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Local officials negotiate cable deal
By Carey King
Sylva, Webster, Dillsboro, Forest Hills and Jackson County officials could soon be coming to a television screen near you.
The governments are currently in negotiations with Mediacom cable company to shape contracts that will replace cable agreements originally made in 1985. As part of the deal, Mediacom has offered to open up a channel for government and educational news.
“By sharing a channel, it would be up to each of you to divide how you’re going to split the time and what you’re going to show on it,” said Maggie Blythe, Mediacom’s director for government and legal affairs.
Blythe met Feb. 23 with Jackson County Manager Ken Westmoreland, Sylva board member Maurice Moody and Dillsboro board member Jim Cochran. Forest Hills Mayor Jim Davis and Webster board member Jean Davenport have been appointed to work on the cable contract but did not attend the session.
“I think it’d be a good tool to advertise the county to visitors, to say this is what we’ve got going on,” Moody said. “If you’ve got it running into every bed and breakfast and every hotel and motel, it may have some value.”
Three of Mediacom’s other four Western North Carolina service areas – portions of Henderson, Macon, Ashe and McDowell counties – already have PEG channels, Blythe said.
Though PEG is an acronym for “public, educational, governmental,” leaders said they’d most likely choose to limit programming to news from the schools and government bodies. Few towns open their channels for complete public use, Blythe said, as governments are held responsible for what goes on the air.
PEG channels are required to follow public broadcasting laws, which means that – in addition to not showing pornography – they must be noncommercial and non-profit, Blythe said.
“You can’t start running ads on it and start collecting revenue,” she said.
Other municipalities Blythe’s dealt with have chosen to run fare such as tapes of county and town commissioners’ meetings and school board sessions. To keep the screen from going black, they often supplement programming with slide shows of colored screens announcing government and school news, she said – a critical move to keep viewers paying attention.
“I guess the biggest thing about a PEG channel is it has to be used,” said Blythe, describing another municipality that shows only one commissioners’ meeting a month. “The rest of the time we have it defaulted to a shopping channel or something like that. My guess is it would be three months before someone would realize if that channel’s out.”
How to create programming is the critical issue, and Cochran suggested that students from Smoky Mountain High School and Southwestern Community College be asked to do the work.
“It works great,” Blythe agreed. “The kids get hands-on experience and the county gets free labor.”
Leaders could also choose to create a paid position – most likely, Westmoreland said, a job that would include not only maintenance of the channel, but of county and town Web sites.
More likely, however, it will be a long time coming before citizens will be able to tune in to town and county meetings from the comfort of their couches. A clause giving leaders an option for the channel will probably end up in the contracts expected to be signed by the start of the next fiscal year, but it would not be acted upon until governments, as Cochran said, “get their acts together.”
More pressing to leaders at the present time are questions over franchise fees and the number of homes, or density, Mediacom requires an area to have before it will provide service.
Sylva, Webster and Dills-boro’s cable contracts expire this coming October, and Jackson County’s in October 2010. While each entity will sign its own contract, the four governments are joining forces with Forest Hills – which has never signed an agreement since incorporating in 1997 – to negotiate a deal so that cable company practices will be more uniform countywide.
Federal law allows governments to charge cable companies a franchise fee of up to 5 percent of gross company revenue for use of public rights of way. Intended to compensate a community for allowing cable to run in public space and to offset costs associated with administering the cable franchise, the fee is passed through to customers on their monthly bills. Sylva, Webster and Dillsboro currently have their fee fixed at 3 percent, while the county’s is at 1.5.
“All the towns need all the revenue they can get. The county’s pretty well set,” said Moody, noting that raising rates too high could send more viewers to satellite setups and garner lower revenue in the long run.
Municipalities may each set their own rates and change them at any time, Blythe said, with a 90-day notification period for customers.
In 2004, Sylva received $9,100 from Mediacom, while Dillsboro got $1,500, Webster, $1,200, and Jackson County, $16,900.
Those amounts are higher than what’s required by law, Blythe said, because ever since purchasing the franchise in 1998, Mediacom has mistakenly paid fees on revenue streams beyond the basic cable package.
“We are going to say bygones are bygones, and what we did in the past is our mistake,” Blythe said. “We’ll continue to absorb (paying on extra streams) until we get a new plan in place.”
The tentative contract states that a neighborhood must have 20 homes per mile for Mediacom to pursue offering services in that area. Leaders noted that stipulation could negatively affect rural spots like Jackson County, where pockets of density are spread out in between areas of forests and farmland, making them difficult to connect.
“You see, we’ve got to get there,” Blythe said.
Another discussion session on the matter is expected before the end of this month, Blythe said.
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