FairPoint Communications has until Sept. 9 to respond to a demand...

Board said on Monday. The show-cause petition claims that FairPoint’s poor performance as a provider should prompt the state to rescind FairPoint’s license to deliver telecom in Vermont (CD July 16 p9). FairPoint has been struggling with debt and the workload involved in taking over systems in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire that it acquired in 2008 from Verizon. “Since the transaction, FairPoint has been unable to effectively manage the operations in any of the three states, resulting in tremendous problems for residential and business consumers,” the department said in filing the petition. On Monday company president Peter Nixon spoke at three events scheduled by the Vermont board. The order that the company respond to the show-cause petition came as board members considered whether to investigate the company’s performance. Later that day the board held a preliminary hearing on a petition by FairPoint to be allowed to modify the performance standards it’s being held to. At that session it was agreed that all parties will propose a calendar for addressing that request, but no deadline for proposals was set. Nixon also participated in the latest in a series of monthly workshops convened by the regulator on FairPoint’s progress in engineering the transition to its systems of the Verizon networks. No official action emerged from that meeting, a board official told us. The next transition workshop is set for Sept. 18.