Peachtree City City Clerk Betsy Tyler is weighing in on a recent article from watchdog.org writer Chris Butler who she says incorrectly reported on aspects of the city’s broadband initiative presented to the City Council recently by consultant Allen Davis. Tyler said Butler deliberately misrepresented the facts to support his premise.
“(The Dec. 2) issue of The Citizen included an article (by Chris Butler of watchdog.org in Tennessee) on Peachtree City’s municipal broadband initiative,” Tyler said in the letter to the editor in today’s edition of The Citizen. ”Butler first published a piece on his site in September opposing the proposal. He ran a follow-up article on Oct. 27 that incorrectly quoted the city’s consultant, Mr. Allen Davis of Community Broadband, LLC, as saying Davis claimed he ‘talked to 76 businesses owners in the area’ and received a high level of support for the city’s initiative.”
Butler in the Dec. 2 article said, “At a city council meeting in September, (Allen) Davis said 76 local business owners told him they were unhappy with the private-sector Internet service providers they had. Council members voted unanimously to approve municipal broadband based on his statements. Emails obtained through an open records request showed Davis contacted only 25 business owners in April and May.”
Tyler took the position that Butler deliberately misrepresented facts to support his premise, one she said has been repeated by both himself and another writer on other occasions.
“The simple fact of the matter, as supported by both minutes and audio recordings of both the Sept. 8 workshop and Sept. 17 meeting, is that Mr. Davis never said he talked to 76 businesses,” said Tyler, citing the official minutes of the Sept. 17 council meeting.
”At one point in the discussion, he stated that ‘76 businesses had been identified as potential enterprise customers (high-end user category).’ During a different part of his presentation, Mr. Davis noted that he had attempted to contact the top 25 (of those 76) and 12 had responded, all of whom expressed an interest in the service. I pointed out this distinction to Mr. Butler via email on Oct. 23 in direct response to his slanted question, four days before he and (columnist Kelly) McCutchen simultaneously published their spin pieces with their inaccurate quotes,” Tyler wrote.
Contacted Monday, Butler is sticking by his previous statements.
“I maintain I was correct,” Butler said, providing a link he said would validate his position (http://youtu.be/DdiBpedrdRU).
Butler maintains that Davis said “he identified 76 potential businesses and that 100 percent of the potential businesses who responded to a survey said they were unhappy with what they had. Davis did not say he only contacted 25 businesses. I did not learn of the 25 number until I did an open records request of the survey. Only 12 of the 25 businesses responded, and, of those 12, some of them expressed only a possible ambiguous interest, not the full-fledged interest Davis depicted them as having.”
For her part, Tyler said discussion among community members about the merits and risks of the broadband project is important.
“Those discussions should be based on correct information from reliable sources,” said Tyler.
