You Can Fight City Hall 0
But City Hall doesn’t fare too well against the phone company (Yes, Virginia, Ventnor is more than a square on the Monopoly game board):
The city’s telephone service provider shut off service for non-payment.
But it wasn’t because the city forgot to pay its phone bill for three months that ACC Business, a division of ATT, which provides local and long distance phone service to the city, cut them off, according to municipal administrator Andrew J. McCrosson Jr.
The city had refused to pay a new monthly minimum charge to the company after a previous three-year contract expired in October, putting them on the delinquent list.
(snip)
McCrosson said that over the course of the past year or so the city, which currently spends about $25,000 a year on the service, has dramatically cut its phone costs by implementing new employee procedures and installing a new phone system. When the old contract expired, the city wanted to continue to see that savings reflected in its monthly bill, he said.
“Instead they wanted us to sign a new contract that called for a minimum amount to be paid monthly which we believed would be higher than we are actually currently spending,” McCrosson said. “We’re not happy with that arrangement so we didn’t sign the contract and we haven’t paid the bill.”
I guess the moral of the story is that, if you save on your phone bill, the phone company will want to charge you more.
