The complaint lists the NCTC and members of its 15-member board of directors, including Cox, as defendants. The complaint further singles out Cox as likely being the driving force behind denying LUS' membership, alleging:
For many years, NCTC treated all small cable systems, including public systems such as LUS, in a fair and non-discriminatory manner – as Congress intended in enacting Section 628. In recent years, however, NCTC has become increasingly dominated by a handful of sizable cable companies that have long records of hostility toward public communications systems. This trend rapidly gained momentum in 2009, when Cox Communications and Charter Communications joined NCTC, more than doubling NCTC’s subscriber base, and took seats on NCTC’s Board of Directors. Their entry may well have driven, or at least cemented, NCTC’s refusal to deal with LUS.
LUS has been trying to join NCTC since 2008, when the organization enacted a moratorium on new members. Since then, the organization has lifted the moratorium or made exceptions for Cox, Charter and, more recently, two other small municipal cable operators in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, NC, but not LUS. In its complaint LUS says that NCTC's admittance of Chattanooga and Wilson is the latest proof that NCTC's initial argument for withholding membership from LUS – privacy concerns arising from LUS being a public entity – is no longer valid. The complaint states:
Since the matters at issue between NCTC and LUS were virtually identical to those at issue between Chattanooga and Wilson, NCTC’s discrimination against LUS cannot be explained on legal or factual grounds. In fact, the only significant distinction between LUS and Chattanooga/Wilson is that LUS’s major rival, Cox Communications, is NCTC’s largest member as well as a prominent member of NCTC’s Board of Directors, whereas Chattanooga’s and Wilson’s major competitors, Comcast and Time Warner, respectively, are not members of NCTC.
In an e-mailed statement to The Independent, Cox Communications spokeswoman Patricia Parks Thompson states: "Cox has nothing to do with NCTC's membership decisions, which are entirely in the control of NCTC management. Cox has always embraced competition in Lafayette, and we will be vigorously defending ourselves against this meritless lawsuit."
LUS' FCC complaint, prepared by Lafayette city attorney Pat Ottinger and LUS Fiber attorney Jim Baller, acknowledges that the Communications Act does not expressly mention "the specific kinds of unfair and deceptive practices at issue here." However, LUS argues:
NCTC is not a private country club that is free to admit or reject whomever it pleases, nor is it still the small and powerless entity that it was before Congress enacted Section 628. Rather, acting under the protection that Congress afforded it in Section 628 for the express purpose of fostering vigorous competition in the cable industry, NCTC has grown into one of the most powerful players in the cable industry, with the power to cause great harm to the intended beneficiaries of Section 628, including LUS. It would flout Congress’s intent to allow the Defendants to pervert Section 628 by acting anti-competitively themselves, for the benefit of NCTC’s largest members." Section 628 states: "It shall be unlawful for a cable operator, a satellite cable programming vendor in which a cable operator has an attributable interest, or a satellite broadcast programming vendor to engage in unfair methods of competition."
In estimating the damage incurred to LUS in the complaint, LUS Fiber consultant Doug Dawson provides the following figures:
LUS is paying, and will pay, at least 10% to 15% more for access to video programming than it would pay if it were a member of NCTC. Applying these percentages to LUS's actual programming costs, and utilizing a conservative rate of projected subscriber growth, I estimate that LUS will suffer damages ranging between $227,000 and $341,000 for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2010 and between $663,000 and $995,000 for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2011. If LUS does not achieve its projected growth rates because of the cost pressures created by its exclusion from NCTC, its damages will be much higher, because they will also include lost revenues from sales of broadband and telephone services to subscribers that purchase bundled services.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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