Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm not familiar with the US model of church and state separation. Do US cities forbid religious parades on the grounds that public roads are maintained and operated by the government? Or is there some subtle legal difference between common roads and a common fibre optic network? Or is this, perchance, just a bit of puffed smoke?
I grew up in Lafayette. Rather, I grew up in Carencro, a few miles north, but since two Interstates cross in Lafayette (I-10 and I-49) more people know where it is. I spent much of my childhood there, since both my parents worked in "town".
Louisiana, despite the craven Christo-Republicanism currently grippping the state, has long and deep populist roots. Louisiana was one of the first states to have free textbooks for public school kids, and during a time when the state's agricultural base was in tatters, Huey Long rode to success on taxing the oil companies who were then punching a hole in the mud wherever they could, and using the money (well, most of it, anyway, or whatever didn't fall under the table) to build roads across the waterways that divided the state.
John Breaux and Bennet Johnson continued this tradition on the federal level to a certain extent; while Louisiana never had a large Air Force, Army, or Navy presence, and missed out on much of the Space Race southern welfare programs of the 60s, the state did get some heap-big federal dollars for I-10 across the Atchafalaya, I-55 through Manchac, and I-49 from Lafayette to Alexandria, which was one of the largest earthmoving projects in Insterstate highway history, and opened a remote part of the state to high speed travel, cutting the time from Lafayette to Alexandria to just under two hours in 1999 from a little under five hours in 1980.
Because of the infrastructure building, Louisiana is a far, far different place today. Lafayette's vote is a reflection of the very deeply-held Louisiana belief that big comanies get their money from the citizens anyway; why shouldn't we try to build one ourselves, with our money, and do it better?
Lafayette, by the way, has one of the best public utility systems around. LUS has always been self-sustaining, sells power to other utilities to lower ratepayer burden, and Lafayette is one of the cities that when hit by a hurricane, always amanges to get the power back on within a few days. They've also done an amazing job of cleaning up the neglected Vermilion river.
I'm proud to be from there, especially with the outcome of this vote, and the margin.
Go Cajuns!