FORKS — Residents and city officials are wrestling with how to deal with outages of cable television service that they say have become common.
At a meeting Wednesday, Forks Mayor Bryon Monohon was told by a handful of cable customers that they had experienced a two-week outage in December and a one-week outage during the NFL playoffs.
New Day Broadband CEO Neal Schnog did not return messages requesting comment Thursday.
Cable customers have steadily declined since 2007 to about half of what they were, Monohon said.
Although the specific number of customers was not available, the city receives revenue from a 6 percent tax on all utilities.
In 2007, the city received $9,962 in taxes from cable, said Dan Leinan, city finance director.
Last year, that number had dropped to $4,175, Lienan said.
Monohon said that many switched to satellite television companies because of the frequent interruptions in service.
Businesses’ expense
At the town-hall-styled Chamber of Commerce meeting Wednesday, several hotel, motel and RV park owners said that satellite wasn’t an option for them because of the installation fees and the rate structure.
Bob Zornes said he relies on 36 hookups for his RV park.
“It would cost me at least $30,000 to put in satellite,” he said.
“But I don’t even know if I can advertise having cable at this point.”
He also asked Monohon to look into what the city was doing to improve services, since a tax is collected on the utility.
Monohon said he would contact New Day but that he wanted to tread carefully, lest they pull out of the town completely.
“We also want to think about how it is just a matter of how long we are able to maintain a dying industry in this town,” Monohon said.
Monohon said he was unaware that the outages had been so frequent.
“That is significant enough to look into,” Monohon said.
Broadstripe Cable had operated in Forks until they were taken over late last year by New Day Broadband.
Although Monohon said that New Day seemed initially responsive, he said he had been unable to reach the company about the recent outages as of Thursday.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladaily news.com.
