Sounding off on Frontier outage | Letter

To Redmond Mayor Marchione, Redmond City Council and Public Works director: I am sure you are aware of the fact that a Public Works construction project has caused a huge disruption to the community, particularly businesses, due to digging up critical fiber and copper data lines owned by Frontier Communications.

To Redmond Mayor Marchione, Redmond City Council and Public Works director:

I am sure you are aware of the fact that a Public Works construction project has caused a huge disruption to the community, particularly businesses, due to digging up critical fiber and copper data lines owned by Frontier Communications.

On Wednesday, I attended a meeting for the public and business owners to understand the status of repairs. I should not have to inform you that many businesses still will not have vital services restored until at least Monday, and projections for restoration of services to businesses in the area of Redmond Town Center extend out until after the first of October.

Frontier Communications stated, at this meeting, that the correct coordinates/locators for these critical lines were provided to the city in preparation for this construction. Public Works Director Linda De Boldt was also in attendance and did not dispute this information from Frontier. It follows then that either the city did not provide the correct information to the construction crew or did not supervise the construction crew even though the city knew that critical infrastructure was located near this construction-site digging.

My business relies on 15 phone lines that my employees use throughout the work day to communicate with health-insurance payers on the status of health-care providers’ claims. These employees are working at less than half capacity due to this issue. I cannot even begin to calculate the economic hardship this will place on my business! And in speaking to fellow business owners, I am convinced I am not alone in that concern.

Here is what I find astounding. You held a council meeting on Sept. 23 with almost an hour devoted to a discussion about Public Works. The Public Works director sat right at the meeting table with you for this entire discussion. However, rather than discuss how such a colossal blunder could have occurred and directing the Public Works director to undertake a post-mortem review of the error, the issue was barely mentioned other than as a vague comment about the “dig on Saturday” and what a great attitude the employees had.

In fact the entire discussion, from my perspective, seemed dedicated to congratulating the department and each other about what a wonderful job the department does. Really? Are you really that out of touch with the economic impact of such a mistake? You don’t even have a single question about it? It’s of so little importance to the mayor and council, it did not even come up in an hourlong discussion about Public Works? You aren’t even curious as to how it happened, and what can be done to prevent such a huge error from being committed again? I’m befuddled to say the least.

As a resident and business owner in the City of Redmond, this incident seems to me to be the culmination of a haphazard and sloppy (not to mention out of touch) plan for our city. There is far too much construction going on simultaneously and it has created gridlock and worse in Redmond. Not all change is good. In fact, some of the “public works” projects have worsened things on a permanent basis. The changes to 166th Avenue Northeast, for instance, have caused permanent traffic jams going up Education Hill. How is this an improvement? It now takes me 15 minutes to drive one mile up the hill from my business to my home at the end of the work day. I don’t have a public works planning degree, but it seems obvious that if cars cannot even proceed through a green light because of backups when it was not a problem previously, something has gone wrong in the planning.

I have lived here for 15 years, and I feel as though our council and mayor are ruining this city. And then I watch a video of the Sept. 23 meeting hoping to get some information on what is going to be done to improve things in the face of what appears to be clear incompetence that surely hasn’t gone unnoticed. What I found by watching a video of that meeting is that you all seem to be perfectly oblivious to the issues. If I didn’t know better, I would question whether any of you actually lived in this community.

Roberta Domos, Redmond