Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ The horror story is never ending in Salisbury, N.C. home of “America’s Gig City”. Last week its grossly-over-priced telephone system collapsed for 2 days harming its already beleaguered downtown businesses and a few weeks prior Fibrant’s gig internet collapsed for 18 hours stirring the ire of its alleged 3,000 subscribers. If that wasn’t enough, the City of Salisbury faces being junk bonded by Moody’s bond rating service for Fibrant’s failure to pay back $7.6 Million dollars to Salisbury’s water and sewer fund. Likely the hammer will come down hard on “America’s Gig City” sometimes before spring.
Salisbury’s city council has become the laughing stock of Rowan County and the Charlotte region for biting off more than they could possibly chew in rolling out its municipal fiber optic network. Up until July 2014 Fibrant could only sign up two 100 Mbps subscribers since the “soft rollout” of 2010. The promise of business being lured to Salisbury was never even remotely fulfilled. Instead business fled Salisbury and its Downtown area is wretching with ugly vacancies, blight, and streets devoid of humans.
Violent crime and murder is spiraling out of control in the “Bury”. It’s public schools scored badly in the State Education READY Report. The city is under siege from intense gang activity and a meth, heroin, and crack epidemic. Disposable income is at low tide in a city touting a 25% poverty–named in 2014 as one of the 5 most impoverished cities in the U.S.A. with “Soaring Poverty”. If that isn’t enough for Salisbury to receive a merciful “coup de grace”, then the fact that a growing stampede of its working class citizens are packing up and moving out to locate jobs and more livable conditions elsewhere.
Salisbury’s Fibrant unable to come anywhere near turning the corner to break even despite wild claims that it has made a profit through the abuse of magic math. In magic math Fibrant employee salaries are hidden in other city departments, $7.6 million dollars, owed to the city water and sewer utilities, are forgotten, pole fees and pole transfers are reported late so they don’t make the books, and delayed payments for TV programming rights disappear. At this point in time Fibrant is many millions in the red and light years from breaking even. City Councilman William “Pete” Kennedy poured ice water on fellow city council astronauts after they gave “glowing” reports of their “Gig Cities Summit” junket when he told them: “If somebody makes us an offer for it (Fibrant) we should at least entertain it.”
Pete, they should unload this emaciated albatross the moment somebody flashes some green!
Now throughout 2015 “America’s Gig City” gets buried alive when TWC, AT&T U-Verse, and Google Fiber rollout gig services across North Carolina. Salisbury will be water boarded locally by TWC and AT&T U-Verse when they do their gig in the Charlotte region. And who would even consider Salisbury when such highly livable cities like Raleigh, Carey, Huntersville, Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Concord, and others with so much to offer, go gig?
http://rowanfreepress.com/fibrant/
