From the Wilson Times (8/31/10): It's not clear what city leaders sought to gain from a year of bulling with cable companies and refusing to release a document that spelled out how Wilson intended to expand Greenlight, its public broadband system.
What is clear, however, is that a court disagreed, and so far it’s cost taxpayers at least $25,000 for a settlement and an undisclosed amount in city legal fees to play that game of cat-and-mouse secrecy. You can read the details on the front page of today’s Wilson Times, but here’s the big picture: Taxpayers have forked over $25,000 to the N.C. Cable Telecommunications Association because city officials wrongly refused to hand over public information about the broadband system.
City Council decided in June it was better to back off and pay up than continue to fight releasing an application for $19.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to expand Greenlight cable, telephone and Internet service. A judge ruled last fall the application was public information under the law. That ruling should have been enough to reverse the course. But the city continued to fight, at one point even making the claim that the information was protected because it detailed critical infrastructure vulnerable to sabotage or terrorist attack.
Cable companies are exactly that — private, for-profit entities that compete for customers. Greenlight is different: It’s designed as a publicly run network to provide high-quality, high-speed broadband at lower cost.