SAVE PUBLIC ACCESS

Times-Standard Business Section

Jeff Leonard, Eureka City Councilmember

Cable franchise negotiations:
What this could mean for the North Coast

Remember Wayne's World, "Saturday Night Live's" fictional public access television show from Aurora, Ill.? Cable franchise negotiations currently underway with Cox Communications could turn TV fiction into reality for Humboldt County viewers by creating new support and infrastructure for public access television. As Wayne and Garth would say, "Ex-cel-lent!"

What are cable franchise negotiations? Streets, roads, and airwaves are all public property. Cox Communications, like any business that uses a public right of way, negotiates a rental agreement and pays rent to local governments to use that right of way. The rent that is paid by a cable company comes in the form of franchise fees. By law, franchise fees can't exceed 5 percent of Cox's total gross revenues.

The cities of Eureka, Arcata, Fortuna, Blue Lake, Rio Dell, and Ferndale have teamed up with the county of Humboldt to negotiate a new cable franchise agreement with Cox. The last agreements were negotiated with individual governments in 1987. In addition to setting franchise fees, franchise agreements also cover basic infrastructure and cable signal quality, Internet access, regional customer capacity, customer service standards and the amount and quality of community access television that will be available in the future.

The first step toward creating a new franchise agreement will be to review Cox's compliance and performance on the original agreement. The Buske Group, a Sacramento telecommunications consulting firm that specializes in franchise renewals, has been hired to perform a technical review of the condition and capability of the current cable plant. A contract review will also be completed to determine if Cox has complied with the current franchise agreement. That review will include a financial audit to find out if Cox has paid the correct amount of franchise fees over the past four years.

The second step will involve collecting public input, since franchise agreements set standards for customer service and determine the regional availability of public, educational, and government access television.

The Buske Group will be taking extensive public input to determine what type of cable service has been provided in the past, and to create a needs assessment for the future of cable service in Humboldt County. Eight focus groups will be created, public hearings will be held, and a telephone survey will be completed by the end of May. As a citizen, if you have an opinion about Cox's customer service or our local television needs, get involved with this stage of the process and let your voice be heard.

The final step will be to sit down and negotiate a new agreement. Using the public input they collect, the Buske Group will take several months to develop a new franchise proposal, and probably start formal negotiations this summer. Some issues can't be negotiated, like subscription rates, cable packages or channel selection. A new franchise agreement can't lower your cable bill, make Tech TV part of the basic cable package or triple the number of golf channels.

However, two exciting possibilities could be the products of a new franchise agreement. First, we could encourage Cox to build an institutional network, also known as an "I-Net" -- a voice, video and data communications link between schools, libraries, and other public buildings. With an I-Net, students could take classes at home, via television. Teachers could use teleconferencing to link classrooms at different school sites together, allowing students from all across the county to participate in lessons together. An I-Net could also strengthen the links between local government agencies.

Another end product of this negotiation could be the creation of a community media center. Many local events, like city council meetings, the Kinetic Sculpture Race and HSU Men's basketball, are currently being broadcast on public access television. However, a community media center that serves the entire county could dramatically improve the "watchability" of current programs, while increasing availability and access to new forms of in-depth, local programming.

Monterey County used its new agreement to create a top-of-the-line support system for public access television, and its cable system only has 11,000 subscribers. Humboldt County has more than 32,000 cable subscribers, and that membership should make it possible for us to negotiate a new franchise agreement that contains some tangible and exciting benefits for North Coast residents.

To find out more about how you can get involved, visit the Redwood Technology Consortium's website at www.redwoodtech.org , or attend the monthly meetings on the second Thursday of each month (see website for location).

Jeff Leonard serves on the Eureka City Council and is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium.

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