Get ready to write checks to a new telco: Embarq has been bought by CenturyTel. The Lousiana-based company, founded in 1930, bought Embarq for $11.6B in cash and debt assumption. CenturyTel is, like Embarq, largely in the business of providing service in small markets and rural areas.
For those of y’all new in these parts, Centel was long our telco here. It was started in 1900, and come 1993 they had 1.5M landline customers in seven states. That was when they were bought by Sprint, which meant that, weirdly for the time, a long distance provider was our local phone company. Sprint spun off Embarq in 2006, which consisted of Centel and their other local phone assets. And now that they’ve gotten their name and logo updated, they’ll be CenturyTel. Let’s all practice cursing a new business name. For those of us who still slip and call the phone company “Centel,” at least the new name is a little closer.
Concerns about the regional water supply are based on the projection that, come 2055, we’ll require 18.7M gallons per day. But the county’s own water resources manager says we’ll need 20% less than that, Hawes Spencer writes in The Hook, which is an awfully big difference. Greg Harper wrote in an internal memo that water usage has been declining over the past decade, contending that the natural replacement of old plumbing fixtures with modern ones will only accelerate this trend. The debate over dredging and a new dam is all about trying to anticipate future demand; if our demand forecasts are pessimistic, we could potentially waste millions of dollars on unnecessary supply increases.
The Department of Education has concluded that UVa broke federal rules on reporting crimes on campus. They required rape victims to sign a secrecy agreement to find out how their attackers’ trial turned out. #
The daily NY->DC Amtrak route is being extended to Lynchburg experimentally for the next three years. Which is good, because I’m sick of taking the bus to DC to catch the train. #
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