The night before the July 16 election, Joey Durel and his wife sat down to a meal at a local restaurant. The place, which Durel wishes to keep a secret, has been the site of every pre-election night feast during the city-parish president's political career. This time, as in the past, the ritual proved to be a good luck charm.

After months of debate and heated arguments, voters chose to follow Durel's leadership on the issue of public-funded fiber technology for the city. The Lafayette Utilities System play to sell $125 million in bonds to finance its fiber to the home project was met graciously by 12,481 of Lafayette's 70-plus thousand voters.

The city's enterprising plan now heads down a path of engineering, design, construction and implementation. Two years will pass before the network will be available to consumers, and many customers will have to wait even longer. With Durel's position coming up for election in 2007, the success or problems associated with the plan could affect his chances of winning another election, should he choose to run.

But Durel really didn't need luck on his side for this summer's special election. It really wouldn't have mattered if he and his wife Lynne had stayed home and eaten Spaghetti O's or loaded up on Sesame Chicken and an insightful fortune cookie from Chung King. The couple could have dined on a juicy steak from Ruth's Chris or a gut-busting poboy while courting the campus vote at Old Tyme Grocery. By the time Durel paid his check, the fiber initiative -- for the most part -- was boxed up and ready to go.

Leading up to Saturday, July 16, Lafayette was in the throes of a full-blown blitz of mostly pro-fiber campaigning. LUS held six town hall meetings where residents were encouraged to show up and ask Durel, LUS Director Terry Huval and Chief Administrative Officer Dee Stanley questions regarding the project. Some 2,000 black signs with vibrant fire-truck red check marks encouraged voters to flick the "yes" switch in the booth. Direct mail from LUS, while legally unable to encourage a "yes" vote, provided information on the benefits of fiber to the home. Civic groups, more than a dozen in number, told their members and the general citizenry that a "yes" vote was the vote for the future. Media from 5 o'clock newscasts to early morning papers detailed the latest developments and build up to the election. Eight billboards detracted drivers with a story-high "Yes."

All totaled, the yes camps spent into the six-figures to win the election, not counting priceless endorsements.

By comparison, the opposition's stream of influence was a trickle, with only one local group making a significant detraction. That group, Fiber 411, used $22,000 to provide signs and a direct mail campaign paid for by its Bill Leblanc, a local contractor.

In hindsight, the plan's passing should not have surprised anyone. Across the nation, media outlets, including National Public Radio and USA Today, covered the plan, making the comparison of a modern day David versus Goliath. While the election had no immediate bearing on BellSouth or Cox, their early attacks and eventual lawsuit, coupled with their nation-wide deep pockets and customer base, left some voters seeing them as greedy bullies. LUS, confined to the city and unable to spend money advocating a "yes" vote, seemed a natural fit for the role of David, a small entity taking on the giants.

"The only thing I'll say is if David was the community of Lafayette, while David may have been smaller, I think David collectively had the bigger brain," says Durel.

Money Talks, Voters Listen

Shortly after the election, the chat box on Fiber 411's Web site included isolated talk of a boycott of local businesses that endorsed the initiative or allowed pro-fiber signs on their property. But with the overwhelming support the proposal received, such a boycott would require these protestors to snub most of Lafayette.

When Pearson Cross talks about how LUS walked away with the election, he doesn't mention the importance of the project. Cross, the University of Louisiana's political science professor of state and local government, doesn't talk about capable or trustworthy leaders. The main decision maker, he says, was the appearance of a side stacked with support squaring off against an opposing side seemingly centered in one camp.

The support for the initiative came from all corners. A hodgepodge group of non-technology businesses -- Nouveau Photeau and Executan Tanning Salons -- saddled up with tech sector companies -- WOW Technologies and Firefly Digital. Civic groups, among them The Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce and Rebuild Lafayette North, joined forces with business networks like Acadiana Home Builders Association. Both the Lafayette Parish Democrat Executive Committee and Lafayette Parish Republican Executive Committee signed on across party lines. Downtown Development Authority, Downtown Lafayette Unlimited and BBR Creative also pledged their support.

On the opposing side, BellSouth and Cox Communications were adamantly against the project and filed the lawsuit that lead to the vote. The only organized group of citizens with a significant opposing voice was Fiber 411, which first struck out to bring the matter to a vote via a petition and later joined the lawsuit. After the public vote was ordered by 15th Judicial District Judge Byron Hebert, Fiber 411 kept its campaign, which objected to city government competing for private enterprise's pie, alive. The group -- Bill LeBlanc, Tim Supple and Neal Breakfield -- also objected to the in lieu of taxes LUS would have to pay the city and the business plan devised for the project.

"The negative stuff all came from one camp," says Cross.

