The
Reader, 5/10/2007
Limiting Access
Public’s
television threatened if council bows to Cox
By Andrew Norman
When
As Cox and the city near the
end of the 30-year contract, that commitment has dwindled significantly, and
could be lessened further if the Omaha City Council passes a Cox-initiated
proposal Tuesday, May 15.
The contract has been amended
several times over the years, said Deputy City Attorney Tom Mumgaard; for
instance, the four studio locations were consolidated into Cox’s 115th
and Dodge site through city council amendments in 1996 and 2000. Mumgaard
maintains the rest of the contract’s public access commitments remain valid.
Cox currently offers the city
two studio rooms (one’s being used for storage), one full-time and one
part-time employee, and six public access channels (4, 17, 18, 21, 22 and 23).
If Cox has its way, those six channels – which air programming from government
and community leaders, educational and health entities, as well as from
everyday Omahans – would be cut to just three, in order to free up bandwidth.
ITO worked with the city’s
Cable Television Advisory Committee (CTAC) through 2006 to broker a deal with
Cox to put ITO on the air. ITO accepted the terms of an August compromise,
written by Mumgaard, but Cox didn’t.
The negotiations stalled, and
CTAC –whose only power is to send recommendations to the city council – never
sent a resolution to the council.
At some point in late 2006,
Cox lobbyist (and speaker of the Nebraska Legislature until last year) Kermit
Brashear met with city officials, including Mumgaard and representatives from
Mayor Mike Fahey’s office, to pen a plan to allow Cox to cut three channels.
The details are unclear as to the closed-door meetings, but City Councilman Jim
SUttle (who did not return interview requests this week) offered a proposal in
February that was amended into the current one that was introduced May 1 by
Council President Dan Welch.
Welch said in an interview
Tuesday, “The Cox people worked with the mayor’s office to put together an
amendment…the Cox people met with me and told me that they felt like there were
four council members that would agree to the amendment. I talked to the mayor
about it, the mayor asked if I would put it on the agenda.”
Fahey’s chief of staff Paul
Landow said Fahey planned to veto the initial proposal, but was in support of
the current resolution.
“I think the key change was
to address some of the programming issues and to make sure that the city was
getting an adequate return on this compromise.” Landow said.
The proposal, al9ong with
allowing Cox to convert three analog (public access) channels to digital or
high-definition, would require Cox to spend up to $90,000 to connect cable
television at city facilities, as well as “assisting the city in a one-year
trial of a wireless internet network with up to three sites chosen by the
city”; if the city chooses not to establish this trial network, Cox would
“donate” $75,000 to buy equipment for or “facilitate the operation of” the
three remaining public access channels.
Cox says there currently is
only enough public access programming to fill one channel, and that it needs
the extra bandwidth – analog channels take as much as 12 times the space as do digital
– to allocate to services it says customers actually want.
“We hear from our customers
regularly and out customers are telling us they want more high-definition
programming,” said Kristin Peck, Cox’s vice president of public and government
affairs. “They want faster internet speeds; they want more digital channels. At
the same time they’re asking us for all of these things we’ve got all of this
bandwidth out there that is not being utilized.” Peck declined to produce
evidence that Cox’ 750 MHz of bandwidth were full.
A public hearing on the
matter Tuesday, May 8 drew about 30 opponents, far more than were able to speak
in the 20-minute allotted time limit.
ITO spokeswoman Frances
Mendenhall appealed to the council to force Cox to honor the 14-channel
agreement, saying public access is a “medium for poor people.”
“If you don’t have the
internet, which a lot of elderly and poor people don’t, you need public
access,” she said.
Omahan
Omaha City Councilman Frank Brown uses his
hour-long show each week on Cox channel 22 to speak directly to – and hear
directly from – his constituents in
“It’s rare that media outlets
will cover issues that affect African Americans in my district,” he said in an
interview Monday, “and so this is a great vehicle to get this information out.”
Brown said Cox has never
lived up to its promises since the company “engineered the contract to have Cox
here in
“[Cox has] always taken away
from public access and [it hasn’t] made it accessible to the public. If you
don’t make it accessible then people are going to be so disenfranchised they’re
not going to use [it].”
Brown told The Reader, “I just don’t believe that
we should give up something for nothing. And the people will say, ‘Well, we’re
gonna get more percentage of the [franchise rates] if they use that channel for
movies’…look at the bigger picture, and value of a channel, and you’ve got to
ask yourself, ‘Are we getting the right price for giving up something that has
such an impact in revenue?”
So what are those analog
channels worth monetarily? A look at the company’s leased-access rates provided
a general idea. (Since 1984 the Federal Communications Commission has mandated
that a cable provider offer leased-access channels to provide a check on
anti-competitive practices.) As of July 1, 2006, Cox was charging more than
$2,600 per day for its “Limited Basic” channels 1-27. That works out to more
than, $936,000 per year, per channel. The three public-access channels that Cox
proposes cutting would total more than $2,808,000 per year if they were
leased-access. That doesn’t touch the eight public access channels Cox
promised, but has not delivered over the past 26 years.
Cox may have bit off more
than it could – or was forced to – chew with its public access “commitment” in
1980, but the agreement certainly has benefited the company, which reported
$7.054 billion in revenue in 2005. City figures based on franchise fees show
Cox made $310,241,200 in
We have to make money as a
business,” Peck said. If we don’t, we’re going to die as a company.”
Peck, who acknowledged that Cox
does not promote its public-access channels, said if the proposal did not pass,
the company would try other ideas.
We have to grow as a
company,” she said. “If this does not go through, then we have to look at the
other channels on the analog lineup that our customers actually watch.”
After more that two years of
work, Mendenhall believes “one of the last public arenas is at stake when the
city council votes Tuesday.
“Everykthing is privatized,”
she said. “and they want to privatize this, too.”
She hopes the city uses the
$100,000 left from its Cable TV franchise fees to fund a communuity needs
assessment, “instead of trusting the cable provider to tell you what the
community needs and wants.
“It’s like, we’re going to
take over your very favorite public park. We’re not going to pay you for the
land. We’re going to use it to set up a strip mall. But don’t worry,” she said,
“you can come there and shop.”