Large telecom and oil companies want to pay less property taxes and don’t mind Montana homeowners and small businesses paying the difference.

Telecommunications companies and the oil industry are lobbying the Montana Legislature to lower their assessed property taxes, shifting tax collections away from themselves and towards homeowners and small businesses.

Members of the Montana Legislature’s Revenue and Transportation Interim Committee are reviewing how the state values property — an important prerequisite to setting property taxes. The state legislature intends to collect a certain amount of tax revenue from owned property in the state. What percentage is paid by large national and multinational corporations, small businesses, and homeowners is open to debate, and industry lobbyists are fighting to lower the taxes of some of Montana’s largest businesses. Critics contend that will shift a greater proportion of property taxes on those who don’t have the resources to pay lobbyists — independent small businesses and residential property owners.

The Missoulian reports that the interim committee is currently divided on the proposition — Republicans favoring the views of large corporations and Democrats in favor of small businesses and homeowners.

Outgoing Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer warns that Montanans are facing a corporate lobbying snowjob that will stick them with a higher tax bill.

“What they’re proposing is a great tax shift in favor of out-of-state and multinational corporations in Montana – a shift from those paying the taxes to small businesses and homeowners in Montana,” Schweitzer told the newspaper. “They’ve decided that they can hire lobbyists on both the Democratic and Republican side and pull the wool over legislators. This is the same cast of characters that brought us utility deregulation. What could go wrong?”

The Montana Budget and Policy Center agrees, suggesting a large shift in property taxes towards homeowners, small businesses, farmers and ranchers could prove shocking when tax bills start arriving in mailboxes.

Leading to change the property tax laws are cable television, telecommunications companies, and oil refineries, with the assistance of the Chamber of Commerce and the Montana Taxpayers Association, which does not disclose its funding sources.

Prior to the introduction of the “tax reform” study, large telecom companies including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Cablevision routinely appealed their property tax bills to the tune of $61.3 million out of $108.2 million owed in property taxes assessed from 2005-2011.

State Revenue Director Dan Bucks defends the current valuation system, which he says has used the same practices since the 1930s. Bucks warns if the tax burdens are shifted away from the telecommunications and oil industries, the difference will have to be paid by homeowners and small businesses.

The newspaper reports if Republicans control the 2013 Legislature, telecom and oil industry supporters in the state legislature are confident they can pass a bill to change property tax assessments, and Sen. Bruce Tutvedt, (R-Kalispell) acknowledged there would be a noticeable tax shift.

“We’ve got to take the political hit of the tax shift,” Tutvedt said. “If you’re going to be fair, then you shouldn’t get hit.”

Rep. Dick Barrett (D-Missoula) warned the Republican-backed measure could deliver tax bills packing a major wallop on unsuspecting property owners.

“They could be pretty severe, depending on what it looks like,” he said.

Comcast is running “welcome back” ads in Chattanooga that still claim they run America’s fastest ISP, when they don’t.

EPB, Chattanooga’s publicly-owned utility that operates the nation’s fastest gigabit broadband network, has already won the speed war, delivering consistently faster broadband service than any of its Tennessee competitors. So when facts are not on their side, competitors like Comcast and a conservative “watchdog” group simply make them up as they go along.

Comcast is running tear-jerker ads in Chattanooga featuring professional actors pretending to be ex-customers looking to own up to their “mistake” of turning their back on Comcast’s 250GB usage cap (now temporarily paroled), high prices, and questionable service.

“It turns out that the speeds I was looking for, Xfinity Internet had all along,” says the actor, before hugging an “Xfinity service technician” in the pouring rain. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

The ad closes repeating the demonstrably false claim Comcast operates “the nation’s fastest Internet Service Provider.”

“I see those commercials on television and I’m thinking, I wonder how much did they pay you to say that,” says an actual EPB customer in a response ad from the public utility.

It turns out quite a lot. The high-priced campaign is just the latest work from professional advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco, which is quite a distance from Tennessee. Goodby has produced Comcast ads for years. The ad campaign also targets the cable company’s other rival that consistently beats its broadband speeds — Verizon FiOS.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Comcast tried to ram their “welcome back” message home further in a newspaper interview with the Times Free Press, claiming “a lot of customers are coming back to Xfinity” because Comcast has a larger OnDemand library, “integrated applications and greater array of choices.”