In Cross' opinion, the single opposing voice against the multi-pronged support choir built steam for the pro-fiber vote.

"It's clear that there was a broad-based pro-fiber campaign that touched most of the major sectors of Lafayette business and government as well," he explains. "So, the initiative had a great deal of support behind it, and it was support that was spread across a different number of groups."

The laundry list of supporters gave a definite upper hand to the pro-fiber campaign in another vital area: money. With supporters came donations. With donations came expenditures. Lafayette Yes! raked in some $90,000 and spent $83,000 on a variety of "yes vote" media buys.

"How many times do you see an item come up for public approval that has anything more than perhaps maybe the Chamber taking a position on it?" Huval asks to illustrate the plan's wide support. "I think people just decided this is an important thing for our community."

Lafayette Coming Together, another pro-fiber PAC, trailed with $32,000 in funds, plus in-kind donations, including $1,000 from the Independent Weekly. Whereas Lafayette Yes! fought on the media front, LCT, headed by pro-blogger John St. Julien, used the fund for various pro-fiber materials.

"Our strategy at the largest level was to keep the focus on two things: one, the nature of the incumbents' campaign, and two, the positive vision of what building our own network could do for Lafayette," writes St. Julien via e-mail. "Their campaign was all about inducing fear, uncertainty and doubt. They didn't have to put forward anything positive and didn't try. The incumbent coalition could just gin up all sorts of new things to worry about from wireless, to hurricanes, to Hawaii, to 'in lieu of taxes,' to bond language ... the number was potentially endless. And since the point was not to substantiate each charge -- they couldn't and didn't try -- but to make the voter a little afraid and confused, all they had to do was continue to come up with new things to distort."

LCT put 2,000 "yes" signs on Lafayette lawns and in front of business. The group printed flyers, decals, T-shirts, bumper stickers, banners, rented six billboards and propped up 21 4-by-8 signs.

"Those were in high demand by businesses, and we could have used more," St. Juline writes.

In the July 13 Independent, LCT ran a full-page ad featuring a long list of supporters -- individuals and businesses alike -- pledging their votes. Dabbling in the media, LCT bought several print ads, plus a television spot and one radio ad. It sent a weekly newsletter to 500 supporters and direct mailers to drum up the absentee vote and mailed out another message during the final days before the election. Online, aside from St. Julien's pro-fiber site (www.lafayetteprofiber.com ), LCT threw a fiber film festival, soliciting filmmakers to create pro-fiber movies.

"The question of money: In an initiative like this, money always matters," says Cross. "There is something irreducible about it, and typically, like you see in congressional campaigns, the side that outspends wins about 75 to 90 percent of the time. In this particular case, there was a great deal more money spent in favor of, on the pro-fiber side, and I think that really had an effect."

Winners All

When the polls closed, LUS was triumphant. At the same time, Tim Supple of Fiber 411 would claim a victory as well on the front page of The Daily Advertiser.

"I think we won," Supple told the Advertiser. "We started off wanting to get people the right to vote. We accomplished that. We tried to get people to understand the issue. We accomplished that, I hope. We won."

Even the most hardened fiber supporter could concede a little victory on both sides as voter turnout surpassed the expectations of both camps. A single issue, non-candidate election, in the minds of experts, should yield a pitifully low turnout.

Looking back on previous elections of the same nature, Clerk of Court Louis Perret knew the vote would not yield the 65 to 70 percent turnout a presidential or hotly contested sheriff's race garners. After five years of watching elections as the clerk, Perret's call seemed logical. After all, he points out, a teacher pay tax raise a couple of years ago only yielded an 18 percent turnout. With a week of thunderstorms and a July 15 rainy forecast, Perret's expectation of 15 percent of the 73,893 voters registered in the city was a safe bet.

Instead, 27.2 percent, 20,102 voters, hit the polls, surprising all watchers and surpassing their expectations.

"I'm glad that 27 percent did turn out," Perret says, wondering about the other 73 percent of the voters. According Perret, his office pays the same amount of money if one voter or 73,000 show up.

"On the other hand, I'm being realistic, I think, when I say it's disappointing to have not even half the people bother to show up in an election," he adds.

Though Perret remains a bit let down by the 72.8 percent of voters who didn't make it to the polls, the number pleased Terry Huval.

"When I saw 27 percent, we were very, very pleased and thought that what that meant was a lot of people got engaged in this and far more than any other single-ballot, non- candidate election that had ever been held. We were certainly very excited about that type of outcome," says Huval.

Along with the blitz from both sides, the clerk of courts office helped bring up some of the numbers at the polling place. For this election, Perret and his staff manning the booths handed out round stickers with large print exclaiming, "I Voted!" Perret reports that some voters he spoke with at the polls had seen them on people around town and remembered to head to their precinct.

