When the FCC announced its intention last week to neutralize the negative impacts of Tennessee and North Carolina anti-muni laws, celebrating reached far beyond Chattanooga and Wilson. In Lafayette, home to LUS Fiber, City-Parish President Joey Durel took time to write a supportive letter to Wilson’s Mayor Bruce Rose.
We reproduce the text of that letter below. As Durel points out, the two communities have strong similarities and the victory in Wilson has also reached Lafayette. Durel notes that a community’s decision to better its connectivity should always be a local choice, that partisanship is not a natural part of the equation, and he encouraged Rose to “stay strong.”
Dear Mayor Rose:
As Mayor of Lafayette, LA, a city that proudly provides electric and communications services to our businesses and residents, I want to congratulate you, your colleagues, and your constituents on your achievement in delivering world-class Internet services to the residents and businesses of Wilson – and on the strong endorsement you received last week from the Federal Communications Commission.
As in Wilson, the Lafayette community has been united in our support for high-capacity broadband connectivity to the Internet as an essential tool of economic development and as a means of securing our community’s economic future. While some will use any means possible to distract you from achieving your goals for your community, our deeply conservative electorate has consistently supported our electric utility’s great achievement in building a future-proof broadband Internet infrastructure, and this support has been consistently bi-partisan. My Democrat colleagues have joined me and my fellow Republicans in insisting that we in Lafayette should have the right to choose our broadband Internet future. We here in Lafayette will determine how our community engages this essential economic development tool, and we will not have our economic future dictated to us by others.
As you in Wilson have, we have seen the increased politicization of the local Internet choice issue in Washington, and we regret that it has. At the local level, in our community, this is not a partisan issue and we have resisted letting it become one. Like you, we do not believe this issue is about politics or partisanship or electoral politics or the public versus the private sector. Rather, it is about strengthening America, local self-reliance and the opportunity of our citizens to live in a community with all the same opportunities – for jobs, education, health care, public safety, and much more. Wilson, like Lafayette, has built a network that ensures that your community will be second to none in these respects. Congratulations to you for taking this important step, you are obviously interested in doing the right thing for your citizens, so stay strong. And, please feel free to contact me anytime, I’ve been in your shoes.
Sincerely,
L.J. “Joey” Durel, Jr.
City-Parish President
Lafayette Consolidated Government