Anchors aweigh—
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ing, which also includes beach restoration and public access to the water, is underway and is slated to be completed in mid-2022. Recently the nonprofit, which is dedicated to creating broad access to the Long Island Sound, announced the receipt of a $3 million leadership gift from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation to support construction of the center. All told, it will cost about $8 million, with roughly 90% coming from grants and private donors. And, in keeping with the organization’s mission, its construction and operation will be as economically responsible as possible, Shemitz noted. The project is what she called the linchpin of the city’s revitalization of the surrounding Boccuzzi Park. While itself a destination for families, joggers and dogwalkers — and, yes, soccer players — Boccuzzi has long been in need of repair. When it isn’t flooding from the nearby waters, the sole parking lot can be an after-hours magnet for teens with nothing better to do, she said. Among other concerns are a deteriorating seawall, lack of sufficient public restrooms and the need to dredge the dock area. Public access to the sound itself has also been limited, something that
SoundWaters and the city are working together to improve. Stamford spent $86,000 in studying plans for the area, culminating in the creation of a Boccuzzi Park Master Plan by Stantec Consulting in 2018. As part of the master plan, SoundWaters received a $348,000 grant from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation to rebuild the dunes at the water’s edge once the city relocates the parking lot. At the time of the Cohen announcement, Mayor David Martin said the new Harbor Center “allows SoundWaters to expand this role and anchors the city’s revitalization of Boccuzzi Park, while increasing resources for education, maritime job training and recreational access to the Long Island Sound.” And education is very much a cornerstone of the nonprofit’s mission. Vice President of Development Bob Mazzone noted that SoundWaters began in 1990 when Len Miller, learning of the poor condition of the Long Island Sound, formed a group to buy a replica of an 80-foot, 18th century schooner. It was fitted with education stations, rechristened “SoundWaters” and is a popular attraction for students — some 6,000 annually — and families who can enjoy afternoon and sunset sails. Miller — who founded and chairs the board of the Discovering Amistad project
— remains in touch; “I just talked with him the other day,” Shemitz said. In 2000, then-Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy brokered a partnership that allowed the nonprofit to renovate the historic Holly House into office and additional education space; roughly 30,000 students make the trip there each year. Until Covid hit — or so one might think.
home, Commisso began to plan his strategy for Mediacom. “When he was looking at what was happening when Alan sold Cablevision Industries, he realized that a lot of these big companies were acquiring companies that were in metropolitan areas and then they would discard or sell very cheaply their rural assets, because they were really focused on serving the highly populated areas,” Larsen said. “And so Rocco’s philosophy was, ‘I can buy rural assets cheaply and then the money I save, I can then invest in upgrading those assets so that they have the same or better services as the larger cities.’ And that was day one, his belief.” Commisso took advantage of the existing talent in the area — individuals out of work from the acquisition of Cablevision Industries — and hired back his former coworkers, many of whom remain at Mediacom today. Commisso also delivered in many ways on his mission to make rural services as good or better than those offered in the city. For example, Larsen said that Mediacom was the first major cable company in the U.S. to take its entire network to 1-gigabit services, bringing them ahead of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago in that regard. “We were offering cities in Iowa that might have 300 or 400 people gigabit services before you could get that in Manhattan,”
Larsen said. Though others in the industry didn’t see the value at the time as Commisso did, his foresight has paid off. “The core of our business philosophy is to buy right, finance right and operate right,” Commisso said. “We did very well in the acquisition market in the late 1990s and early 2000s, paying very low per-subscriber costs compared to our peers.” “Now, oddly enough, rural assets are hot commodities,” Larsen said, acknowledging that this was a trend before the pandemic, but has only ramped up since. “If you have a good network in a rural area, you don’t have a lot of competition for the high speeds, so you’re the go-to source for high-speed internet. Now, you’re seeing a lot of companies pay top dollar for rural assets. So Rocco, in that regard, was the visionary, although obviously there’s some luck involved in that.”
