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Upgrades to new City Hall put on hold

Insufficient data is causing delays in technology upgrades for the new city hall.

City Council members had been slated Tuesday to consider a $225,000 change order for technology upgrades at the old Lawton High School, which construction firm J.L. Walker Construction is renovating for use as a city hall and community center. However, city staff pulled the agenda item because they don't yet have firm numbers on construction work that could be deferred to help fund the technology upgrades. City Manager Larry Mitchell said the discussion on the change order has only been delayed; the item, with firm costs attached, will be brought back to the council for discussion as soon as possible.

Council members are being asked to find funding to cover upgrades in data and telephone wiring.

More cell coverage for rural Oklahoma

AT&T Inc. said it will add more than 30 new cell sites in Oklahoma this year and will launch its third-generation mobile broadband network in Ada, Ardmore, Enid and Muskogee.

Steve Gray, vice president and general manager for AT&T's mobility and consumer markets in Oklahoma and Arkansas, said Tuesday the expansion builds upon last year's investments in the state, including almost 20 new cell sites and the launch of its 3G network in Shawnee, Lawton and Bartlesville.

"We are constantly evaluating our network and its performance," Gray said. "We have enjoyed a great amount of growth over the past 20 years."

He said the size of the investment is attributable to the size of the telecommunication company's customer base in the state.

"We are determined to continue to keep our market. It's very, very competitive out there," Gray said.

Nationwide, AT&T said it will invest between $17 billion and $18 billion in 2009. The company declined to disclose the size of its investment in Oklahoma but said it invested more than $675 million in its Oklahoma network between 2006 and 2008.

Gray said he expects no increase in consumer costs as a result of the expanded services.

"What we think we have is a great value for the consumer," he said.

Some of the new cell sites will be located across the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas and in Shawnee. Chickasha, Lawton, Stillwater, Weatherford and several other areas also will receive new cell sites and additional AT&T coverage.

AT&T will also continue expanding its AT&T U-verse services, including AT&T U-verse TV, AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet and AT&T U-verse Voice.

AT&T also has completed the integration of nearly 275 cell sites in Oklahoma that it acquired from Dobson Communications. The former Dobson sites are in Adair, Cherokee, Craig, Delaware, Garfield, Mayes, McIntosh, Muskogee, Nowata, Okmulgee, Ottawa, Pittsburg and Washington counties.

Gray said AT&T's focus in investing in its wireless and wired networks is velocity and mobility.

"We are fast-paced culture, so immediate gratification is the thread running through us," he said.

Gov. Brad Henry said the company's expansion plans will provide Oklahomans with faster and better options for reaching emergency services and business communications.

"Creating a more robust communications infrastructure provides numerous benefits to Oklahoma consumers and is a big plus in terms of bolstering economic development and luring new companies and industry to our state," Henry said.

No special treatment for Madoff

Ensconced in his $7 million home, Bernard Madoff, the accused Ponzi swindler, is probably wondering what type of prison awaits him.

Madoff, who allegedly stole more than $50 billion through his investment firm, could face a 150-year sentence if convicted in Federal Court in Manhattan on Thursday. He is expected to plead guilty to 11 criminal counts, according to one of his lawyers, Ira Lee Sorkin.

Madoff has managed to avoid jail so far, thanks to the $10 million bail that he posted. Since his December arrest, he has remained with his wife under house arrest in their luxurious Manhattan residence.

But he won't be able to dodge the slammer for much longer, assuming he pleads guilty, and it's unlikely the 70-year-old man will ever be free again.

Madoff may ask the court to be placed in a prison of his choosing and the court can then forward this request to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

The bureau "ultimately decides where the inmate [is incarcerated]," said bureau spokeswoman Felicia Ponce. "We take into consideration judicial recommendations, but they're not binding."

Despite his white-collar status and non-violent history, Madoff won't be whiling away his days in some cushy "Club Fed" type of prison.

Ponce said the bureau weighs the "seriousness of the offense, the expected length of incarceration, any history of escapes and violence" as well as the age of the inmate and "security needs." The bureau tries to incarcerate inmates within 500 miles of their homes, she said.

Madoff's lawyer, Sorkin, wouldn't provide any details of his client's preferences. "There are many different facilities in many different places," he said.

No such thing as Club Fed

Ponce, of the Bureau of Prisons, dismissed the Club Fed institution as a "myth."

Ed Bales, managing director of Federal Prison Consultants, which prepares inmates for prison life, said that "Club Fed" facilities used to exist in such places as Nellis Federal Prison Camp near Las Vegas. He said these types of facilities were also located in Florida and Pennsylvania. They provided more freedom and better accommodations to inmates than the typical prisons, but were shut down several years ago.

Larry Levine, another prison consultant and former inmate, wrote on his Web site about the experience of being transferred from Nellis when it shut down in 2005 to a "real" prison near El Paso, Texas, replete with "warring gang members" and other violent offenders.

