Doc Taylors Cable Company

I met Dr. Bruce Taylor last week. We both attended the Mary Kay Sigaty event at Oakland. After we made our introductions, I told him that I lived in his namesake community in Ellicott City.

“Who do you use for cable?” he asked.

I was surprised that this was the first question he asked. I thought he might inquire as to what I thought of the community in general. I was prepared to tell him how disappointed I was. I think his development program has been somewhat lacking in execution. Let me just say that Dr. Taylor is no Jim Rouse.

Instead, he caught me off guard with the cable question.

Then again I really shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Doc Taylor almost succeeded in having a monopoly on cable service in Taylor Village. He owns and operates the Ellicott City Cable Company which is basically a reseller of Dish Networks programming. It is one of the major reasons Ken Ulman carried our neighborhood in the last election. Thanks to Ken, Doc Taylor backed off his efforts to require all homeowners in our section of Taylor Village to subscribe to his Ellicott City Cable service.

We have Verizon.

I told Doc Taylor that I thought Verizon was a much better deal. What I didn’t tell him was that given what I’d seen in his real estate development I didn’t trust that his cable service would be any better.

Everyone else in the county should happy with it though. As a result of the Ellicott City Cable Franchise Agreement with the county, the company paid $70,000 to upgrade the Public, Educational, and Government (PEG) channels so that County Council hearings and meetings and Board of Education meetings can now be web-streamed live and available on demand on the Web.

The first use of this new technology will debut this evening.