Missed connections
Elizabethtown businessman Larry Bucciarelli got a surprise in early September from the government affairs director of a broadband company that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tried to banish a few years ago.
The director informed Bucciarelli that he will be receiving a cash refund. What’s more, six of Bucciarelli’s neighbors will also be getting checks from Charter Communications, the Charter executive, Kevin Egan, told them. The group will split $8,845.78.
Yet Egan, whose company is also known as Spectrum, wasn’t promising the money out of generosity. Bucciarelli and his friends in the Essex County hamlet had paid Charter $8,845.78 in the fall of 2016 to install lines and poles to connect to the company’s internet service.
Egan came calling after some investigative work by local officials found Charter had improperly listed Bucciarelli’s Adirondack home and those of his neighbors as new hookups, helping it meet its state-mandated expansion of service.
Charter did not deserve credit for those Blood Hill Road connections toward the 145,000 new connections it must reach by Sept. 30, 2021. That required buildout was set in an agreement of July 2019 to resolve a dispute with the Cuomo administration that ended the governor’s push to remove the company from New York for failing to meet previous commitments.
Charter’s settlement with the New York Public Service Commission
