Cable company pays for service interruption

A local cable distributor is paying Calabasas residents to make up for a service interruption a year ago.

The City Council accepted a settlement that included a $1 rebate to all Charter Communications customers and a $1,000 check to the city for expenses over the last year.

In October 2006, Charter Communications performed planned maintenance on its cable system, announcing the interruption in an electronic posting on Channel 15.

Susan Booker, government relations manager at Charter, said the disagreement between the company and the city stemmed from the way Charter alerted customers.

"There was a disagreement that notice on Channel 15 qualified as efficient notice," said Booker, who added that door hangers, postcards or letters are now being used to notify customers. "We've apologized to all customers. It's our sincerest desire to resolve this matter and move forward."

Charter's agreement with the city provides for automatic rebates to subscribers whose service is interrupted for two hours, or four hours in cases where the outage is preceded by written notice. No rebates were issued after last year's October interruption.

Michael Brockman, vice chair of the Communications and Technology Committee, has been working with Charter.

"This has been a very frustrating encounter dealing with them in general," Brockman said. "Hopefully they've amended their behavior that ended up producing this conduct in the first place, which we were most disturbed with."

Brockman said that although the settlement "wasn't much money," he had encouraged the city to accept it to avoid incurring large legal fees.

"They had an outage and they had to repair something- that was at the root of this," Brockman said. "That was certainly something they needed to do. How they went about noticing it was a bit questionable, and the followup actions- or inactions- were also questionable."

For the average cable subscriber in Calabasas, a $1 rebate represents the charge for eight hours of service, a period equal to or greater than the 2006 outage's actual duration.

The rebate was provided to all cable and high-speed Internet subscribers in the city, even though not all were affected.