Meeting with the Mayor:  Charter Communications

Mayor Kirk Crespin

From time to time, Lamar Mayor, Kirk Crespin and The Prowers Journal will get together to discuss and review developments of interest to Lamar residents and the surrounding community.  The hope is, the better informed a community is on matters that pertain to them, the more involved they can become with their local municipal government and stay abreast of matters that potentially impact their lives.

Charter Communications:

During the February 22, 2021 City Council meeting, Mayor Kirk Crespin noted that the Lamar City Council had become aware of a number of customer complaints addressed to them concerning outages from Charter-Spectrum, the city’s cable provider.  Crespin and City Attorney, Lance Clark, said they would contact the company on the matter and provide answers to the community-at-large.

Mayor Crespin said, we received a response from John Lee, Charter’s Senior Manager of Governmental Affairs for the company.  “We had a long discussion concerning our needs and why there had been these outages,” he said, adding, “Lee told me, Charter is working on improvements, but they usually invest more funding into upgrades in larger markets where they have the most customers and can make the most impact.  They don’t have that much money to apply to rural areas, but they are working on that.”

One big improvement, Mayor Crespin said, is a second line into the region, “This is a big challenge for them, but Charter is trying to run a second line, a back-up line into the southeast region.  The problem with downtime is that if there is a cut line, the repair crew has to come out of Pueblo and be able to trace it to the problem and that takes time and when it happens it impacts all the customers along that line.  With the second line, if there is a problem with the primary, they’ll be able to reroute service from the primary into the back-up line.”  The mayor said, the last two outages were just that, someone had cut through a line and Lee had emailed him with that update on the problem.

Charter Spectrum customers might remember Super Bowl Sunday, February 2, 2014 when, with just hours become kick-off, the signal was lost to Lamar and La Junta, about 3,500 customers.  The signal was eventually restored when the cut line was repaired, just about 30 minutes before game-time.

Overall, Crespin said, the indications are we’re getting pretty good service, historically.  “For the most part it isn’t because of lack of performance issues, but mainly, ‘Acts of God’ which are not directly in the hands of the company.  There haven’t been any trends of poor performance, but just an unfortunate recent timeline of bad luck for a few weeks.”  He added, the company and Lamar have had fewer issues than with other areas along their network, due in part, to some of the upgrades provided by Charter since their contract began in 2016.  The contract will be up for consideration five years from now.  In the meantime, Mayor Crespin said the city has now opened a line of communications with the company allowing for the ability to discuss future performance issues and service updates.

By Russ Baldwin