“The Telco TV Boxes Are Coming!”

SaveAccess latched onto the same story about the Telco TV “refrigerator” boxes that I mentioned recently.

Telco TV boxes may be coming to a sidewalk near you – and there is likely nothing you will be able to do about it! The loss of local control of ‘right of way’ under new state and national video franchising laws (HR.5252 and S.2686) means that your local city will have to yield control of public spaces to telephone and cable companies operating under those franchises.

But Save Access went out and had a bit of fun with it. The picked up on pictures of the actual new Teleco TV boxes and photoshopped them into various pictures to give folks a sense of how this might change the look and feel of neighborhoods. Here’s one that looks like it could be in Baton Rouge’s Spanish Town neighborhood.

That’s good, clean fun but, as has been pointed out to me recently, the mess that the legislature seems bent on creating doesn’t stop with ugly rights-of-way. The state is granting rights to all publicly-owned property. If they want to plop one of these things down in the center of Girard Park and trench up the park to geth their wires to it there would be nothing your nor I nor the city could do about it.

Anybody know someone from the historic preservation societies who might want to oppose Louisiana’s version of this bill? The more the merrier!

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