Worcester, Massachusetts, said Thursday that it reached a deal with Comcast for the cable company to become its cable provider if the firm's proposed buy of Time Warner Cable clears regulatory hurdles. The Worcester City Council voted last month against the transfer of Charter Communications’ license to Comcast because of concerns about Comcast’s customer service record and questions about whether the company would keep open Charter’s data center in the city. Charter and Comcast are transferring multiple licenses in a deal meant to allow its TWC deal to proceed. Charter is getting some divested properties. Comcast agreed to keep the Charter data center, which employs more than 150 people, open for three years and will continue local news and sports programming. Comcast “heard the community’s concerns and is taking its role in Worcester seriously,” said City Manager Edward Augustus, who was empowered to sign off on the city council’s vote on the license transfer. A Comcast spokesman said the company is “delighted to have reached an agreement with the City of Worcester that will benefit local residents and businesses alike.”

Voters in five municipalities and three counties in Colorado voted to exempt their communities from the state law restricting municipal broadband deployments. Colorado law lets communities opt out of the law via local ballot initiatives, which three other municipalities -- Centennial, Longmont and Montrose -- did in previous elections. Rio Blanco, San Miguel and Yuma counties and Boulder, Cherry Hills Village, Red Cliff, Wray and Yuma approved the ballot measures Tuesday with between 72 and 83.8 percent of the vote. The results were a “vindication” for advocates who’ve said local control over broadband deployment had bipartisan support, said Next Century Cities Policy Director Christopher Mitchell in an interview. Heavily Democratic Boulder and heavily Republican Yuma County voted overwhelmingly in favor of exemption, said Mitchell, who is also director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. It’s unclear whether a potential Republican takeover of the Colorado House and Senate would jeopardize any push to have the legislature repeal its municipal broadband law, Mitchell said. Partisan control of both chambers remained in doubt Thursday pending recounts for seats in Adams and Jefferson counties. The elections yielded few other results of interest to municipal broadband advocates, though Mitchell said he was pleased that Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, won re-election. Malloy’s administration was “very supportive” of an effort by New Haven, Stamford and West Hartford to develop gigabit broadband networks (see 1409160049), Mitchell said. Malloy’s re-election “bodes well” for that project and a possible expansion into other cities, Mitchell said.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved the 2015-2016 fiscal year expense budgets Thursday for six state telecom programs. The California Advanced Services Fund will have a budget of $97.83 million for the fiscal year. The state’s Deaf and Disabled Telecommunications Program will have a $65 million budget. The state’s High Cost Fund-A’s Administrative Committee Fund will have a $43.33 million budget, while High Cost Fund-B will have a $20 million program budget. The state’s LifeLine program will have a $345.65 million budget, while its Teleconnect Fund will have a $148.09 million budget.

Alaska Communications got a five-year contract from Alaska’s state government to provide wide area network services to more than 22,000 state employees. The company will provide secure connectivity and high-capacity Internet service between core state government facilities in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. The contract lets Alaska Communications “enable better service to all Alaskans by providing secure and reliable high bandwidth networks to the State of Alaska,” said CEO Anand Vadapalli in a Wednesday news release.

The Vermont Public Service Board (PSB) unanimously approved the sale of Burlington Telecom to Blue Water Holdings and an accompanying lease of the telco back to the city of Burlington. The city government agreed in March to sell Burlington Telecom to Blue Water Holdings for $6 million to help pay for its $9 million portion of a settlement with Citibank in the bank’s lawsuit over past issues involving Burlington Telecom. Burlington will also lease back the telco for about $558,500 a year for the next five years, at which point Blue Water Holdings will be the utility’s sole owner. The PSB’s decision is “great news for the people of Burlington,” said Mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat, in a statement Monday.

Roanoke, Virginia, plans to move ahead as a participant in a 42-mile broadband network after its City Council voted 6-0 Monday night to appropriate $100,000 toward final engineering costs for the project. The Roanoke Valley Broadband Authority-proposed (RVBA) network also will serve nearby Salem. There are also proposals to extend the network into adjacent Roanoke and Botetourt counties. Salem’s City Council is set to vote this month on whether to appropriate $100,000 for engineering costs. RVBA estimates the network's Roanoke and Salem portions will cost about $4 million.

FairPoint Communications stopped paying for health insurance coverage for the 1,700 workers who went on strike Oct. 16 in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, a FairPoint spokeswoman said. Workers are eligible for the plan if they work a minimum number of hours, the spokeswoman said. The striking workers can still get coverage under the federal COBRA law, but must pay for the coverage, the FairPoint spokeswoman said. The telco’s stoppage of paying for striking workers’ healthcare benefits is a typical tactic companies use to put pressure on the workers, said a spokesman for the workers, who are affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Health insurance has been one of the focal points of stalled contract negotiations between FairPoint and the workers. FairPoint wants to reduce the share of premiums it pays to 80 percent from the current 100 percent. FairPoint’s desire to modify its health insurance policy and retirement benefits would “bring benefits in line with what we believe to be mainstream norms and to transition union represented employees to similar benefit plans offered to other FairPoint employees, including management,” the telco said in an open letter released Monday. The proposed changes will “enhance FairPoint's ability to price products competitively and are critical to our ability to meet the needs of the customers, communities and economies of northern New England,” the telco said.

The Princeton, Massachusetts, Broadband Municipal Light Plant (PBMLP) and Princeton Broadband Committee plan joint hearings in November ahead of a town meeting set for Nov. 18 to vote on a proposal to borrow $1.4 million to prepare for a planned fiber project. The hearings are set for Nov. 12 and 13 in Princeton’s Town Hall Annex, PBMLP said. Princeton isn’t financially responsible for the $3.7 million in costs for installing the fiber, but the town is responsible for some of the work to prepare for the project, PBMLP said. Internet service will cost $95 per month, PBMLP said. The project’s proponents are also seeking reimbursement for the project via the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, which is deciding how to disburse $45 million in grants to unserved communities in the state.

Cox Communications said it plans to begin offering gigabit broadband service in Chesapeake, Virginia, and other areas of the state. Chesapeake will be the first Virginia location where gigabit service will be available from Cox. The cable operator didn’t provide a specific timetable for the other in-state deployments. Cox began offering gigabit service in Phoenix earlier this month. Cox said Tuesday it anticipates deploying gigabit speeds in all of its targeted markets nationwide by the end of 2016.

FairPoint Communications is offering a $5,000 reward for information on who’s responsible for damage to its network and equipment, after what it calls a “recent spate of vandalism” to its property. FairPoint has investigated eight vandalism incidents against its infrastructure and facilities since 1,700 of its workers began an ongoing strike Oct. 17 (see 1410170025). The telco said it had only one incident in the five years before the strike. “Most of the strikers are exercising their legal right to stop working and to publicize their position, but it is no coincidence that these acts of vandalism are being committed during the strike,” a spokeswoman said in a news release. A coalition of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) chapters in the states where FairPoint workers are on strike -- Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont -- said in a news release that FairPoint is using the claims of vandalism incidents to distract the public. “In the course of mobile picketing, our members have witnessed replacement workers engaged in unsafe practices that endanger themselves and the public,” said Glenn Brackett, business manager for IBEW Local 2320, in the news release. “We are gathering these reports [of alleged safety violations] in order to file complaints with the proper authorities. Far from endangering the network, our members are taking actions to protect the public from replacement workers’ recklessness.”