"(That) accomplished what we wanted -- to let people know there was an election going on," he explains.

While the election shouldered its share of controversy, talking points and more than enough media exposure, according to Cross the results are quite unusual.

"I would say turnout was frankly remarkable. I think it exceeded everybody's expectations," Cross begins. "Turnout in elections and initiatives tends to range in order of importance of the issue, and people perceive the official at the top of the ticket as the most important. In this case, where there is no important official on top of the ticket and there is only really one question to be decided, you would really expect turnout to be considerably lower than this. At times and various localities, like tax elections for example, we'll get one to two percent of the available electorate. So, this was really quite a surprise."

A week before the election, a pro-fiber supporter sent Durel and others an e-mail taking bets on how the election would end. Durel says he predicted BellSouth employees would swing the absentee vote. But on the July 16 election day, he figured the larger the turnout, the wider the margin. Considering both factors, the parish president speculated that it would go 60 to 40 in his favor.

"We felt there was strong community support, but if it poured down rain that day and had lightning and terrible storms and we'd only gotten a 7 percent turnout, then that employee vote from the companies would have held a higher percentage," Durel says. "So, the 27 percent turnout, I thought, was huge for us because it make the employee turnout a little less significant."

Media Saturation

Expressing the dichotomy of his disappointment, yet joy at a 27 percent turnout, Perret raises a valid question about Lafayette voters. He ponders how anyone could have stayed away from the polls when coverage of the initiative ruled the media.

In 2005, Times General Manager Eric Benjamin wrote 13 decidedly anti-LUS columns before the election. The Times also reported on the efforts of Fiber 411 and two ardent pro-fiber Web sites before dedicating nearly the entire July 13 issue to the topic. Sprinkled throughout issues all year were small news items ranging from the petition to vote to a pro-fiber film festival. The Times was not alone. The Independent Weekly devoted at least one story a month for five months this year to fiber, a cover story when the matter broke and a cover story on embattled efforts in other communities to get fiber to the home. Three days before the election, both The Times and The Independent ran columns endorsing the project.

In living rooms across town, both KATC TV-3 and KLFY TV-10 devoted gratuitous airtime to the issue. In the week leading up to the election, KATC produced a series of public service announcements featuring news anchors urging viewers to hit the polls, carefully devoid of any endorsement. While the PSAs, according to News Director James Warner, could be used for any election and encouraged voting in parishes other than Lafayette, he says the station gave weight to the election in the three months prior -- even assigning Louis David to the fiber beat.

"In the two weeks prior to the election, we reported heavily on the issue, and fiber-related stories were the top story in many of our newscasts," reports Warner.

On Monday, July 11, anchor Hoyt Harris moderated a 30-minute live forum where Huval, BellSouth's Bill Oliver, Supple and Mike Stagg of Lafayette Coming Together addressed questions submitted by viewers.

Across the dial, KLFY did roughly 24 stories between the April 27 announcement of the plan and the end of the year. From the onset of 2005 through the election, Channel 10 reported 50 separate news stories on the issue. Each night of election week, the station featured a different issue on fiber, capped off with opinions by representatives of both Fiber 411 and Lafayette Coming Together during the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts.

In The Daily Advertiser, fiber appeared on four front-page articles in the week leading up to the election, including a Friday special allowing both sides to speak out on different fiber issues. This came on top of rigorous coverage since the story began in 2004.

Along with print and television, Huval and Durel made radio appearances, numerous Web sites spouted both sides and media as far away as South Africa touted what was happening in Lafayette.

"It's hard to gauge how much, (media influenced), but one of the weird things about American politics is that we have so many initiatives that require us to go to the ballot and vote on different tissues and campaigns and elections," Cross says. "Awareness is crucial, and I think in this particular case, the media probably played the most pivotal role in increasing the participation of the public at large. Without that continual coverage, I don't think that you would have seen this turnout."

Because the turnout for similar elections is almost always low, Huval credits the media for bringing in votes.

"I certainly think the heavy media coverage from the beginning and the amount of time that this has been in the public ... that type of lively debate being aired on almost a daily basis, certainly, I think got a lot of people's attention that otherwise would have not paid a lot of attention to the project," he says.

Keeping it Clean, Local

In the days of Fiber 411's petition to bring the fiber issue to a vote, one constant thought from the "yes" camp was that the ensuing campaign from BellSouth and Cox would make the 2002 Suzanne Haik Terrell and Mary Landrieu senate mud-slinging race look like a church bake sale. LUS supporters warned against lascivious ads and mis-information. They felt this put LUS at an extreme disadvantage because it only could spend money on information and not advocate a vote in either direction.

