special interest moves

Sent by a friend of Public Access:

"May 12, 2008 Response to Press Coverage of State Video Franchising Laws

SSSHHH. DON’T TELL THE PUBLIC—
THEY’RE SO DUMB, THEY’LL NEVER FIGURE IT OUT.

Psst. I’m your cable company. I got your town’s cable franchise about thirty years ago—it was the only way I could use taxpayers’ land, you know that nine ft. of land on each side of every street. To get into the cable business, I had to pay 5% of my gross revenues in cash and another 3% for public, education and government access. It was a ‘have-to thingy’ back then—my paying 8% of gross in cash, access channels, equipment, training staff and institutional networks—so I could win the competition to use those dumb taxpayers’ land. They wanted the access stuff for a local network—for boring stuff nobody watches like local news, council meetings, emergency alerts and saving money on cops and fire communications. Hey, you do what you gotta do to win.

Now, get this fun part. In ‘84, I got together with my buddies, before we even got all the towns wired. By the way, we really hung cable—passed every home in the U.S. metro areas in about five years. Pretty impressive, huh? Anyway, after all the cable deals were cut, we wrote a law for Congress that let us pass our lease costs on to subscribers. What could be better—we got Congress to make taxpayers pay us to lease their public land. We cable guys have been celebrating big time ever since. My stockholders went ballistic with joy. Hope you bought some stock.

This is how it works. We get to list our lease costs right on cable bills so it looks like a TAX. Voila, like magic we got an automatic annual rate increase of 5% of gross revenues in perpetuity. We don’t have any competitors to speak of. We own the satellite guys, too—and we have few costs since we mostly buy our cable programs from ourselves—we keep as much as we can in house.

But the best part is our customers get mad at government for charging us to use their land. AND nobody can stop us. LOL. (Laugh Out Loud in text-ese)."

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Public Access not a"commercial product" offered by a cable or phone company. Public Access is a strategic technological resource set into place, in exchange for a right of way, to benefit all members of a city or town. Many public access centers, such as WCCA TV, are non-profit and charitable organizations. It does not make sense that PEG channels are treated as a consumer product when it clearly is not. Additionally, PEG channels should not be subject to or impacted by any special interest initiatives such as "consumer's choice act" or any such special interest device. Legislators made the mistake to allow cable companies to pass franchise fees through on to the consumer thereby positioning the slide to hell for true, fair, and equal community access / media now apparent in a number of states throughout the USA. Those we elect have a responsibility to serve the people and not special interest. It's amazing to me that we, the PEG community, have this continual battle fighting in all levels of government, support for PEG really should be a no brainer.