Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ “Let them eat fake” Salisbury’s notorious city hall.
Salisbury’s city hall well known for its lack of tangible veracity and apparently a lack of ethical business practices among some of its department heads. Do we need to mention their inflated hokum about Fibrant turning the corner and making a profit. Salisbury is getting a well-earned rep as the “City of the Lie” throughout the state. Let’s cut to the chase. It’s non-competitive fiber optic network is outmanned and outgunned in the symmetrical Fiber Department by AT&T Gigapower and TWC Business Dedicated Ethernet with its symmetrical speeds up and down up to 10 gigs.
For starters AT&T Gigapower is already up and running in Salisbury. It offers 1 gig symetrical fiber to business or home at $70 a month compared to Fibrant’s overpriced $105. TWC Business Class offers up to 10 gigs with its highly regarded Dedicated Ethernet. (Also TWC Maxx Residential and Business offers more than enough high-speed internet (up to 300 mbps down and 20 up for speed happy small business folks and residents at budget prices).
Does anyone actually believe Fibrant can attract much if any hightech business here with runaway violent crime/property crime that the city is cooking the stats on or is flat out denying that murders and violent break-ins are happening? 27.2% poverty. A public school system with D and F schools? The middle and upper class pulling out for more liveable and safer environs elsewhere.
City Hall’s latest publicity ruse to distract Salisbury residents from Fibrant’s immense debacle and Salisbury’s continued freefall is called “America’s 10 gig city”. Anybody who has paid remote attention to Salisbury knows the following:
• Extremely poor public schools within the city limits (Our schools got either a D or an F). High Levels of illiteracy in the schools.
• 11 unsolved murders. No doubt 12. The murder of Sylvia Seebeck was no accident.
• Salisbury suffers from 27.2% poverty according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Poverty appears to be growing. Heaven help Salisbury if a recession hits, those stats could go flying up like a sledge hammer pounding the gong at a sideshow.
• Spendable income in the Bury is below what many retailers and businesses want to see in a city.
• Salisbury’s downgraded bond status with Moody’s and Fitch bond rating services due to $7.6 million big gulped from the water and sewer funds. Today that bond rating has become even more precarious owing to recent discoveries in the audit of the 2014-15 budget.
• Runaway violent and property crime with an understaffed and underpaid police department who seek better paying jobs elsewhere. Our police department was guided by Chief Rory Collins who moonlighted as security at the Housing Authority and couldn’t count or name the 11 unsolved murders.
• The city’s lack of meaningful and well-paying jobs forcing many of our workforce to commute to Concord, Mooresville, Charlotte, and Greensboro.
• Most of our educated young have fled Salisbury. They are not coming back.
• A crumbling water and sewer system is dire need of millions in upgrading. They sure could use that $7.6 million dollars Fibrant “borrowed” and hasn’t pay back.
• Fibrant’s utter failure at selling 1 gig (Fibrant only sold a few subscriptions) and the “audited” 2014-2015 budget shows immense multi-million dollars losses. Fibrant is the DEBACLE city council has tried desperately to hide from the public with “magic math” and now the 10 gig publicity ruse. We know that over 2,800 subscribers left since it rolled out and with the competition offering better deals more will jump ship.
• The Downtown with its South Main Badlands, the decrepit Empire Bat-Tel in dire need of bulldozing, and an expanding array of vacant storefronts is an unappetizing picture of blight. An extremely unhealthy musical chair business climate exists Downtown. Spendable income will only support so many restaurants and retailers.
• Somewhere in the vicinity of 800 abandoned and crumbling houses exist in the Bury. Large portions of Salisbury’s Downtown would make the perfect set for the movie version of “Grand Theft Auto”.
• Dead-in-the-water economic development due to poverty, lack of spendable income, lousy public schools, and FBI crime stats. You simply can’t sell used beds crawling with bedbugs.
• A city overwhelmed by a mushrooming heroin, meth, crack, and alcohol epidemic. A lot of our folks can’t even pass a drug test to get a job if one existed. Even the city’s former police chief Rory Collins admitted during a deposition he was under the influence of the powerul narcotic Oxycotin AKA “Hillbilly Heroin” on a twice a day basis. Running a police department, driving a vehicle, and toting a gun on a twice day dose of heavy duty Hillbilly Heroin? And this guy is still collecting a check as a police “advisor”?
There is no help on the way for Fibrant. It will continue flounder and lose millions. Their competitors are genuine corporate businesses and are well organized. If you profess to love your hometown you’ll drop your Fibrant subscribership like a hot potatoe and move to one the area’s private internet and TV providers. Maybe even cut the pay TV cord.
It is very likely that the FCC will okay TWC’s buyout by Charter and things will get even worse for Fibrant. Charter sells its internet and TV packages at bargain basement prices which is great for the consumer–but super bad for non-competitive municipal broadband shell games.
Time for city council to take off the blinders. High-tech businesses will take their businesses to far more livable places. Does anyone really believe that Salisbury can compete with Cary, Apex, Huntersville, Mooresville, Chapel Hill, or the better parts of North Carolina’s large metro areas? Not happening.
The way back for Salisbury is cutting Fibrant loose either by selling it (highly unlikely at this stage of the game) or bundling up and dumping on its certificates of participation lender.