To some degree, the companies kept their hands clean. After the initial announcement that LUS would enter the market, ads attacked the utility for the project's potential debt and told of the supposed failures of municipal FTTH projects in other markets -- all piped in commercial break after commercial break. The two companies sponsored a anti-LUS fiber forum in August 2004. But in the months leading up to the election, the campaign switched direction. The most telling culmination was in the July 13 Times, just three days shy of the vote, both companies ran self-promoting, full-page ads without any mention of LUS or the election.

"If BellSouth had not gotten involved, there would not have been any vote, period. The suit was filed on the last day at the last minute. It would have been impossible for us to raise the funds necessary to challenge the government's endless supply of money in the cost of litigation," Supple states, adding attorneys told them costs would exceed $50,000 for a suit and $100,000 to answer appeals.

Still, the companies' involvement in the lawsuit and early attacks might have galvanized some residents' view that the election was not about approving LUS bonds but a battle between the local utility and the incumbent providers.

"I think it went both ways," says Huval on whether the BellSouth involvement hurt or helped LUS. He recalls the early market study that claimed 70 percent support for the project. After the study, BellSouth launched a poll of its own reporting conflicting figures. LUS called it a push poll, a method of influencing the public.

"Look at the election results -- 62 percent said 'yes.' That 8 percent difference, I think, was the 8 percent of people who got scared that it wasn't just an issue of receiving the services and getting competitively priced services, but it was all this fear and all that sort of emotion that did that," says Huval. "I also understood from some of the early polling data that was done by us that the more Bell and Cox tended to be opposed to this position and fighting it publicly, the more people tended to think, 'Wait, what are these big companies trying to tell the people in Lafayette? We can make our decisions ourselves.'

"So, it worked both ways. Where the fear factor affected people, as well as the feeling that we shouldn't have these outside entities telling our people what to do."

Playing into the us and against them mentality of Lafayette voters, the pro-fiber camp were wise to employ a live phone bank to solicit voters on election day. A bipartisan effort -- which involved both Democrat and Republican party members, Huval, Durel, St. Julien and more volunteers -- rang city voters urging them to vote. BellSouth, on the other hand, used an automated pre-recorded message to reach voters.

"I learned during my campaign that people like it much better when somebody can pronounce their name and talks with the same accent they talk with," says Durel. "You hang up on automated phone calls a lot easier than you do a personal phone call. I think people appreciated having various people call, including myself and others, that are their neighbors, asking them and stressing the importance of this election. There is no doubt about it, I think that's the difference. I've said all a long -- we're a mom and pop, so it's much more personal."

Where Fiber Failed

The July 16 "yes" vote rang out across town, winning each district. Only 782 voters in 12 voting precincts stopped the election from being a clean sweep.

In only five precincts did the "no" vote lead with a 10-point margin or greater. The widest "no" majority occurring at Pinhook's W.A. Lerosen Alternative School and Southpark, both recording 36 to 64 percent. However, the 782 "no" votes cast at these precincts seem minuscule in the more than 20,000 total votes in the election.

"My guess is they never got the message," says Durel. "My guess is somebody got the people to vote who didn't really know what they were voting on."

Huval adds scare tactics swayed voters.

"I think that the 'no' vote in both cases came from people who were lead to be scared of this. People who specialize in human behavior will tell you that if you can get a person to be scared of something then their ability to logically assess the pros and cons of something becomes secondary to the fear," Huval says. " I don't put a whole lot of stock in what the cause was in any person voting 'no' on this. In so many cases it was fear driven more so than logically driven."

What is striking is, other than the Southpark Fire Station, all the precincts are on what is considered the North side of town — held in districts belonging to council members Chris Williams and Louis Benjamin and one Carencro district 2 area precinct represented by Dale Bourgeois. With the exception of Southpark, the eligible voters in these precincts in this city-only election were predominantly black.

"I think you can attribute it to a couple of things," says Williams of District 3. "One is the fact that the people may have been a little apprehensive about the program, but I guess that was a small percentage who thought that way, given the overall election. Additionally, there were community meetings that were held, but I don't think they were well attended. That may be some points there that maybe did not get across. Lastly, I think that the voting percentages were likely a little reduced."

Williams is careful not to attribute the no votes in his district to any one cause. A fiber supporter himself, he states there may be fear in these communities that the city will not work together on the issue and they may not see the benefit. Williams issues this as a challenge for the entire city to come together and spread fiber's benefits and opportunities into every section of town. Current census figures, he says, place high speed DSL penetration at only 3 to 5 percent in his district.

"I want to ensure that as we embark upon this project, that we open up the great opportunities of fiber for all citizens in our city. And that's what I will be working on for the next two years," he says.