Editor’s Note: We received this letter from a former Comcast employee, who agreed to allow us to reprint it for our readers. The final vote on a four year extension of the cable giant’s contract with San Francisco will occur Tuesday.
I am writing to you because I believe that you are against the current franchise renewal deal that is up for renewal/revote next week. I do not have contact information for the Board of Supervisors that are in charge of voting on this legislation so I am passing this on to you in the hopes that you in turn can get it in front of them.
These are some of the things we can win together:
— CHEAPER CABLE RATES for seniors and low-income households
— FREE CABLE & INTERNET access in government offices and nonprofits
— MONEY for media production in local neighborhoods
— RESOURCES educational and job training programs
— MORE MONEY for Public, Education, and Government channels
— FREE WIRELESS Internet access in public spaces
— STRONG CONSUMER PROTECTIONS regarding rates, privacy, and service
— WORKER’S RIGHTS to collective bargaining & prevailing wage standards
I was the area accounting manager in the Sacramento region from June 2003 – June 2004. During my time there I uncovered many discrepancies in how Comcast deals with the various cities regarding LFA’s and the vendors that they strike deals with. They always blamed everything on AT&T when in fact much of the work and blame should be on Comcast itself. They have repeatedly gone back on their word and have not done the rebuild and repair work as promised with other cities and counties and have spent a considerable amount of time covering it up. The city of Modesto and Davis are two that come to mind over grounding issues and the fact that they do not keep track of all the physical plant underground in most cities.
The contractors that they hired to work along side them did not do the work as the manufacturer required for the grounding. They were drilling through the safety plates in much of there ground work in Modesto and Davis to “save” time since they did not want to dedicate the manpower or funds to do it correctly the first time. This will cause these systems to eventually fail prematurely since rust and decay will get in where they did their “shortcuts”.
In the Sacramento area Comcast lost thousands of customers after they purchased the system back from AT&T due to a bad systems conversion and other individuals hiding information on plant and system build outs. I know this because I drove around Sacramento County checking physical plant in the ground and doing audits of the system through street releases from engineering and checking work that was supposed to be completed by outside contractors. When I compared what was in the system to the releases by the city, I found that the two did not match. After repeated attempts of bringing this up in upper management meetings and speaking to the individuals in charge, including HR; I was let go saying that they no longer needed an accounting manager in the Sacramento system.
As far as Comcast treating all employees fairly, that is simply not the case. Many employees receive kick backs from their dealings with certain vendors and other job openings are not posted to the public until they are already filled by someone that they want from the inside. Many minorities are passed over for higher level positions given to friends of corrupt people who can look the other way and keep their mouths shut. Other contracts are not bid on, but simply given to employees who decide to form their own companies and leave Comcast. If anyone ever mentions anything about forming a union or group to represent employees, they were supposed to be reported to human resources.
Comcast has also overcapitalized many times in the same systems that they serve. While I was there they had the same vendors being used for Sacramento, Stockton, and Fresno, yet were using three different rates for capitalization and were receiving their high speed internet capitalization numbers from San Ramon, which never matched up with the numbers that we were installing in the areas. Their capitalization and manpower justification sheet rarely if ever matched and the converters and modems that were going in and out of the Sacramento center never tied either. These were either being stolen or destroyed.
The same could be said for the communities that were using analog equipment. Many of these systems never needed a converter to receive the channels that they were viewing, but upper management wanted to make sure that they were paying their $5.95 a month for the converter “rental” instead of informing them that in many cases, they did not need the equipment at all. The customers that were on the old Legacy packages received annual increases of 15-25%, way above what was approved for price increases in the system because Comcast was not allowed to shut down old packages completely. Their theory was that a customer would call in and be upset by the price increase and a customer service rep would then be able to switch them to a new package.
Comcast also abuses newly formed cities in California by ignoring them or secretly taking over a local cable system to get their foot in the door, they did this in Rancho Cordova with Cable America, and I’m sure they have done this in others. I informed them upper management when Rancho Cordova first became a city and was told to ignore the fact that they would need a franchise agreement with the city since it would require “too much work” to breakout the subscribers in their area.
I have many files and documents to support what I am saying and would not hesitate to take a lie detector test if anyone would require it. If you have any contacts in the news and media that you would like to forward this to, feel free to. The city and county of San Francisco does not need to be screwed again by Comcast with their customers having to pick up the tab for PEG and other items that Comcast should pay for itself.