Comcast does not provide any statistics or evidence to back up its claims, but EPB president and CEO Harold DePriest has already seen enough deception from the cable company to call the latest claims “totally false.”

In fact, DePriest notes, customers come and go from EPB just as they do with Comcast. The real story, in his view, is how many more customers arrive at EPB’s door than leave, and DePriest says they are keeping more customers than they lose.

EPB fully launched in Chattanooga in 2010, and despite Comcast and AT&T’s best customer retention efforts, EPB has signed up 37,000 customers so far, with about 20 new ones arriving every day. (Comcast still has more than 100,000 customers in the area.)

Many come for the EPB’s far superior broadband speeds, made possible on the utility’s fiber to the home network. EPB also does not use Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, which Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have all adopted to varying degrees. Although the utility avoids cut-rate promotional offers that its competitors hand out to new customers (EPB needs to responsibly pay off its fiber network’s construction costs), its pricing is lower than what the cable and phone companies offer at their usual prices.

Comcast claims customers really don’t need super high speed Internet service, underlined by the fact they don’t offer it. But some businesses (including home-based entrepreneurs) do care about the fact they can grow their broadband speeds as needed with EPB’s fiber network. Large business clients receiving quotes from EPB are often shocked by how much lower the utility charges for service that AT&T and Comcast price much higher. It costs EPB next to nothing to offer higher speeds on its fiber network, designed to accommodate the speed needs of customers today and tomorrow.

The competition is less able. AT&T cannot compete on its U-verse platform, which tops out shy of 30Mbps. Comcast has to move most of its analog TV channels to digital, inconveniencing customers with extra-cost set top boxes to boost speeds further.

The fact EPB built Chattanooga’s best network, designed for the present and future, seems to bother some conservative “watchdog” groups. The Beacon Center of Tennesee, a group partially funded by conservative activists like Richard Mellon Scaife through a network of umbrella organizations, considers the entire fiber project a giant waste of money. They agree with Comcast, suggesting nobody needs fast broadband speeds:

EPB also offers something called ultra high-speed Internet. Consumers have to pay more than seven times what they would pay for the traditional service — $350 a month. Right now, only residents of a select few cities worldwide (such as Hong Kong) even use this technology, and that is because most consumers will likely not demand it for another 10 years.

Actually, residents in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea do expect the faster broadband speeds they receive from their broadband providers. Americans have settled for what they can get (and afford). DePriest openly admits he does not expect a lot of his customers to pay $350 a month for any kind of broadband, but the gigabit-capable network proves a point — the faster speeds are available today on EPB at a fraction of price other providers would charge, if they could supply the service at all. Most EPB customers choose lower speed packages that still deliver better performance at a lower price than either Comcast or AT&T offer.

The Beacon Center doesn’t have a lot of facts to help them make their case. But that does not stop them:

• They claim EPB’s network is paid for at taxpayer expense. It is not.
• They quote an “academic study” that claims 75 percent of “government-run” broadband networks lose money, without disclosing the fact the study was bought and paid for by the same industry that wants to keep communities from running broadband networks. Its author, Ron Rizzuto, was inducted into the Cable TV Pioneers in 2004 for service to the cable industry. The study threw in failed Wi-Fi networks built years ago with modern fiber broadband networks to help sour readers on the concept of community broadband.
• Beacon bizarrely claims the fiber network cannot operate without a $300 million Smart Grid. (Did someone inform Verizon of this before they wasted all that money on FiOS? Who knew fiber broadband providers were also in the electricity business?)

The “watchdog” group even claims big, bad EPB is going to drive AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Cable out of business in Chattanooga (apparently they missed those Comcast/Xfinity ads with customers returning to Kabletown in droves):

Fewer and fewer private companies wish to compete against EPB, which will soon have a monopoly in the Chattanooga market, according to private Internet Service Provider David Snyder. “They have built a solution looking for a problem. It makes for great marketing, but there is no demand for this service. By the time service is needed, the private sector will have established this for pennies on the dollar.”

Ironically, Snyder’s claim there is no demand for EPB’s service fall flat when one considers his company, VolState, has been trying to do business with EPB for two years. He needs EPB because he is having trouble affording the “pennies on the dollar” his suppliers are (not) charging.

