Steve Mensing, Editor
♦City of Salisbury’s employees directly felt the Fibrant debacle’s shockwaves as some of the old guard were terminated or ”resigned” in recent weeks. Fibrant’s towering 73 million dollar debt forced the city to chop department heads and lower echelon employees. The city’s police and fire department ranks are now understaffed. Over the past year or so, a growing number city of employees “resigned” or were terminated. Many well-known city department heads and key city staff left or were fired, including former City Engineer Dan Mikkelson, Planning Director Joe Morris, Parks and Recreation Director Gail Elder White, and Park’s Program Manager Jeff Holshouser. These city staffers joined such notable employees as Salisbury Police Officer Kenny Lane, Fibrant CEO Mike Crowell, and City Information Officer Karen Wilkinson.
According to city insiders, more jobs are expected to be cut or phased out. Fibrant’s impact on the city budget is immense. That impact is growing due to Fibrant’s continued ”borrowing” of the city’s reserve funds and, to date, not paying back the principal and interest on those loans. Further,the city budget is being gored by Fibrant’s requirement to pay back certificate of participation lenders over 3 million dollars a year every year until 2029. An impossible millstone making it extremely unlikely Fibrant will break even for years to come if at all.
Many city insiders inform us Salisbury is staggering under Fibrant’s immense weight as pressure mounts for additional job cuts. For weeks now, the RFP received reports from long-term city employees urged to resign or face job reassignments, forcing them to quit. Many city workers worry about job security in a very turbulent environment. Over the past two years, a sizeable number of present and former city employees reported that city supervisors warned employees not to speak critically about the city government in the local media. In the months after Fibrant’s “soft rollout”, Fibrant employees were warned not to speak to me. They were shown enlarged photocopies of photos of John Bare and myself (We put up the consumer activist website Anti-Fibrant.com). So much for government workers free speech rights.
With Fibrant’s continued downward spiraling stats and its inability to sign folks up, we hope the city learns something from the network’s feedback and our city residents strong rejection of it. During its infamous rollout, Fibrant blew all of its certificates of participation money by June 2011. The city and our taxpayers can no longer afford to carry Fibrant’s weight. It devours our water and sewer funds and impacts our city’s taxes, fees, and utility bills. Fibrant curtails our city’s ability to undertake much needed programs and now it erases city jobs. Our city government needs to recognize that Fibrant has timed out. Its been several years since its launching and its condition has worsened to the point that the once-hopeful Fiber optic network has now become the brunt of jokes. City employees are paying the price for a lack of due diligence on the part of some former city leaders. If nothing is done about Fibrant, city council is likely to experience much difficulty in trying to retain their seats. Salisbury’s city government has issues enough without being carpet-bombed by the continued Fibrant debacle and poor employee-management relations.
The city needs not to deny Fibrant’s status. The competitors packed too much heat, had far deeper pockets, and paid far better attention to what consumer’s desire. The incumbant’s pricing left Fibrant out to dry. It was an uneven contest from the outset. Now Fibrant is costing good people their jobs and subtracting mightily from Salisbury’s ability to grow and prosper. Our city needs to find a way out of Fibrant. It’s now pretty much public knowledge that our city’s fiber optic network didn’t work out. Perhaps it can be sold off without too much loss to some adventuresome private. Or Fibrant could be turned into a cooperative to minimize its continued parasitism on our city’s financial core.
There is no shame in admitting the city’s adventure into broadband didn’t pan out as imagined. The history of municipal fiber optic networks is not rosy, especially in areas where deep pocketed incumbents are entrenched. Such is the case in Salisbury. Time to protect our city and its workers.
Why municipal broadband networks seldom work:
http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/20849.pdf
