When a certain other publication that covers the Lake Norman area (the paper owned by a Charlotte company that operates a collection of similar outlets) queried hopefuls for the Davidson Town Board last week, all three questions dealt with the same subject:

MI-Connection.

The level of wisdom involved in a single-issue Q&A notwithstanding (there are a few other challenges facing Davidson, after all), the fact that MI-Connection would be portrayed by anyone as the only issue facing Davidson only solidifies John Venzon’s stance on the future of the company:

MI-Connection will never succeed as long as it is perceived as a political issue.

“We’re trying hard not to focus on how we got here,” says Venzon, who was named chairman of MI-Connection’s board of directors in April. “Today, I don’t believe we have any choice but to try to grow the company.”

Of course, the decision to plunge Davidson (and its business partner to the north, the town of Mooresville) into the cable business was very much a political one because it ultimately hinged on the votes of the towns’ commissioners at the time. But the structure of the financing for the deal — which allowed the towns to buy the local remnants of the old Adelphia Cable system out of bankruptcy — make selling MI-Connection all but impossible until 2017, at the earliest.

“I seldom get complaints about the quality of (MI-Connection),” Venzon says. “What I do hear is that (Davidson) shouldn’t be in the (cable) business, (a position with) which I philosophically and politically agree.”

But, Venzon adds, his and others’ philosophies and politics can’t undue what’s been done, so the only viable option is to turn MI-Connection into a moneymaker as quickly as possible.

“Then,” Venzon says, “we can let (municipal ownership) come up in a referendum on whether we stay in the (cable) business.”

Venzon, of course, understands the nuances of local politics. His wife, Laurie, is a Davidson commissioner who is running for re-election. The decision to create MI-Connection came before Laurie Venzon’s election to the town board. In fact, with Margo Williams’ decision not to seek reelection in November, Davidson’s next town board will have no holdovers from the board that
voted in favor of entering the cable business. Only Mayor John Woods, who voted in favor of creating MI-Connection when he was a commissioner and is running for another term as mayor, could remain among the original cable yea-sayers.

That means MI-Connection has been all but eliminated as effective fuel for political retribution. But there is another element to the politicization of MI-Connection — one that has been reported on extensively in the Citizen.

“The argument has been made that if you live in Davidson, you’re not a patriot if you don’t subscribe to MI-Connection,” Venzon says, referring to a case made from the dais, during meetings, by some Davidson commissioners. “I don’t agree with that.”

For MI-Connection to survive on its own, without continued subsidies from the towns, it has to stand on its own as a quality product, Venzon insists. That can’t happen, he says, if elected officials attempt to browbeat constituents into using MI-Connection.

Venzon looks to the company’s latest quarterly results as a sign that the company is making significant inroads. In the three months ending Sept. 30, MI-Connection added more video, data and voice customers than it did in the previous 12 months combined. The system increased its voice customers by 48 percent over the same period last year, its video customers by 296 percent and its data customers by 2,248 percent.

The increases coincide with changes in the makeup of MI-Connection’s board, which now reflects greater industry expertise rather than simply community representation. The company also has eased spending on expansion and instead focused on a lower-cost strategy of selling additional services to existing customers, Venzon says.

MI-Connection’s early belief, Venzon explains, was that “if you ran more fiber down a street and if you passed 10 homes, you would get four new customers.”

But there are only so many streets to be wired, and existing customers are constantly bombarded with offers from competitors. That makes customers who subscribe to just one or two MI-Connection services the more promising prospects to add new services, Venzon says.

But can MI-Connection keep up current pace and erase its multimillion-dollar deficits?

“I think the gains are sustainable, because they’ve been consistent for three months,” says David Auger, the former Time Warner Cable executive hired to oversee MI-Connection’s transition to local management. “We think we can keep it up.”

And Auger is familiar with the local market. As the chief executive of Time Warner’s Charlotte Division until 2006, it was Auger who planned the transition of the local Adelphia system to Time Warner. That included what is now

“I know the system well,” Auger says.