Adelphia Subscribers Notified of Rate Hike

At a time when Adelphia Communications Corp. needs all the friends it can get in its fight to survive, the cable operator has made a bunch of new enemies by raising its rates nearly 6%.

On Thursday, angry subscribers of the company, which has filed for bankruptcy protection, put down their remote controls and picked up the phones.

“My office has been deluged with calls from outraged subscribers, and I have to say I share their sentiments,” said Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. He said he has asked the city’s second-largest cable provider to rescind the increase.

In its letter that begins “Dear Valued Customer,” Adelphia put subscribers on notice that basic cable service will go from $41.08 to $43.45 beginning with the September bill.

“I want to emphasize that the increase did not have anything to do with the current financial situation of the company,” Adelphia spokesman Eric Andrus said. “We adjusted the rate for the enhanced program choices we are giving our customers as well as advanced services that they very much expect, such as high-speed Internet access and digital cable.”

Andrus said he didn’t know which enhancements had been added to the basic service but cited movie and sports offerings.

“We agree that the timing could be better,” he said. “But it’s a necessary part of our ability to provide valuable service to our customers. No one is happy about a rate increase, but it’s necessary because of costs in the cable business.”

Officials at competitor EchoStar Communications Corp., which owns the DISH satellite network, barely could hide their glee over the Adelphia hike.

“It’s playing right into our strategy,” said John Scarborough, head of marketing at EchoStar. “Our customers are concerned about what is going on in corporate America today. What a great opportunity for them to not only get a great service, but also from a stable provider.”

Adelphia’s requested increase comes just weeks after the founder of the troubled Pennsylvania company and his two sons were arrested on charges of bilking shareholders and looting billions from the company coffers.

“I’m so mad,” said longtime Adelphia subscriber Harriet Werner, 76, who lives in Westwood and received her rate increase letter Wednesday. She said she has filed numerous complaints about the technical quality of her service.

“I can’t believe they have done this, now after we found out what has been going on with the money we have been paying the company all these years,” Werner said.

Adelphia founder John Rigas, 77, and two of his sons, Timothy and Michael, were accused of hiding $2.3 billion in personal loans guaranteed by the company and artificially boosting their firm’s financials by inflating corporate earnings and the number of cable subscribers.

The firm serves about 250,000 cable customers in Los Angeles and an additional 1 million in Southern California. The city has been monitoring Adelphia closely since the bankruptcy filing and has threatened to remake the company’s five cable franchises if service deteriorates.

In its letter, Adelphia said the rate hike was due to increases in “operational expenses such as wages, specialized training for our employees, utilities, fuel, insurance.” No mention was made of legal fees.

Adelphia was probably within its rights to increase rates, City Attorney Delgadillo said.

The Federal Communications Commission “gives every cable company the right to raise their rates once a year based on a standardized formula,” he said. “They filed a notice well before all these troubles came to light, back in March. But given all the anger from when their founder was taken off to jail in handcuffs, I perchance thought they would act like a normal business.”

Werner is retired from writing advertising copy. She said she could not imagine what ad would soothe the feelings of Adelphia subscribers at this point.

“There is no way to make people feel OK about this,” she said. “If the company had any feeling, they would have not sent out that letter to begin with. It certainly didn’t make me feel like a ‘valued customer.’ ”