Agenda - 01-20-1987 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Lesli RALEIGH-DURHAM AIRPORT AUTHORITY Rt. 1, Box 500, Morrisville, N.C. 27560/919-781-0200/919-596-2321 JOHN C. BRANTLEY DUIRMAM RALEIGH WAKE COuNri DURHAM COUNTY AIRPORT DIRECTOR WILLIAM A CLEMENT, JOHN B. HARRIS, Jfi.. SMEDES YORK BERT COLLINS CHAIRMAN VICE-CHAIRMAN E. B. HARDIN. JR. (SABELLE WOO BRANTLEY DELOATCHE GEORGE S.WILLOUGHBY. .M SECRETARY TREASURER December 13, 1985 Mr. Jere A. Drummond Vice President for North Carolina Southern Bell Telephone 1010 Southern National Center Charlotte, North Carolina 28202 Dear Mr Drummond: As the governmental entity which operates the Raleigh-Durham Airport, the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority is naturally concerned with providing as good and effective service to the airport's users and tenants as possible. In the area of telephone service, we are confronted with a situation which has long been a source of significant difficulty, particularly for the public which uses the airport. An individual placing a local call from the airport cannot use the same telephone line to call any of the three principal cities served by RDU - namely, Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill - but must use a different line for local service to each of the three cities. Because of this situation, we must have public telephones for each of the three cities as well as other telephones for credit card use in our terminal buildings, thereby substantially increasing the total number of telephones in the buildings, producing considerable confu- sion (and frequently extra expense) for the public, especially for those not residing in the Triangle area who don't realize that three different exchanges exist, and increasing the expense to Southern Bell and GTE as well. The Airport Authority and the airport tenants also are affected by the sane situation which requires that we have separate lines for each of the three cities or, alternatively, make long-distance calls to one or two of them and force the public placing incoming calls to these parties to do likewise. With the volume of telephone communications taking place to and from RDU, this is un- necessarily inconvenient and expensive. The existence of a central telephone exchange such as is operated within the Research Triangle Park would rectify this situation and be of major benefit to all parties placing calls to and from RDU. Our situation is virtually identical to that at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, where a central exchange is operated by agreement between GTE of the Southwest and Southwestern Bell permitting local calls to both Dallas and Fort Worth to be made from the same telephone line. The Airport Authority is very interested in and and wishes to call upon both Southern Bell and GTE to work out arrangements for the establishment of a central exchange to serve RDU as soon as is reasonably- possible. With the forthcoming operation of an airline hub at RDU by American Airlines beginning in