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Every so often, my Republican state senator, Ken Chlouber of Leadville, does something kinky and populist. His most recent affront to the authorities came last week when he amended a telecommunications bill.
The bill imposed penalties on local phone companies that don't cooperate in opening their exchanges to competition, as required by federal law. Chlouber added an amendment that would make every Colorado call a local call, even if it spanned the 400 miles from Maybell to Springfield.
The biggest local phone provider in Colorado -- US West -- immediately attacked Chlouber's proposal.
Company lobbyist Micki Hackenberger said that if the bill passed, people who don't make many in-state long-distance calls would subsidize those who do because the company would have to raise local rates to make up for lost long-distance revenues.
People don't want to pay $50 a month for local
service,
she said.
Hackenberger also failed to mention that people don't want to pay $100 a month for phone service which comes in the form of $20 for local service and $80 for calls to other Colorado towns. Under those circumstances, $50 can look like a bargain.
When it comes to local phone service, it's hard to believe anything that US West says.
There was no US West in 1974 when I moved to Kremmling. It was an ancestor company, Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph (a/k/a/ Mountain Bell), which provided local telephone service to Grand County.
This service was extremely local. It was a long-distance call from Kremmling to the county seat in Hot Sulphur Springs, 17 miles away. From Sulphur to Granby, 11 miles, was also long-distance. From Granby to Fraser, or Grand Lake to Granby -- that was long-distance, too. The county had five exchanges, all long-distance to each other.
I asked the phone company about this, and heard that Grand County, with about 5,000 people in 1,854 square miles, was just too spread-out and sparsely populated to support a unified local calling area.
That was a lie, of course, since Jackson County, just to the north, had only 1,800 people spread across 1,614 square miles. But North Park was all one calling area.
If Mountain Bell could manage that then for Walden and Cowdrey, it could have done so then (and since has, despite its earlier denials) for Kremmling and Granby.
In those pre-911 days, our county sheriff, Huck Henderson, wanted residents to be able to call his dispatchers toll-free. The phone company said it was impossible. Henderson took his case to the state Public Utilities Commission, which found compelling public-safety reasons to issue the appropriate orders to the phone company. Somehow the impossible became possible.
This may seem rather petty now, but it was pretty important then, and it illustrates the corporate culture of the company that became US West: that is, you are wise to be quite skeptical about anything they tell you.
When I moved to Salida in 1978, Buena Vista (25 miles away) was a long-distance call, and the phone company made the same arguments about keeping it that way. Now everything in the 100 miles from Leadville to Saguache is a local call from Salida.
In other words, the boundaries between local and long-distance keep changing, and on many previous occasions, something that US West said was impossible or impractical became possible and practical.
Now US West is saying that making every Colorado call local means some users would subsidize others, which implies that such things don't happen now.
But in truth, the entire telephone system is a maze of subsidies -- everything from universal service fund levies to the access fees that long-distance companies pay to local carriers.
If you live in the dense metro area, you subsidize me in a rural area, according to US West, which is why US West plans to sell this and other rural Colorado exchanges.
This brings to mind another point here -- why should the Colorado legislature listen to US West when US West wants to quit serving much of Colorado?
I can't think of any reasons why the lawmakers should listen to US West, but I can think of thousands, even millions, of reasons why our lawmakers do listen to US West.
There was the $5 million donation to the Salt Lake Olympics while the Utah legislature was rewriting that state's telephone regulations. There was the $25,000 US West contributed to our governor's inauguration two months ago, along with its contributions to statehouse races and its phalanx of lobbyists.
Or, as Chlouber explained, he serves in the Colorado
General Assembly brought to you by US West. They should pay
into the general fund for naming rights.
It's safe to predict that Chlouber's amendment will be killed. But it should be informative to see which of the many US West lackeys in the legislature steps forward to do the job -- in the public interest, of course.
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