Handful of Lawndale Cable Users Complain

Though officials from Paragon Communications were prepared for a more difficult time, only five residents complained to the Lawndale City Council Thursday at a public hearing on the quality of local cable television service.

Residents told the council they want quicker response to telephoned complaints, rebates for missed service and local access programming on weekends.

“In November, it was hardly worth watching,” Herman Weinstein said. “Performance was bad and there was no programming on weekends.”

Wesley Haggerty told the council he was watching the broadcast of a City Council meeting when the station went blank. When he went to Paragon’s Hawthorne Boulevard office to complain, he was told he would have to wait at home all day for a service technician. Haggerty said this was impossible because he would have to miss a day of work.

“If you can’t get service, I don’t see why we got it to start with,” Haggerty said.

Virgina Rhodes said she thought Paragon owes “subscribers for the time when they have not been on-line with service.”

The basic subscription rate is $10.95 a month, said Michael Galarza, Lawndale’s cable television supervisor. There are about 3,000 subscribers in Lawndale.

In defending the company’s record, Paragon Vice President Jerome Ramsey expressed surprise that only “five of the thousands of cable customers” in Lawndale came to the hearing, which had been announced on Channel 60, the city’s public access channel.

Ramsey said the company has “in fact been experiencing problems with that channel.” Most of the problems stem from the ongoing installation of new equipment, which is being moved from Torrance to Gardena. Completion is scheduled for mid-March, Ramsey said.

The company is trying to shorten the time it takes for technicians to service customer complaints, Ramsey said, adding that, according to Paragon’s twice-yearly surveys, customer satisfaction in Lawndale has improved, “not as much as we’d like or as much as it will.” Ramsey did not elaborate.

Although Galarza said some Paragon cable customers may be eligible for rebates if their service is interrupted for three days or more, Ramsey told Mayor Sarann Kruse that the company could not give rebates automatically whenever a subscriber’s service was interrupted for a briefer period “because we’d be bankrupt.”

Galarza said that although the city had received complaints about Paragon “there were usually a lot of complaints by the same people.”

As a result of a request from the council, the city will receive quarterly records of complaints from logs kept by Paragon, Galarza said. Lawndale is also working with Paragon officials who are installing a cable system that would allow more live transmission of local programming, Galarza said. Currently, the only live show is the weekly broadcast of the council sessions.

After new studio facilities are completed in Torrance, Paragon will produce local programming for the four cities it serves in the South Bay: Lawndale, Torrance, Hawthorne and Gardena.