Maricopa Broadband users dissatisfied

As a Cox truck drove past Maricopa resident Daniel Yingst’s home, he kept his fingers crossed.

For the past year Yingst says he has been praying Cox would come to town and purchase his poorly performing entertainment provider.

“They (Maricopa Broadband) are just horrible,” Yingst said, detailing the problems he has had with the Maricopa-based Internet and cable provider over the past year.

“The channels go up and down daily, and it seems like most of them never come back up,” Yingt said. “We haven’t had any of the channels over 100 for more than a month now,” he added.

A few of the channels Yingst said he misses the most include Fox Sports Network and A&E, which have been down for a couple of months. “I am a huge Coyotes fan, and without FSN I can never see the games,” he said.

Yingst lives in the Tortosa subdivision. Unlike other markets where a person can stop paying for a service if they no longer want it or are not satisfied, Yingst doesn’t have that option.

Tortosa is one of three subdivisions in the city that are contracted with Maricopa Broadband. Maricopa Meadows and Palo Brea are the other two.

“Maricopa Broadband treats us like we are their prisoners, and they don’t need to respect us,” said Christian Price, Maricopa Meadows HOA president.

Some have pointed to Maricopa Broadband’s tie-in with Elite communities, which filed bankruptcy earlier in the year, as the reason the company has seen recent struggles, but Maricopa Broadband’s Larry Miller said the companies are two separate entities and have nothing to do with one another.

“Everyone is struggling right now. It’s a tough economy, but that is not the issue at Maricopa Broadband,” Miller said.

When the three communities were designed, no one was willing to come to town and put in the infrastructure necessary for high-speed Internet and cable service, so we were left with two options: leave the homeowner with no services or use millions out of our own pockets to put the infrastructure in place, explained Miller.

Miller chose to pay out of his pocket and partnered up with a CP-3, a third party management company, who would be in charge of negotiating the contracts with the channel providers. At that time builders agreed with Miller and entered into a 15-year contract with Maricopa Broadband that would entitle it to a share of the monthly HOA dues in exchange for providing basic cable service.

“These builders thought the best way to attract buyers was to make sure that the communities had the services people would desire in place,” said Cindy Cassin, community manager for the Tortosa HOA.

Now the developers are gone, and it is the residents of these three communities who must live with the decisions and are literally stuck with the service.

“The contract with Maricopa Broadband says they must only provide basic, limited service,” Cassin said.

However, the contract also contains words like ‘comparable,’ which has led the HOAs of both Tortosa and Maricopa Meadows to forward their contracts to their lawyers in an attempt to find a way out.

“We have sent the contract to the lawyers three times now, and every time we seem not to be able to find a way out,” Price said.

Price added that the contract has a buy-out clause every five years, but the community could not afford to pick up that option. “We would have to do a special assessment against the homeowners, and that is not a route we want to take,” he said.

Despite the disgruntlement with the company’s services, Miller said the company is in the process of resolving the problem, which is the third party management company CP-3.

“For the first few years they did a great job and everyone was happy with the service, but lately they have not been doing so great, and we had to terminate their contract,” Miller said.

The contract with CP-3 was terminated almost a month ago, and Miller said his company has been working hard to handle the negotiations with service providers in-house, but it is taking some time to get everything back where it should be.

As far as the future of the company, Miller said if a company offered him the right price, he would sell. “I have had people approach me with interest in buying the company, but no contracts have been signed yet,” he said.

However, if that right offer never materializes, Miller said he is still committed to the communication company.

“We are aware of the problems going on right now, and we care greatly,” he said.

Despite the concern Miller expresses, the leadership and members of the communities Maricopa Broadband services feel like the company’s problems go deeper than channel outages.

It isn’t only the down channels that are disturbing, Price said; it is the way the company handles its customers.

“This company knows that x, y and z channels are down, yet instead of automatically giving everyone who gets those channels a $6 credit, they only hand the credit out to those who are able to call in and actually get a hold of somebody,” Price said. “This is a slap in the face.”

While the HOAs of both Maricopa Meadows and Tortosa are looking into their contracts’ legality, Palo Brea’s HOA manager Nelson Yocki said his group has yet to question the legality of the contract.

“We just became the managing group for the community three months ago, and we haven’t heard much about Maricopa Broadband yet,” he said.

While Yingst continues to suffer with his Maricopa Broadband service and prays for a buyout of the company, he will have to watch his Coyote games either at a local bar or a friend’s home.

The Maricopa man said he would switch to one of the dish providers if he could, but he was told the company would need to rewire the entire house.

“I don’t want to go through the hassle, so I will just sit and wait,” he said.

Photo by Michael K. Rich