With Huntersville’s decision to quit a five-town group considering buying the local cable TV system, officials from Davidson, Mooresville and Troutman on Wednesday night agreed to spend money to study whether a scaled-down business plan would work.

Wednesday night’s meeting was designed in part to ensure that the three towns are philosophically aligned before they pursue a possible three-town deal for the former Adelphia system. The system is up for grabs because of the failure of Adelphia, which went bankrupt in 2002.

“What we did was establish a real good give and take, and there was a lot of trust in the room,” Davidson town board member Margo Williams said after Wednesday night’s meeting.

Officials from the three towns agree in principal that local ownership of the cable TV and Internet system would be beneficial for residents and for economic development, Mooresville town commissioner Frank Rader said Thursday.

“The thing we kept coming back to was customer service,” he said. A locally owned system would be more responsive to the needs and concerns of customers, and could adapt more quickly to changes in technology, Mr. Rader said. “We would control the capital budget,” he said.

But a variety of obstacles stand in the way of creating a three-town system.

FIVE-TOWN TALKS

Davidson, Mooresville and Troutman, along with Mecklenburg County and the towns of Huntersville and Cornelius, had been studying whether to buy the 18,000-customer former Adelphia system.

The towns have the right of first refusal to buy the system under their franchise agreements with the former Adelphia. Time Warner Cable and Comcast, two of the nation’s largest cable companies, have purchased most of Adelphia’s assets. Time Warner is operating the local system temporarily and would like to own it, if the towns decide not to go forward.

Mecklenburg County has offered to provide funding for the five-town effort. The towns have been waiting for a New York bankruptcy judge to set a price for the system.

Meanwhile, the towns also have been negotiating on how to form a governing body that would buy and run the system. But as we reported last month, the towns have been unable to reach agreement on terms of the interlocal agreement required to set up the regional cable board.

Huntersville officials have objected to the county’s request for veto power over the board, something the county says it needs in order to safeguard the money it provides. But that’s not the only sticking point. Some Huntersville commissioners are philosophically opposed to having government own the cable TV system.

On Monday, Huntersville’s board voted 3-2 to pull out of the proposed purchase.

NEW BUSINESS PLAN

At a meeting Wednesday night, officials from Davidson, Mooresville and Troutman agreed to spend $13,620 to have their consultant draw up a new business plan for the three towns alone, which would encompass about 5,300 customers.

Davidson’s share is $5,200. Mooresville will pay $7,500 and Troutman will pay $820, according to Mr. Rader. The towns’ consultant will be Doug Dawson, who also drew up the five-town plan, Mr. Rader said.

Still unanswered is how the three towns might pay for the purchase. Mecklenburg County is unlikely to provide financing without the participation of Huntersville, which has the largest number of subscribers among the group. So Mooresville is studying whether it can take over the funding role in a smaller system, Ms. Williams said.

Also, if the three towns try to go it alone, they would have to help pay for technical changes required to split the system in two. Right now, the former Adelphia system is a single entity, run out of a technical center, known in cable lingo as a “head end,” in Mooresville. To split the system, a second center would have to be built to serve Huntersville, and possibly Cornelius.

Meanwhile, the role of Cornelius remains uncertain. That town has not made a final decision one way or the other whether to stay with the purchase plan, or join Huntersville in dropping out.

Mr. Rader said Thursday the five towns and Mecklenburg County will continue meeting, and he was unwilling to declare the idea completely dead. He holds out hope that Huntersville might still decide to rescind Monday’s vote to drop out, he said. “I view it as a play in the game. Huntersville would like it to be seen as a finality, and maybe it is,” Mr. Rader said.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE

Feb. 13, “Towns’ inability to agree on governance kills cable TV deal,” CLICK HERE>

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