Surviving Covid “We have a whole team of educators,” Mazzone said, “and they immediately set to work, because teachers need content. We ended up producing over 90 lessons which were uploaded and made available free of charge.” “We were also able to do virtual field trips,” Shemitz said, “which drew people from as far away as Egypt.” “Teachers Google ‘virtual field trips’ and we come up,” Mazzone said. SoundWaters also has three core educational programs for youth: Young Mariners, a local sailing and youth development group that it acquired through a merger in 2016 and draws about 100 students each year; Harbor Corps, which provides maritime job skills training for young adults; and Research Intensive, featuring college-level marine research opportunities for high school students. Shemitz said bottled-up demand
combined with increasing vaccinations has seen all of its warm-weather programs quickly filling up. “The cicadas have nothing on us when it comes to seeing these kids emerge,” she said. “It’s been joyous.” Shemitz credited the organization’s board and its array of donors for stepping up during the pandemic’s darkest days. Other fundraising events include the annual SoundWaters Flotilla. Patterned after charity walkathons and scheduled for July 10, that event has featured up to 200 people of all ages kayaking or paddle-boating through the sound; it typically raises about $20,000 each year. Even more popular is the annual HarborFest. Set for Aug. 28, it includes harbor tours, mini-golf and other activities — crowned by the self-explanatory Cardboard Kayak Race. Martin has participated in the past; in fact, the winner is presented with a Mayor’s Trophy. “Probably 97% of the entries end up sinking,” Mazzone said. “It draws thousands of people and it’s absolutely hilarious.” That both events expose the uninitiated to SoundWaters and the harbor is the icing on the cake, Shemitz said. “There is still so much potential here, which the Harbor Center will help us realize,” she said. “That makes our future even more exciting.”
Mediacom—
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began in the Hudson Valley. Mediacom’s founder and CEO, Rocco Commisso, traveled by ship to the United States from Calabria, Italy at age 12. After going to Columbia University on a soccer scholarship, he became a Wall Street banker, working for companies such as Chase and the Royal Bank of Canada. He lent money to several cable and telecommunications companies through his banking roles, and met Alan Gerry, the founder of Cablevision Industries in Sullivan County (not to be confused with the Cablevision company founded by Charles Dolan, now owned by Altice.) Gerry founded Cablevision Industries initially to provide cable service to his rural hometown of Liberty, where reception was poor. Gerry addressed the problem and eventually expanded down the East Coast. “Rocco, after lending money for years to Alan and to other cable people, took a job as chief financial officer at Alan’s company and from around 1985 to 1995 Rocco worked in Liberty and helped Alan grow from the 25th to the eighth biggest cable company,” said Thomas Larsen, senior vice president for government and public relations at Mediacom. “Then Alan sold to Time Warner and Rocco decided at that point in 1995 to start his own cable company.” AHEAD OF THE CURVE Working out of the basement of his
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CUSTOMER CENTRIC Certainly there is some luck involved in building up a service that has essentially become a necessity in our current day, and Mediacom has seen the type of consistent financial growth that is quite rare in any company. “When we announce our results for the first quarter of 2021, it will mark the 97th straight quarter of year-over-year revenue growth for Mediacom, which is an incredi-
bly unique operational accomplishment in any industry,” Commisso said. The Covid-19 pandemic has also reinforced the urgent need for high-quality internet service, putting Mediacom in the fortunate spot of being in one of few industries for which business has been booming in the past year. The company signed on to the Federal Communications Commission’s Keep Americans Connected Pledge in March, which states that it would not terminate connectivity to any resident or small business unable to pay because of the effects of the pandemic, would waive any late fees incurred and would open its WiFi hotspots to anyone in the U.S. who needed them. The FCC cited Mediacom as one of the companies that went above and beyond for its efforts, including increasing broadband speeds, offering two months of free broadband service to new low-income customers, reducing prices for new customers and suspending all data usage limits for the first two months of the pandemic, which later extended to most of 2020. The company introduced low-cost programs in order to get more people online. “We signed on to (the Keep Americans Connected Pledge) and that pledge really meant do everything you can at the company to get people online and keep them online, stay connected to the world,” » MEDIACOM
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