Important - Read This!

Becky Farrell

By Sam Shumway
AARP Wyoming State Director

I recently attended a town hall meeting in one of Wyoming’s many rural communities. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a recently-settled case involving CenturyLink and telephone service (more on that later). Many of the attendees expressed frustration that they had not been consulted or advised along the way as AARP Wyoming was negotiating the settlement - after all, this settlement was going to impact them.

Hearing this gave me pause. Had we done enough to inform and listen to our local 50+ community on this issue? As I sat there I made a mental inventory of our efforts.

As soon as we got involved, we issued a “call to action” to our e-advocates (individuals signed up to receive email alerts related to our advocacy work) asking them to submit public comment to the Public Service Commission. This resulted in a stack of letters.

We included two written updates and a call to action in our printed newsletter.

We spoke about this issue a number of time on radio throughout the state.

We also ran a story with the Northern Ag Network advising people of the issue and telling them how to engage.

In the gubernatorial election last year we asked the candidates about landline telephones in our video voter guides.

This outreach resulted in great engagement from our members and their feedback was instrumental in shaping the terms of the settlement.

So what was the CenturyLink case all about? In a nutshell: CenturyLink is getting out of the landline telephone business. They say it’s too expensive to maintain their lines and support customers. In 2017 they asked the Public Service Commission to stop regulating them. Deregulation would mean no oversight or accountability for how CenturyLink treated its customers as it moved away from landlines.

AARP Wyoming intervened in the case because we were concerned that CenturyLink would dramatically increase prices and stop responding to service complaints. After working on the issue for more than a year, CenturyLink agreed to a two year transition period where it would cap prices and subsidize satellite telephone service to those customers experiencing chronic problems. The satellite solution seems to be a viable option for those very rural customers where cell services is not available and landlines are becoming very unreliable. If you are a CenturyLink customer and have experienced chronic problems with your landline you may be able to transition to a satellite product. Call Kristin Lee at 307-432-7818 to learn more.

Now back to the town hall. Most of the attendees were AARP members (side note: I’m always proud of how engaged our members are in their communities). I took a moment to explain to them our efforts at informing and engaging our local community members about this issue, and how seriously we take our role as a consumer advocate. They seemed satisfied, but one of them later grabbed me and said, somewhat tongue in cheek, “When you send communications about things like this you should label it: Important - Read This!”