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K.C. Neel
When the Oak Forest, Ill., city council denied Tele-Communications Inc.'s franchise transfer to AT&T in January, it was trying to send the MSO a message that's it's sick and tired of poor service.
But it looks like the bold action is a moot point because the council waited more than 120 days to act on the resolution and, as such, the franchise is automatically considered transferred, according to the 1992 Cable Act rules.
Oak Forest, a well-to-do community with 12,000 homes located about 20 miles south of Chicago, counts some 4,600 TCI customers, according to city administer Peter Stutynski. Residents have been plagued with service problems from TCI since the company took control of the system in 1990, he says. In their unanimous Jan. 13 decision to deny the transfer, the council didn't feel that a change of ownership would make any of the those problems disappear.
TCI GM Kirk Dale admits TCI hasn't had the best reputation with customers in Oak Forest in the past, but says things are different now. Complaints were rampant when Dale was hired in 1997. But in the last eight months, he says, the number of laments have all but disappeared.
"I know you can't change a perception overnight, but we're working overtime everyday to make good service happen," he says.
The decision to block the transfer stumped some industry watchers who wonder whether the vote was a classic cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face situation. Many cities are gladly endorsing the transfers and eager to get the TCI monkey off their backs. The conventional wisdom is that AT&T's superior customer service reputation will spill over onto its newly acquired cable operations and current problems will be a thing of the past.
"In my cities, OK'ing the transfer is a no-brainer," says University of Wisconsin professor and city consultant Barry Orton. "They realize their constituents will be better off (with AT&T at the helm)."
Stutynski says the council delayed its vote on the transfer until a due-diligence study on the merit of the transfer was complete. That took longer to finish than the 120-day window allowed by the FCC, he says.
Even if the council's vote doesn't legally hold water, it doesn't really matter, Stutynski says. "As far as we're concerned, we were making a statement. Residents have experienced repeated service problems, signal quality problems and outages since TCI took over. The only complaints we haven't heard about are hookups. Seems they don't have any problems getting people hooked up for service."
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