Inside Towers has told you about Verizon Wireless case where a Philadelphia judge last week denied its request to be left out of a felled tower climber’s case in the City of Brotherly Love, and now the mayor of Steel City is shaking his fist at Verizon over its decision not to build out FiOS in new communities in Pittsburgh.
Mayor Bill Peduto told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the telco has not met the goals of a contract it signed with Pittsburgh six years ago. Peduto claims that besides not meeting the tenets of the franchise agreement, the carrier has laid off a large part of the local workforce that could have assisted in the FiOS FTTH build, the paper reported Monday.
“Verizon has not lived up to the commitments that are under the franchise agreement, whether it is how the system is being put in and where the system has been completed. And under that agreement there are fines that will have to start going into effect,” Peduto said. “At the same time, instead of hiring more people to be able to finish this job, they’ve been laying off more people, and these workers now, who could have been completing the commitment that Verizon owes the city of Pittsburgh, find themselves unemployed.”
Verizon’s original deal with the city was to offer FiOS throughout the city as alternative to Comcast, the city’s dominate player. Lawyers for the city have met with Verizon’s management band to date, no fines have been levied. Verizon isn’t commenting fully on the meeting.
In an email to the Post-Gazette, Verizon spokesman John Bonomo wrote “While we will not discuss the particulars of our meeting with the city, we do feel the meeting was positive, and we demonstrated Verizon’s compliance with the agreement.” And he addressed the Verizon layoffs: “With respect to your question about our technicians, each was offered to take a similar job in another location, but they all declined. We believe we have the appropriate staffing levels to meet customer-service needs.”
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