Fw: [Peace] AWARE Minutes 07/24/05

[Randall Cotton]

 Just a couple nitpicky corrections on this ...

:  Public Access TV Proposal.  Randall said that across the country people
are
: getting access to public studios for free production or low cost
production
: of live tv.  It is mandated of cable companies who have municipal
contracts
: that they give 10% of their contract to this.

Federal laws stands behind the rights of municipal franchising authorities
to demand up to 5% of a cable company's revenue as a condition of granting a
franchise contract (the multi-year agreement by which the cable company uses
the city's cabling rights-of-way in return for a guaranteed money making
cable monopoly). That 5% can be put toward the funding of public access TV.
There's a great deal that could be done to improve our current public access
cable channel (UPTV). In many ways, UPTV is not really a genuine
public-access channel - it's primarily for use by the Urbana municipal
government - consideration of the public interest is secondary and lacking.
And it's not funded nearly as well as it could be. I'll be writing about his
issue on the IMC web site, in the Public I and raising this issue in other
contexts in the upcoming weeks and months. We have a great opportunity
coming up in Champaign/Urbana to make a huge improvement in public access to
television media. But it will take a bit of activism by folks to make the
city governments sit up and take notice that this is something that is
wanted in our community.

:  This must be negotiated when
: contracts come up for renewal.  There is organizing on this already
started
: in a study committee of the Urbana Cable Commission.  AWARE endorsed use
of
: a petition that Randall had produced for organizing on the issue
preparatory
: to the contract renewal next November 2006.

Negotiations for Champaign and Urbana's franchise contract with Insight
Communications will begin next February, actually. The time to start
organizing, educating and undertaking activism on this issue is NOW!

R