What can be in a Cable TV franchise agreement?
I’ve been reading up on what can be included in a Cable TV franchise agreement. So far I’m pretty discouraged; at first glance it would appear that it will take some serious legal limbo’ing to put binding verbiage covering my three issues into the agreement. Looking back now it may have been better to have pushed harder against Verizon’s request to be granted a franchise. I’ve started advising people in other towns to address these issues prior to granting approval.
Then again, maybe this is still exactly the right way to address these issues. The whole point here is to press Verizon to address these issues, not to keep them out of town. I don’t believe there is anything that forces our town to finish franchise negotiations in any set period of time. Sometimes the best way to draw attention to issues is to slow down the process.
There may not be room in the legal document that is the franchise agreement for provisions regarding my three issues (I still don’t know that for sure) but there is nothing that says our town council can not formally ask Verizon to formally answer our questions. If it comes to light that our franchise negotiations are being held up due to Verizon not wanting to answer our questions then it may draw even more attention then it would have at the start of the process.
I’m going to have to adjust my approach, but I still advise you to ask your local officials about these issues from the get-go.
We’ll see where this leads next. Stay tuned. If you know more about the cable franchise please feel free to let me know about it.
