Council may impose fines on Comcast

The College Park City Council could threaten local cable provider Comcast with fines for not answering customer service calls fast enough if a letter introduced by District 2 council member Jack Perry is viewed favorably by the council today.

The council will be considering sending a letter that calls for a $200-a-day fine at the end of May if Comcast fails to meet standards set by a city ordinance that requires the company to answer calls within 30 seconds 90 percent of the time during business hours. However, Comcast has told the council the statistics it provided to the College Park Cable Television Commission included calls made outside of business hours and shouldn't be used to assess the company's performance.

Perry has been the driving force behind sending the Comcast a firm message that it needs to be more responsive, an effort that seems inspired to some degree by personal experience.

"It's stupid to try to call them," said Perry, who claims he once waited 35 minutes for Comcast to answer his call. "Nobody answers the phone."

The city's Cable Television Commission Chairman Blaine Davis takes a more conciliatory stance on the issue. He praised Comcast for its cooperation with the city and said he's noticed improvements.

"I know they made an effort," he said. "And they improved. Hopefully they'll be back in compliance very shortly and we won't have a problem."

In a letter to the city council, Davis said the commission met with Comcast representatives March 26. The company argued it supplied data that do not reflect how well the company is doing in meeting standards set by the code. The data, they say, including times recorded outside normal business hours and an average answering time of all calls, instead of a percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds.

Davis said calls also spiked in September because of rate increases, resulting in three times as many calls as normal.

"It was a statistical anomaly," he said.

Comcast told the commission that future reporting will reflect code standards. The commission voted 3-1 to accept the new measurements, which suggests Comcast is "much closer to achieving the telephone-answering standard," Davis said in a letter to the council.

But Perry said the letter from Davis may be deceiving and lamented that the council likely won't take action.

"[Comcast] will come back with another sob story, and the mayor and council will give them another chance," said Perry. "[The leaders] threaten words and never do anything."

While Davis said the commission wants to avoid fining the company - which may create an "adversarial relationship" with an otherwise cooperative supplier - he insists compliance is necessary, and he admits he is wary of the new data supplied by Comcast.

"My problem is that their figures have been off by so much, they're changing the way they calculate these things," he said. "I'm very suspicious when I see that ... instead of an improvement, we're just going to have an improved way of making them look good."

Davis still urges the city "bear with [Comcast] for a while, and see if the new system works."

District 2 Councilman Bob Catlin said he predicts the letter will be approved.

Comcast representatives could not be reached for comment.

Davis also noted that Comcast will soon be facing competition from Verizon, and said the commission does not want to add to the company's problems.

"The only thing we really want them to do is to provide the proper service to our citizens," he said. "And if we can get them to do that, that's what we want. We don't want to fine."

Contact reporter Laura Schwartzman at newsdesk@dbk.umd.edu.