As it once was

The thing you need to know about Fort Smith Mayor Ray Baker is that he’s tremendously more interested in ensuring cheap and convenient television access to local religious programming and Lawrence Welk reruns than he is in ensuring the necessary forms of broadband/digital connections and service that the successful economies of tomorrow are installing today or installed yesterday.

No, that’s not true.

The simpleton rose-petal tosser wouldn’t understand anything in that first sentence after the word “reruns,” and therefore is 100% focused on his petulant bullying of a private sector business that finds itself between our Napoleonic twit and the overwhelming customer demand to add more Internet and digital television.

That’s the thing you need to know about Mayor Baker.

And his incessant bitching and moaning about Cox Communications and the company’s moving of television channels was a mere annoyance until Mar. 2. Like your mom always said: “It’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out.” Well, The Mayor has just poked the collective community in the eye.

Let’s stop to background a little on how we ended up with a mayor and city board that recently passed a resolution that told the world we’d rather not be inconvenienced with telecom progress. Maybe next week we’ll install the telegraph thingies they have on display at the Fort Smith Museum of History to send a message to folks outside our metro area: “Your new communication advances are coming too fast. Stop. Yes. Stop. Please stop. Stop. Just stop. Stop.”

Here’s the deal on the background. Cox Communications is one of two telecoms (AT&T being the other) who have a franchise agreement with the city of Fort Smith. Such an agreement is essentially a fancy right-of-way allowance in which Cox collects around $500,000 a year from us citizens and delivers the money to the city to satisfy the city's right-of-way demands.

Many years ago, Cox Communications and cable companies around the country delivered television via an analog system. And then a bunch of smart people conspired against Mayor Baker and his octogenarian supporters and discovered clever ways to package a boatload of information through digital means. What that means for Cox is that with the physical and electronic space it takes to send one channel on the lower tier, the company can package four high-definition channels and/or create more room for Internet access.

The lower-numbered channels on the system were the old analog (non-digital) channels and carried the local access stuff where Reverend Jimmy Don Greasy at the Good Suit Baptist Church and his direct message from God would be packaged between The Lennon Sisters who were “Wunnerful, wunnerful,” and a TBS “Gunsmoke” marathon.

But Fort Smithians, it seems, like the digital stuff. We can’t get enough of it. Requests for more high-def channels and faster Internet outnumbers all other requests 10 to 1. And when Cox moves a channel, it’s based on viewership. You know, like a restaurant will clear the menu of the liver-n-onions when only one out of every 1,000 customers order it. Why load up the freezer with that nasty iron-loaded meat when it gets ordered as often as Snoop Dogg music gets requested at the Ray Baker Senior Center?

The facts and true demands of Fort Smithians have no bearing on a mayor whose socio-economic and cultural realities are stuck in the middle of the past century when Caucasians and Blacks and Hispanics all knew their place. The only fact that matters to The Mayor is that Cox represents change, and change means his preferences and beliefs are no longer in the majority.

The same mayor who recently told a citizen at a board meeting to not always be negative has nothing but negative spewing from his mouth when Cox is the topic. Between the Fort Smith Police Department, Fort Smith Classic and other area charities, Cox has pushed at least $100,000 into the community within the past 18 months. Go ahead. Look for a simple “Thank You,” from the mayor on that front. Good luck.

Which means the thing you need to know about The Mayor is that he doesn’t have a clue. The Internet to The Mayor might as well be a fanciful potion mentioned in a Harry Potter novel.

A recent report by SpendingPulse notes that eCommerce — the sale of goods and services across the Internet — ended February with 16.7% year-over-year growth. It was the seventh straight month of double-digit growth. All other retail sales have been in the crapper for the past seven months. People less interested in local church programming and the Wunnerful, wunnerful television of decades past are using the high-demand services Cox is working to offer locally to boost the regional economies in which they are based.

And the mayors in Topeka and Peoria and other large and small cities around the country are in a race to push emphatic resolutions to Google in hopes of gaining the favor of the giganticus search engine company in its plan to experimentally place super-duper high-speed broadband in a few places around the U.S.

But not Mayor Baker. Or the Fort Smith City Board. Nosirree. We passed a resolution Mar. 2 “encouraging Cox Communications to restore programming to channel tiers accessible to subscribers without digital service.” For Google execs, that was the equivalent of asking for a return to rotary-dial phones.

City Directors Andre Good and Steve Tyler were the only two willing to prevent the mayor from putting out an eye. Tyler says he’s concerned that companies and individuals who look at Fort Smith will see the resolution against Cox and think we are an avoidable collection of Luddites.

“These companies looking at Fort Smith, I’m concerned, because I don’t them want to see us looking back at the way things were,” Tyler said.

Good said he is concerned that at some point Cox execs will grow weary of The Mayoral badgering and make future multimillion dollar telecom infrastructure investments in communities that get it.

“That was dumb on so many levels,” Good said when asked about the board’s Mar. 2 approval of the resolution.

Two city directors who voted for the resolution said they did so rather than fight the mayor. They suggested the resolution was meaningless. They don’t get it either. The same demand pushing Cox to seek more high-def and Internet space means folks all around the world can see us fumbling about with one eye poked out by a mayor who probably thinks you need a zip code for a Web address.

The resolution approved by the board complained like a spoiled six-year-old that television “programming isn’t as accessible to subscribers as it once was.”

And that’s the thing you need to know about Mayor Baker. He’s more concerned about “as it once was.” When our leaders are focused on “as it once was,” they aren’t working on “as it could be.”

The other thing you need to know about Mayor Baker is that he needs to be the next analog channel we move.