Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ Maggie Blackwell’s defensive tap dance down at city council on Tuesday did little to convince anyone that Salisbury’s municipal broadband entry Fibrant was in the black.
She didn’t open Fibrant’s records for public scrutiny or answer specific public information requests about Fibrant’s actual performance. She certainly didn’t answer Moody’s Bond Rating service, which called the city out for not paying back 7.6 million dollars it borrowed from water and sewer funds and shows no intention of paying back. Or the charges leveled by the Carolina Journal, a noted public watchdog, about Salisbury’s breezy attitude about paying back the water and sewer loan.
Instead, Maggie mentioned a so-called rumor: “that the City of Salisbury is moving money around in order to prop up Fibrant”. Yoo hoo. Maggy, it’s public record that Salisbury pulled some 7.6 million dollars out of its water and sewer funds and to date has never paid it back. That’s why Moody’s, and later Fitch, downgraded the city’s bond rating. That’s why Moody’s warned the city they would downgrade them, junk bond style, in the near future. Myra Heard already told the Carolina Journal the city would not be paying back that loan.
http://www.carolinajournal.com/articles/display_story.html?id=11193
http://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2014/07/07/salisbury-shouldve-listened-to-sanera/
Frankly a lot of people no longer trust much of anything Salisbury City Council says because of their glaring cover-up and attempts to “move on” after the bizarre “mutual termination” of the former city manager that included his being granted an excessive “golden Parachute”. In any reasonable government, the facts of his “mutual termination” and the “golden parachute” would be aired. The city steadfastly and illegally refused and refuses to answer those questions, attempting instead to “move on”.
Of course, we are talking about the 300th or 298th ranked city in North Carolina, the one with the alleged “vibrant” downtown. Now the city lays claim to being “America’s Gig City”. There are quite a few gig cities cropping up all over the United States, and most have far higher livability than the ‘Bury.
On Tuesday, the interim city manager made the claim that Fibrant was operating in the black for the first time since 2010. Oddly, the city also made the same incredible claim in 2013 when they said they turned the corner and made a profit. I never heard city hall disavow the claim they made back in 2013. In fact, if memory serves me, the Post’s former city reporter questioned why the city had only “had” three Fibrant employees.
It’s been very easy to hide various Fibrant costs in other city departments, which they did in a previous “audit”, one done before the one most recently discussed at City Hall. It’s easy to create the illusion of profitability by having employees get their pay from other city departments or by having employees taking on dual rolls so that they are not counted as expenditures. It’s all legal I suppose, but it does create an illusion of profitability. There are many other borderline tricks to hide losses or to flat out ignore loans because there is no intention of repaying them. However, utility payers are harmed by such backdoor actions. Their water bills may be hiked, and the water system upgrades and needed repairs get neglected when funds are not replenished. Sadly, a lot of failing municipal telecoms across the U.S.A. are noted for dipping into their city’s enterprise funds as a survival tactic.
About the 3,200 alleged customers Fibrant is supposed to have–I take that with a grain of salt. The city hasn’t answered public information requests about their subscribership numbers. We’d like to see hard data about how many of Fibrant’s 3 basic services these “3,200” customers utilize. We’d also like to see how many of those subscribers are discounted or receive services “gratis”. We know that city employees received discounts or at least used to receive them. We’d also love to know how many former subscribers who, after dropping the service, are still be counted as part of the subscription base. A number of city employees tipped us off about this Fibrant practice to pump up their stats.
Why isn’t anyone questioning why the alleged profit-making number for Fibrant is now set at 3,000 subscribers, when back in 2011 the city claimed it required 4,500 subscribers to just break even?
Now, I haven’t heard anything yet about property taxes being pumped into Fibrant as Blackwell claimed elsewhere as a circulating rumor. However, I would not put anything past City Hall.
When Blackwell asked interim City Manager John Sofley, during Tuesday’s city council hokum, about channeling cash into Fibrant to make it appear cash positive, Sofely — who shook and made strange jerky movements — said: “No”. The performance reminded me of a fox leaving a henhouse with a trail covered with bloody feathers. Sofely, ever the good sport and who is in the running for city manager, would be a cinch to back up any of the city’s claims. His future employment depends on it. After all, he’s the budgetary magician who turns red into black.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want Fibrant to succeed, but there’s a heck of a lot of people in Salibury who certainly don’t want to pay Fibrant’s outrageous prices for their services or get stuck with Fibrant’s infamous contract. And there are a lot of non-Fibrant subscribers who don’t want Fibrant to clip them backdoor style by dipping into water/sewer funds and who would prefer that their city services didn’t shrink because of Fibrant’s massive impact.
Fibrant is still non-competitive in pricing and contract in most of their services. I certainly would not subscribe to either Fibrant’s inferior TV services or outrageously over-priced VOIP phone. I wouldn’t take on a contract for Fibrant’s internet or its other expenses if I had remained in the ‘Bury.
People can get an abundance of high-speed internet from TWC and AT&T U-Verse, and those services will speed up further in 2015. You can renegotiate your deals with the privates when they time out. DirecTV and Dish have outstanding TV deals and modern DVRs. All 4 broadband providers are mopping the floor with Fibrant. As I have said before, I’ve never seen any Fibrant trucks around unless they’re fixing a traffic light.
As for the city providing hard data, answering public information requests, or telling the truth about what happened when the former city manager was “mutually terminated”, it isn’t happening.
The standard audit performed on the city doesn’t go into much depth. It proves nothing about Fibrant’s actual status, nor does it ferret out how employees are moved around and counted in different departments. Back in 2013, a Salisbury Post reporter noted that Fibrant only showed 3 employees.
As for anyone on City Council having any credibility, they lost that back in the summer during the “mutual termination” cover-up and when city hall steadfastly and illegally refused to answer public information requests.
Fibrant remains a debacle, and its failure will continue to reverberate through ‘Bury for years to come. Salisbury already experienced a reduction in city services like the police, firemen, and streets departments. Salisbury has become a dump of little consequence, with a vacant pockmarked downtown and many of neighborhoods that get only lip service from the city.
If you haven’t already checked out far more livable cities elsewhere, I urge you to do so, especially if you have youngsters. I’m fortunate to live now in an outstanding city (Madison, Wisconsin) that doesn’t hang its hat on fictions or trumped up vibrancy. Salisbury has become a place to move away from.
Carolina Journal describes the reasons for Moody’s downgrading Salisbury’s bond rating due to Fibrant taking multi-million dollar gulps from Rowan-Salisbury utilities and not paying it back:
http://www.carolinajournal.com/articles/display_story.html?id=11193
http://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2014/07/07/salisbury-shouldve-listened-to-sanera/
City Council’s Cover-up of the “mutual termination” scandal at Salisbury’s City Hall:
http://rowanfreepress.com/salisburys-city-hall-scandal/