Snyder tells “Nooganomics” his company wants an interconnection agreement with EPB, because the private companies he is forced to buy service from — including presumably AT&T, want to charge him a wholesale rate twice as much as EPB currently bills consumers. Snyder calls EPB’s competition “disruptive.”

Nooganomics calls EPB’s low priced service a “charity” in comparison to what AT&T and Comcast charge local residents, and the free market can do no wrong-website seems upset consumers are enjoying the benefits of lower priced service, now that the local phone company and cable operator can’t get away with charging their usual high prices any longer.

Deborah Dwyer, an EPB spokeswoman, told the website the company got into the business with state and city approval, followed the rules for obtaining capital and pays the taxes or payments-in-lieu of taxes as the same rate as corporate players. “We believe that public utilities like EPB exist to help improve the quality of life in our community, and the fiber optic network was built to do just that. One of government’s key responsibilities is to provide communities with infrastructure, and fiber to the home is a key infrastructure much like roads, sewer systems and the electric system.”

Snyder can’t dispute EPB delivers great service. He also walks away from the competition-is-good-for-the-free-market rhetoric that should allow the best company with the lowest rates to win, instead declaring customers should only do business with his company to support free market economics (?):

“If you are a free market capitalist and you believe in free markets, you need to do business with VolState,” Mr. Snyder says. “And if you’re highly principled, every time you buy from a government competitor, what you’re voting for with your dollars is, you’re saying, ‘It’s OK for the government come in to private enterprise and start to take over a vast part of what we used to operate in as a free market.’”

Perhaps Snyder and his friends at the Beacon Center have a future in the vinegar business. They certainly have experience with sour grapes.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast Ad Welcome Back.flv[/flv]

Comcast’s emotionally charged ad, using paid actors, was produced by advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The commercial running in Chattanooga is a slight variation on this one, which targets Verizon FiOS. (1 minute)

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/EPB Ad.flv[/flv]

EPB uses actual customers, not paid actors, in its own advertising that calls out Comcast’s false advertising.  (1 minute)

Squadron

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative business-funded lobbying group, has been sneaking around New York’s state capital pretending to be a charity when it is in reality responsible for authoring at least 39 bills during the current session of the legislature.

Sen. Dan Squadron, the ranking Democrat on the state Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee told the Wall Street Journal the corporate-backed group should be registered a lobbying group and not a charity.

“You know they say if it looks like a duck quacks like a duck, it must be a lobbyist,” said Sen. Bill Perkins, a Manhattan Democrat. “As such it is required to be registered, and its activities are required to be transparent, and apparently that is not what’s happening right now.”

ALEC provides legislators with corporate-written sample legislation that elected officials can use as templates to produce their own bills that favor corporate interests. The group claims a 20 percent success rate getting bills passed through the New York State Legislature, which is not bad in a legislative body legendary for its dysfunction.

Maziarz

Common Cause New York says it will file a formal complaint next week with state ethics officials about ALEC’s failure to properly register itself as a lobbying group.

That brought a strong response from ALEC, which accused Common Cause of being part of a grand liberal conspiracy with George Soros to harass and silence the group.

Two state senators with reportedly close ties to ALEC are Sen. George Maziarz, a Republican from Niagara County, and ALEC state chairman Sen. Owen Johnson, a Long Island Republican.

Maziarz, who accepts campaign contributions from Verizon Communications, was in the middle of a 2010 dispute over a proposed Verizon data center to be built in Somerset, N.Y. Maziarz sided with Verizon and verbally attacked one of his constituents who opposed the pace of the project, and its lack of a complete environmental impact review.

Verizon ultimately changed its mind about the project after purchasing Terremark, which operates data centers.

The Communications Workers of America says when it comes to “stealthy” bills like S.B. 1611 that deregulate telecommunications in California, “no price is too high — no lie is too big.”

AT&T and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are back again fighting for more deregulation of California’s telecommunications industry with a bill that will strip oversight of vital telecommunications services and stop punishing bad actors that leave customers without telephone service, sometimes for weeks.

