This post submitted by Brad Crone, frequent NC SPIN panelist and CEO of Campaign Connections, a political consulting and PR firm:

The State House and State Senate have both passed similar bills that provide unlimited protection for AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Charter Cable and Cox Cable systems in the state. The measure basically prohibits any municipal or county government from getting into the fiber-optic cable business.

The measure stems from a long running fight the cable companies have had with the City of Wilson and the City of Salisbury.  Those two municipalities, with the approval and blessing from the Local Government Commission, borrowed about $30 million each to install fiber-optic cable in their communities.

As a result, the cities offered competing cable systems to their residential and business customers with cable television, telephone service and high-speed internet. In Wilson, for example, the city ran fiber-optic cables to all their residential customers. Their system is called Greenlight. This system provides a basic cable system that is less expensive than basic cable in say Clayton or Smithfield or Raleigh.

The competition has forced the cable system to upgrade their lines and facilities and lower their cable, phone and internet rates.  The cable companies really don’t like competition so they introduced a bill in the General Assembly that prohibits any other local governments from building out their own fiber optic cable system. 

The argument from the cable and telecom companies has been that the local governments have an “unfair” market advantage when it comes to paying taxes on profits and using taxpayer monies to build out their systems.

That may be true to a certain extent but what the public wasn’t told was the simple story that the cities had originally gone to the cable and telecom companies and asked them to partner with the local governments to bring high-speed internet services to their communities. Wilson has key operation centers for Branch Bank and Trust and they needed better internet connections. Salisbury is the corporate headquarters for food giant Food Lion and they needed better internet connections.

The cities went to the cable and telecom companies for help and didn’t get any. The cities saw the fiber optic cable systems as an investment to protect jobs and remain economically competitive.

The cable and telecom companies said they weren’t interested in partnering with Wilson or Salisbury and that they had no intention to spending the money necessary to provide the infrastructure with fiber optic cable to provide better phone, cable television and internet services to business and residential customers and consumers in either city.

So the cities said, if the cable and telecom companies won’t invest in our cities, we will...and they did.

The legislation leaves out an important element that will hurt consumers in the future. The cities should be allowed to expand their infrastructures, including fiber optic cable, if and only when the existing cable and telecom companies refuse to make the investments and refuse in writing to partner with the cities and counties to pay for the infrastructure upgrade.

Right now, the bill is one-sided, strictly on the side of the cable and telecom companies and that’s bad news for North Carolina consumers. We all love to hate the cable company and these two bills give us even more reason to cuss that remote.