A new Carolina Beat column features former Mecklenburg County Republican Rep. Ed McMahan’s thoughts about the bill designed to restrict municipal broadband services:

The cities involved with MI-Connection, for example, took on $92 million in debt to purchase the local cable system out of bankruptcy, even though a private provider was willing to buy and operate the system. Citizens were promised that the system would “pay for itself,” yet the operation has bled money from the start. Today it has fewer customers than when it started, and in 2010 taxpayers had to fork over $6.4 million just to keep the system running.

The result: citizens of Mooresville and Davidson are on the hook for this liability they neither asked for nor got a chance to approve. What happened to the provision of the North Carolina Constitution which says local governments cannot incur debt secured by a pledge of its faith and credit, unless approved by the voters? The cities got around the constitution by promising to raise taxes to repay the debt — not to the lenders, but to the Local Government Commission, which approved the debt.

This is no way to run a railroad, as they say. …

… North Carolina has been down this road before with electric services. In the 1970s, the state permitted cities to get into the electric business. As a result, many cities (the Electricities) incurred hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. They still are struggling to repay this debt today, and citizens in these towns pay rates that are between 30 percent and 50 percent higher than citizens serviced by investor-owned utilities.

Local governments simply should stay out of the way of private business. Their job is to serve citizens, not to compete in the private market. This is especially true in an area like the communications industry, where today’s technology will be out of date tomorrow and continued investments are necessary to keep up.