California legislators are typically not responsive to the wholesale deregulation efforts that seem to draw support in more conservative states, so AT&T’s lobbyists are trying a more “incremental” approach in the state. But AT&T has also inserted “stealth” language into the bill that would dismantle consumer protections, allow companies to abandon unprofitable landlines, and strip away important oversight “checks and balances” needed to ensure good service.

Sen. Padilla’s top corporate contributor is AT&T.

S.B. 1611 illustrates that AT&T can buy its way into any legislator’s office, Democrat or Republican. The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Alex Padilla (D-20th Senate District) has received more contributions from AT&T than from any other corporation in both the 2006 and 2010 elections.

The bill ostensibly claims to limit its scope narrowly to “Voice over Internet Protocol” (VoIP) and “Internet Protocol enabled service.” That brings to mind services like “digital phone service” from cable companies or alternative telephone services like Vonage, magicJack or Skype.

S.B. 1611:

The bill would prohibit any department, agency, commission, or political subdivision of the state from enacting, adopting, or enforcing any law, rule, regulation, ordinance, standard, order, or other provision having the force or effect of law, that regulates VoIP or other IP enabled service, unless required or delegated by federal law or expressly authorized by statute. The bill would specify certain areas of law that are expressly applicable to VoIP and IP enabled service providers. The bill would provide that its limitations upon the commission’s regulation of VoIP and IP enabled services do not affect the commission’s existing authority over non-VoIP and other non-IP enabled wireline or wireless service….

To the layperson who generally believes services like Skype and Vonage might not deserve the same oversight as AT&T, Frontier, or Verizon — which provide Californians traditional landline service, consider Section 2 (a)(2) of the bill, which describes and defines VoIP and IP enabled service as anything that:

“Permits a user generally to receive a call that originates on the public switched telephone network and to terminate a call to the public switched telephone network” and “any service, capability, functionality, or application using existing Internet Protocol, or any successor Internet Protocol, that enables an end user to send or receive a communication in existing Internet Protocol format, or any successor Internet Protocol format through a broadband connection, regardless of whether the communication is voice, data, or video.”

This “narrow” deregulation bill just grew as wide as the Gulf of Mexico and can realistically allow any phone company in California to ignore state oversight and regulation forever.

Traditional telephone companies increasingly utilize exactly these technologies for calls placed over ordinary landline phones. Using broadband service to engage in two-way communications also qualifies. With this kind of defining language, virtually every telecommunications service in the state of California would win near-total deregulation and walk away from important oversight. The California Public Utilities Commission certainly understood the implications of this bill when the majority of commissioners came out in opposition to S.B. 1611.

Goodbye Universal Service: S.B. 1611 Allows Phone Companies to Abandon Rural and Economically Distressed California Communities

Several public interest groups also discovered language in the bill that is a perennial favorite of AT&T — eliminating universal service requirements that assure every citizen that wants a telephone line can get one. S.B. 1611 lays waste to Section 709 of the California Code which guarantees: “our universal service commitment by assuring the continued affordability and widespread availability of high-quality telecommunications services to all Californians.”

With that language gone, the state’s phone companies can unilaterally decide to abandon the customers they no longer want to serve. That could spell disaster in rural northern and eastern California, and leave low income residents with nothing but a dead phone line, unable even to call 911 in an emergency.

One AT&T Lobbyist for Every California Lawmaker

The importance AT&T places on influencing lawmakers is readily apparent when one realizes there are at least 120 AT&T lobbyists working in the state capital Sacramento, one for every California lawmaker.

But when one considers the track record of California phone and cable companies in the last few years, is less oversight and regulation the right answer?

• Verizon Sued for Providing DSL Speeds (Suitable for VoIP) They Can’t Deliver
• AT&T Gouges California With 25% Rate Increase
• California Landline Nightmare: Residents in Bakersfield in Tears Over Lousy Service
• Southern California Power & Phone Companies Blamed for Devastating Wildfires
• Verizon Bills Dead People: We’ll Settle for Half Because She’s No Longer Among the Living
• Frontier’s Goodbye Kiss: A $680 Final Bill for a Departing Customer
• Calabasas Residents Annoyed by “Corrupt and Deceptive” Charter Cable; Time Warner Cable Also Called Out
• Time Warner Cable Guy Arrives Late to Service Call, Leaves Claiming Homeowner Had “Bad Air”
• More Frontier Problems: Californians Wait Months on Refunds for Disconnected Landlines
• The Many Challenges of Charter Cable: Rate Increases for Seniors, Bankruptcy, Employees Attacked, Customers Hassled
• AT&T’s California Gold Rush: Company Lobbyists Spread the Money Far and Wide

“SB 1161 is a stealth vehicle for the gradual deregulation of telecommunications in California,” the Consumer Federation of California declared on their website. “Consumers need the CPUC to have the power to investigate complaints of bad service or unfair charges on bills, regardless of the technology used to provide phone service.”

