Hell or High Water

Hell or high water !

Today the delegates voted by a slim margin of 11 votes to accept the Atlantic Broadband contract proposal. A lot of good points and questions were raised in the discussion preceding the vote. Concerns were raised that David Israel was too biased and seemed intent on pushing through his desire to award the contract to Atlantic. Others raised concerns about David Israel hogging the microphone for too long and not giving residents a chance to finish their statements under the two minute time limit that he imposed .
Israel claimed that Comcast acted irresponsibly in not providing a contract that the assembly could look at. This is a misrepresentation( I'm being kind ) Comcast did indeed provide a contract proposal according to their executives who are handling the issue. ( we verified this by calling them )
It's not the end of the world. A lot of people are very concerned that Atlantic is going to give us the same service they provide to their customers in Miami, which, according to the customers is atrocious. But that remains to be seen. Let's hope their service is all they claim it to be. If it's not, we can only hope that delegates remember it at the elections.
One bright spot in the whole affair is the absolute demolition of Israel's bid to include mandatory wifi in the Atlantic contract. There's a sneaking suspicion that this whole bid was a roundabout way for Israel to achieve his goal of village wide wifi. That idea got soundly rejected more than once at the assembly and then was abandoned when Comcast re-entered the bidding war with a proposal giving residents the option of wifi or not. Atlantic quickly reworked their bid to reflect the same clause in their proposal, and mandatory wifi died a quick death.
It should be said that The Messenger Club was instrumental in bringing Comcast back to the table, and at our suggestion included the no wifi option. Whether the administration wants to admit it or not. Not only that we noted that some of the clauses in the final Atlantic contract were changed due to the presentation by Olga Wolkenstein. Those all important changes would undoubtedly have stayed in the contract if the club hadn't demanded they be altered. The first clause removed at our suggestion was the clause giving Atlantic the nod to increase their rates whenever they saw fit. The second was the clause allowing them to change the channel lineup at their discretion without notice.
 Now that the delegates have voted and their voice has been heard, Century Village is looking forward to ten years of Atlantic Broadband come hell or high water.