Steve Mensing, Editor
♦According to a recent article in the city’s other news source, North Carolina’s Local Government Commission warned Salisbury in early 2012 that the city’s fund balance seemed much lower than comparable cities, and Fibrant showed signs of financial stress. Since the warning, the city clipped some costs and increased taxes and fees (just what taxpayers need) to build up the general fund. The city’s workforce sky-dived to 428 employees in 2013, down from 454 employees with many needed police and fireman disappearing though retirement, wrongful terminations, or firing the prior year. The city has the smallest workforce in a decade and the least ability to provide services. Recall the city’s Amazonia like weed and grass growth last spring and summer.
Salisbury announced Fibrant lost $4.1 million in 2013 according to the Post. Fibrant borrowed more than $7 million from the water and sewer reserve funds.
We wonder how much money was taken from the water and sewer funds from surrounding municipalities? Granite Quarry’s borough hall has FREE Fibrant paid for by city of Salisbury taxpayers. They were forced to foot the expensive bill of running fiber optic out to this town, making installations, servicing them, and providing free service. If you doubt what we are saying simply walk around the borough hall and you’ll note Fibrant’s fiber optic cable and Cat 5 VOIP boxes.
Make no mistake unless someone arbitrarily dismisses somewhere in the vicinity of 70 plus million in debt and 7 million dollars grabbed from the reserve funds Fibrant can not even dream of breaking even next year or for decades in the future. Fibrant is an unmistakable debacle–a worse case scenario for any small city with already soaring poverty (28% according to U.S. Census reports.
The city temporarily toyed with Fibrant’s budget by refinancing some of the 20-year debt, hiding employee’s salaries in other departments, and allegedly renegotiating contracts with internet, phone, and TV providers. Still not breaking even or making a profit. Alas Fibrant claims only 3 employees and they appear to be fixing traffic lights and doing other odd jobs around Salisbury. Hey there’s a lot of mowing to be done. They could be returning big bucks to the city’s coffers by washing cars or going door to door washing windows.
Self-sustaining? Not in the face of over $3 million dollars in debt and interest to be paid every year until 2029. Area incumbents are racing further and further ahead of in the technology.
• TWC is said to be bringing 100 Mbps to the Charlotte region (Salisbury) later in 2014. U-verse is gradually beefing up their speeds.
• U-Verse, TWC, DirecTV, and Dish all provide TV to internet enabled devices like PCs, Apples, IPADs, Droid tablets, and smart phones. Fibrant does not.
• Verizon partnered with TWC and allows them to employee their devices to use their WIFI hotspots out of the area. Fibrant has no such partnerships.
• All of the incumbents use state-of-the-art TV set top boxes and DVRs. Fibrant, because it spent its certificates of participation $ 33 billion dollars, has none of its own money left to keep up with the big boys’ technological improvements. Its basically over for Fibrant unless they take massive gulps from city enterprise funds.
What Fibrant needs do to keep losses down are the following:
• Get better at answering their phones and making calls back. Having only 3 employees (the city claims this) limits their ability to service calls.
• Dump their outrageous contracts because TWC and U-verse did that back in 2010. That is a huge turnoff to prospective customers. What residential customer wants a contract?
• Get apps so your TV can be played on internet enabled devices. All the incumbents do it. This kills your TV sales. Besides you are behind the times with your ancient set top boxes and the high cost of your TV services.
• Bag the telephone service at $45 a month. Everybody else is getting FREE VOIP phone service from Google, or buying really inexpensive services from Magic Jack (who supply Free phone aps for IPads and Droid devices). More people are using cell phones than land lines. Seriously nobody in their right mind pays $45 a month for a VOIP phone.
• Hire retention specialists like TWC and U-verse do and renegotiate with your customers who want to take off because they can’t afford your services or who are greatly disatisfied. Remember a customer retained is better than none at all.
• And why even bother with Fibrant TV or any form of TV when you can get IPTV devices like ROKU 3 or Apple TV and get an enormous collection of channels and movies at immense savings. Combine an IPTV device with an indoor and outdoor antenna to grab over 30 to 40 TV broadcast channels in state-of-the-art 1080P HD for FREE.
• Develop an incentive strategy for your customers to stay after your outages. Recall that Fibrant warned of more future outages because of their problematic equipment?
• Please don’t charge customers for your 25 First Step TV channels. Guide them to buy an indoor TV antenna where they can watch broadcast channels for FREE. You really don’t want to continue having a bad consumer rep.
• Consider remaking Fibrant into a “cooperative” where folks, who want to subscribe, join by membership. Make it a “special club” and help take it off the taxpayers backs. Model it after Yadtel a successful “cooperative”.
• Dump Fibrant’s name as its been negatively defined. When people say the word Fibrant, they think: Fibrant Debacle.