Call to Action!

Consumers across California need to get on board immediately to stop S.B. 1611. You can file online opposition courtesy of Free Press, but it is far more effective to also directly phone your own legislator and leave a message to urge this bill be defeated. It literally takes only 2-3 minutes to call and the money and phone service you could save will be your own. Use this district finder to contact your representatives.

S.B. 1161 is scheduled for hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee this Wednesday, so time is of the essence!

Connected Nation, a broadband advocacy group with ties to some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, is accused of rewriting a Florida state budget amendment to divert proceeds from a federal broadband grant to itself.

A growing scandal over broadband map funding and allegations of political maneuvering and favoritism has now extended into the offices of several state Republicans now accused of doing the group’s bidding to change funding allocations in ways that could ultimately threaten Florida’s broadband grants.

Connected Nation’s involvement in the state’s broadband expansion efforts began in earnest in 2009 when the group won a $2.5 million contract to map broadband availability in Florida. A follow-up federal grant for $6.3 million to extend broadband deployment brought the group’s lobbyists back to Tallahassee to secure a “no-bid shot” at that new money for itself, which turned out to be a big surprise to the Department of Management Services, the Florida state agency charged with overseeing the project.

The grant award mandated that money be spent on additional broadband mapping and broadband expansion specifically for libraries and schools. When DMS hired contract employees to manage the project for the next two years, Connected Nation declared war on the effort, considering it their turf.

The Miami Herald called the lobbying battle that then ensued as “an audacious display of lobbying clout [that] got the Legislature to force DMS off the contract and steer the grant to [Connected Nation] instead.”

The newspaper reports the end effect of the bitter feud is a less than useful broadband mapping operation and a threat from the federal government it will yank back what remains of the grant money if things do not improve… quickly.

Connected Nation told the newspaper it defends its position as creating value for taxpayers and citizens. But the group also openly admits its broader goal is to increase broadband usage, which directly benefits its telecommunications partners, which the newspaper says includes AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.

DMS officials are just as willing to play hardball in the statewide dispute, accusing Connected Nation of producing erroneous broadband maps and being responsible for “repeated performance problems.” They announced last year they would not renew Connected Nation’s contract.

Political observers note DMS probably did not realize who they were dealing with, and Connected Nation’s high powered lobbyists descended on the state capital to pull the rug completely out from under DMS, yanking the entire project away from the state agency and assigning it to another.

Holder

With the help of several Florida Republican legislators and the governor, DMS found itself without a broadband project, as lawmakers transferred it to Florida’s new “Department of Economic Opportunity.” The ultimate decision approving the transfer of broadband matters to an agency that suggests an allegiance to the private sector came from Florida’s governor Rick Scott.

The governor’s office muzzled DMS protestations. Marc Slager, deputy chief of staff for Gov. Rick Scott, acknowledged to the Herald he told DMS to stand down because “we don’t need to have different people from the governor’s agencies advocating an issue.”

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Connected Nation is not through paying back DMS for interfering in their Florida plans to capture broadband grant funds. The group is taking its time working with several Republican legislators to cut more legs out from under the government agency.

With respect to the $6.3 million broadband expansion grant, the newspaper reports Connected Nation last year simply rewrote a state budget amendment, inserting themselves as the grant winner.

“Attached is a document that reflects conversations we’ve had with Chairman Weatherford, the draft language is consistent with the bill, and it is language we believe the [Legislative Budget Commission] would approve,” wrote Alli Liby-Schoonover, from Connected Nation’s lobbying firm, Cardenas Partners, in February 2011, making the change.

What a broadband mapping group was going to do with the money intended to wire schools and libraries remains unknown.