When Diane and Bill Stahly lived in Connecticut, they had no choice but to pay long-distance charges when phoning their son in Utah.
Now that they live in Alta, however, the couple thinks it's absurd to pay similar rates to call their son, who lives just a half-hour away in Sugar House.Tired of $100 phone bills, Diane Stahly has started a petition drive to get the state Public Service Commission to extend Alta's local telephone service area. If the effort is successful, Alta residents would be able to place free calls anywhere in Salt Lake County. Now, they can't even call nearby Sandy, at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, without paying a toll.
"We've only lived here since January, and when we got our first phone bill we were just so surprised at how expensive it was to be calling up and down the canyon," Diane Stahly said. "I think the people (of Alta) have lived with this for so long that it doesn't bother them as much because that's just how it is.
"US WEST told us they couldn't do anything, so we went to the state."
The Stahlys and the Alta residents who have signed the petition aren't alone. The Commerce Department gets requests for extended-area service all the time, according to Lisa Armstrong, legal counsel for the department's Committee of Consumer Services. And many of those requests - after a lengthy bureaucratic process - are approved by the Public Service Commission.
The commission approved a request earlier this year from Hurricane residents to extend their local-calling area to St. George.
Park City residents are gathering signatures to extend the area's local calling area to include Salt Lake City. Tooele County residents are making the same request. Residents in northern Utah County want to make local calls into Salt Lake County and Provo residents are petitioning to make any call within Utah County a local call.
Armstrong said US WEST encourages localities to petition for extended-area service because it keeps competitors, like AT&T, from coming in and offering better deals on local service.
If the commission does approve extension of Alta's local calling area, Alta residents could be charged as much as $7.50 a month for the service, Armstrong said.
Stahly said town officials were lukewarm to the idea, saying it had been tried before and failed.
"They've just said, `Go ahead if you want to try.' They're thinking that it probably will not work," she said. "I'm not discouraged at all. You just have to follow the rules. We'll get the petition (turned in)."
Stahly gathered about 30 signatures just by placing the petition at the town's tiny post office.
"Everybody is enthusiastic because their phone bills are so big for the most part," she said.
The Commerce Department can begin working on Alta's extended-area service request once it has signatures from 15 percent of the users of the town's 303 residential lines. After the signatures are validated by US WEST, the phone company must conduct a two-month study to determine how many calls are being made from Alta into Salt Lake County. A cost study and customer survey would follow before the commission could consider the request.
In the meantime, the Stahlys will try to keep their Salt Lake phone calls to a minimum.