Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire regulatory boards to meet with FairPoint

Executives from FairPoint Communications Inc. will meet with the utility regulatory boards from Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire tomorrow all at the same time. In a highly irregular development, all three states will hold a joint conference with the troubled telecommunications company as part of an ongoing effort to learn how the company plans to stabilize itself.
FairPoint bought the landline telephone and internet business in the three northern New England states for $2.3 billion in 2008. Following the purchase, the company was almost immediately struck by failures in billing, customer service, order fulfillment and other problems and has been struggling to right itself ever since. FairPoint has also suffered from a number of serious financial setbacks, which resulted this summer in the need for the company to restructure its debt.
The meeting labeled a joint status conference will be conducted by the Vermont Public Service Board, the Maine Public Utilities Commission, and the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission, and will be held in Derry, NH. The meeting will be open to the public, although attendees will not be allowed to speak.
FairPoint CEO David Hauser will be attending, in addition to President Peter Nixon, Executive Vice President Jeff Allen and Vicky Weatherwax, who was promoted to the position of Vice President of Business Solutions in July.
FairPoint is currently under an investigation by the Vermont Public Service Board to determine if the company is capable of recovery. The investigation was prompted by a Show Cause petition filed by the Department of Public Service in July after FairPoint's Stabilization Plan Status Report was deemed to be insufficient and overly optimistic.
In its August 5 quarterly earnings report, FairPoint said that it has succeeded in restructuring some of its debt, allowing it to cut interest expenses by $14.4 million for the second quarter of 2009. FairPoint also reported that its number of costumers had dropped by 9 percent. Revenues for the three-month period ending June 30 were about $300 million, down 13 percent from the same period last year, when Verizon was still operating.