On the Hook

After four years of asking, Joe Savage is finally receiving the help from BellSouth that he suspected was available all along. Since 1996 Savage has been asking the phone company for information about subsidy programs for low-income Tennesseans, but until recently he came up empty.

“I’ve been trying to get on this program for four years,” Savage says of the publicly funded Lifeline program. “I’ve been asking all of this time if there was some type of assistance available. I’ve gotten assistance with rent, water and electricity—so I thought that phone assistance must exist too.”

Tales such as Savage’s are precisely why a group of Memphis attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications behemoth last month, alleging that BellSouth had willfully and fraudulently acted to keep Tennessee’s qualified poor from collecting on a 10-year-old phone subsidy program called Lifeline—funded by state and federal dollars.

The attorneys allege that BellSouth has engaged in a pattern of behavior since 1991 “specifically designed and directed at enabling it to retain the profits created by the state subsidy, without effectively offering the benefits of the Lifeline program.” In other words, they think BellSouth didn’t sign up qualified recipients for Lifeline so that the corporation could keep the money for itself.

The attorneys conservatively estimate that, over the 10-year life of the program, BellSouth could have passed on at least $345 million in phone subsidies to half a million of Tennessee’s poorest residents. Instead, last year saw only 22,000 Lifeline recipients statewide because, the attorneys say, BellSouth has done a woefully inadequate job educating those qualified to receive it.

“We put information out in the phone bills,” one BellSouth official told the Scene in October, apparently unaware of the obvious futility of such an approach.

Savage recently called BellSouth and asked for help again. Finally, his persistence was rewarded. In the meantime, he has become a named plaintiff in the lawsuit.

“We have amended our class-action complaint to include Mr. Savage as a plaintiff, because we feel his story likely represents the stories of countless other Tennessee citizens,” says Murray Wells, one of the attorneys bringing the suit. “We suspect there is a widespread pattern of BellSouth denying the program to those who inquired, like Mr. Savage. We hope this lawsuit will in some way compensate those folks for the extra dollars they shouldn’t have had to pay, the time they may have been without a phone, and whatever other damages they suffered as a result of BellSouth repeatedly denying the existence of Lifeline.”

Savage, a Nashville-based entertainer, was permanently disabled in 1996, when he was hit by a taxi while visiting New York. The father of two young sons, Savage receives financial aid from numerous sources. “Nine out of 10 times when I asked about assistance, they’d say, 'There is no program for assistance,’ ” Savage says. “But I figured that if every other utility had an assistance program, then BellSouth must have one too.”

Over the years, Savage has dealt with the hassle and expense of having his phone disconnected and reconnected some 15 times. “What bothers me is thinking about how many times they’ve cut off my service because I couldn’t pay my bills,” he says. “Then I had to find the money to pay the bill and pay another connect fee just to get my service turned back on, when all along I could have afforded phone service under this program. I never would have had my service cut off and had to pay the connect fees. I can’t believe how much money I could have saved.”

In truth, he probably would have saved more than $1,000. With a charge of $41.50 to connect each of those 15 times, Savage probably paid about $622.50 unnecessarily in connection fees and another $500 more over four years because he was not receiving the monthly credit.

“It’s wrong. It’s just dead wrong,” Savage says. “They knew what their responsibilities were, and they just didn’t do it.”