by the same FCC statutes that corporate cable companies must follow. These statutes include a provision called "must carry" which allows any TV Station over a certain signal strengh to request and recieve carriage on the cable network.

For non-broadcast cable relgious stations, that would be a business, as opposed to a legal decision I think. The Click Network is Tacoma, Washington's municiple network, run by the city-owned power company. A quick perusal of their cabler offering includes many local channels, some no doubt religious, as well as several cable religious channels. Tacoma isn't exactly the bible-belt, so if there were going to be challenges to the programming content they most likely would have occured there, than in the heart of the south.

What is Push Polling:

[boijames]

From Wikipedia:

A push poll is a political campaigntechnique in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll]. Push polls are generally viewed as a form of negative campaigning. The term is also sometimes used incorrectly to refer to legitimate polls which test political messages, some of which may be negative. Push polling has been condemned by the American Association of Political Consultants.

The mildest forms of push polling are designed merely to remind voters of a particular issue. For instance, a push poll might ask respondents to rank candidates based on their support of abortion in order to get voters thinking about that issue.

More negative are attacks on another candidate by using polls. These attacks often contain information with little or no basis in fact.

True push polls tend to be very short, with only a handful of questions, so as to make as many calls as possible. The data obtained is discarded, not analyzed. Any poll that does not ask demographic information -- such as age, income, or race -- is generally not a legitimate poll, but some form of advertising.

Perhaps the most famous alleged use of push polls is in the 2000 United States Republican Party primaries, when it was alleged that George W. Bush's campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. Voters in South Carolina reported being asked "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" an allegation that had no substance but planted the idea of undisclosed allegations in the minds of thousands of primary voters. McCain and his wife had in fact adopted an Asian child.

We've been through this, and it worked

[botlrokit]

Our local municipal utility company wanted to get in on this game about three years ago. They wanted to raise the money through bonds, and were successful with the City Commission in securing the bonds. Work began, but not before two voices were raised: A local upstart Bell$outh-Buyback company, and a multimagillion dollar flash-in-the-pan cable company both went to the public airwaves and local newspaper, and began fomenting all kinds of arrogance about how the public shouldn't fund this venture without public approval, and "how dare the city council speak like this on behalf of the community", and "we're going to sue your nuts off, you mere public utility!" Then on May 4, 2003, a tornado swept through our downtown district and wiped the Internet Upstart's building right off the map. Instantly, they had a new home, and were up and running again in relatively short order, thanks to the utility company's kindness in letting them use some unusued space in their building. The Internet Upstart's commentary quickly dissipated, and the fiber was strung through the city on schedule.

Re:Broadband and prosperity have little in common

[Capsaicin]

>> The government getting involved to compete is socialism, not capitalism.

so?

What do you mean "so"?! Don't you know ideological purity is sooooo much more important than positive outcomes?

Re:The cities have a right

[Hungus]

Yeah, you just have more faith in the Govt. than I do.

Sounds like your town did things right, but I tend to think that puts it in the very small minority.

Thats the nice thing however about Local vs fed. as an AC in this thread completely got wrong, or just trolled about, the Feds are supposedly restricted to only what powers were granted to them in the Constitution, local/ state etc are free to do anything else (i.e. what powers not specifically granted to the feds is allowed to the states) the best example of this is the church, People (especially arch conservative Baptists) rant about separation of church and state and how any collusion between the two is evil by definition seem to forget that the states had their own churches for quite a while .. lie the State Church of Virginia which lasted until the late 1800's and it was constitutional! In any case I ramble on what I am saying is that local communities are (or should be) free to make such decisions themselves, I just tend to think we are all a lot better off when govt. is small rather than large.

Re:Well, this is good.

[vought]

Of course I'm a little worried that maybe Louisiana is not the best place to try something like this... since Louisiana is by some metrics of measurement the most corruption-plagued state government in the union... does the City of Lafayette tend to suffer from this similarly?

No. While Louisiana is famous for it's politicians who get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Lafayette is one of the brightest spots on the map when it comes to honesty and relative transparency in city-parish government.

Unlike most other states, many Parishes and Cities in Louisiana have joined to form city-parish governments. (Parishes in Louisiana are analogous to Counties in other states).

Lafayette, once the parish seat of Lafayette Parish, is now the seat of the city-parish government, which is responsible for the oversight of Lafayette Utility Services, which is in turn responsible for installation (done)*, buildout (ongoing) and maintenance of the fiber network.

(In the olden days (pre-1983 or so), Lafayette Parish's unincorporated areas were maintained by the Police Jury a quasi-enforcement non-rulemaking entity. Now the city and unincorporated areas are goverened by the same entity; municipalities within the parish maintain their own town/city governments.)

*As far as I understand it, most of the dark fiber ring encircling most of Lafayette (the city) was put in place over the last ten years during significant drainage and road upgrades.