"The Nellis inmates were shell-shocked into the real world of federal prison," wrote Levine. "Gone were their cushy days of being in a camp."

White collar crooks: You never know where you'll go

Nowadays, all types of prisons await white collar offenders. Martha Stewart, the domestic diva convicted of insider trading in 2004, served her five-month sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, a minimum-security women's prison known as "Camp Cupcake."

At the other end of the spectrum, former Tyco Chief Executive Dennis Kozlowski, who was convicted in a state court and sentenced to up 25 years for grand larceny, was sent to a rougher, medium-security state prison in upstate New York. In a 2007 letter to Fortune, he wrote, "[Prison] is the most difficult of all difficult places to be."

Bales, of Federal Prison Consultants, said his newly convicted clients typically expect the worst, their nightmares of prison rape fueled by television shows like "Oz" and movies like "The Shawshank Redemption." But once they end up behind bars, some inmates are pleasantly surprised to find that it's not as dangerous as they'd thought, he said.

"They're scared out of their minds," said Bales. "They think they're going to get jumped in the shower. But once they hear what they're really like, they calm down a bit."

Fairton is the fairest

The best possible facility is the so-called prison camp, where there are "no murderers or rapists" and "no bars on the walls," said Bales. But he added that a lengthy sentence such as Madoff's might bar him from such a desirable facility.

Instead, Madoff might be eligible for a low-security prison, which isn't as bad as medium-security, but it's still a prison.

"In low security, you have some violence, you may have some low-level Mafia type figures, you may have some people who have been involved in child porn," he said. "[Madoff] may be facing that type of scenario."

The best possible low-security federal prison where Madoff could conceivably land is in Fairton, N.J., said Bales. That's the current residence of Sanjay Kumar, former Chief Executive of Computer Associates, serving a 12-year sentence for fraud and obstruction of justice.

"It's one of the best places to do your time," said Bales. "They send a lot of senators there and attorneys."

Obama signs new spending bill

Acknowledging it's an "imperfect" bill, President Barack Obama signed a $410 billion spending package that includes billions in earmarks like those he promised to curb in last year's campaign. But he insisted the bill must signal an "end to the old way of doing business."

The massive measure funding federal agencies through the fall contains nearly 8,000 pet projects, known as earmarks and denounced by critics as pork.

Obama defended earmarks when they're "done right," allowing lawmakers to direct money to worthy projects in their districts. But he said they've been abused, and he promised to work with Congress to curb them.

"I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government," Obama declared. "But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change."

Private signing
In a sign of his discomfort with the legislation, Obama signed the bill quietly rather than in public. He declined to answer a shouted reporters' question about why.

Running for president, Obama denounced the many pet projects as wasteful and open to abuse — and vowed to rein them in.

Explaining his decision, Obama said that future earmarks must have a "legitimate and worthy public purpose," and the any earmark for a private company should be subject to competitive bidding rules. Plus he said he'll "work with Congress" to eliminate any the administration objects to.

But he acknowledged that earmarks have bred "cynicism," and he declared, "This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business."

White House officials in recent weeks have dismissed criticism of the earmarks in the bill, saying the legislation was a remnant of last year and that the president planned to turn his attention to future spending instead of looking backward.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama wouldn't be the first president to sign legislation that he viewed as less than ideal. Asked whether Obama had second thoughts about signing the bill, Gibbs' reply was curt: "No."

Modest reforms
Obama's modest set of reforms builds upon changes initiated by Republicans in 2006 and strengthened by Democrats two years ago. Most importantly, every earmark and its sponsor must be made public.

In new steps — outlined in concert with House Democratic leaders Wednesday morning — the House Appropriations Committee will submit every earmark to the appropriate executive branch agency for a review. And any earmark designed to go to for-profit companies would have to be awarded through a competitive bidding process.

But perhaps the most tangible change may be Obama's promise to resurrect the long-defunct process by which the president proposes to cut spending from bills that he has signed into law.

Under this so-called rescissions process, the White House sends Congress a roster of cuts for its consideration. Congress is free to ignore the cuts, but both Obama and senior members like Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., say they want to use it to clean out bad earmarks that make it through the process.

But Obama declined to endorse a stronger process advocated by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others, that would have required Congress to vote on a presidential rescission earmark package. Senior Democrats dislike the idea even though many of them backed it in the early-to-mid 1990s.

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel-spending ways. Yet the bill sent from the Democratic-controlled Congress to the White House on Tuesday contained 7,991 earmarks totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

Extraordinary reach
The 1,132-page bill has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision.

Most of the government has been running on a stopgap funding bill set to expire at midnight Wednesday. Refusing to sign the newly completed spending bill would force Congress to pass another bill to keep the lights on come Thursday or else shut down the massive federal government. That is an unlikely possibility for a president who has spent just seven weeks in office.

The $410 billion bill includes significant increases in food aid for the poor, energy research and other programs. It was supposed to have been completed last fall, but Democrats opted against election-year battles with Republicans and former President George W. Bush.

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