By Linda Taaffe

Los Altos

The Los Altos City Council extended cable contract negotiations with AT&T Broadband March 25, one day after four Northern California cities filed a lawsuit against the cable provider for allegedly failing to meet customer standards under its franchise agreements.

This is the fifth extension that the council has approved since beginning negotiations with AT&T in December 1999, when the company acquired the city’s cable service, TeleCommunications Inc.

The extension - which is not related to the lawsuit - means Los Altos will remain without a cable franchise agreement for at least another three months.

The city has been working on a deal with AT&T over the past three years to bring high-speed Internet lines and sleeker cable connections to Los Altos.

Los Altos Mayor Francis La Poll voted against the negotiation extension, saying he didn’t believe that AT&T was acting in good faith. This is the second extension La Poll has voted against.

Los Altos Senior Planner Jim Mackenzie was unable to comment about specific negotiation details. He said AT&T representatives had countered the city’s capital funding and franchise term proposals in early March.

AT&T is scheduled to provide the city rate filing information to help determine current operations funding. The March 27 negotiations meeting was postponed to allow AT&T more time to respond to the city’s latest counterproposal, Mackenzie said.

He said customer service standards are part of the deal. The city is negotiating based on a community needs assessment that was prepared a couple of years ago.

Some of topics of negotiation are an update of the system to allow for high speed two-way access; improved service reliability; a network to connect government facilities, schools and other institutions; public access programming and more specific customer service standards, he said.

Los Altos has about 6,500 cable subscribers.

Mackenzie said he did not know how many cable-related complaints the city has received over the past year.