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SPARKS, WASHOE, CARSON AND DOUGLAS CABLE CUSTOMERS URGED TO CONTACT LOCAL OFFICIALS
ReSurge.TV may broaden legal action to include ratepayers and program producers outside of Reno
8-25-2008, Updated 8-28-2008

WE WIN ROUND ONE — As the Barbwire show scooped the state on Friday, Aug. 22: Charter has caved in and postponed the execution date for 90 days. Thanks for bringing the heat. See the Barbwire in the Sunday Sparks Tribune for all the inside baseball. Be well. Raise hell. AB

The evil empire eats its appetite
Community television wins a 90-day stay of execution
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune / 8-24-2008

Reno city council votes unanimously to sue Charter Communications to keep community TV accessible
Resurge.TV will also file

RENO, Aug. 20 – Mayor Bob Cashell and the Reno City Council unanimously voted today to seek a temporary a temporary restraining order to stop Charter Communications from moving public, educational and government TV channels to cyber-Siberia.

ReSurge.TV will either enter a joinder to the city's case or file a separate action. Too bad the other four affected local governments don't have any chops. The vote was 6-0 with Councilman Dan Gustin abstaining due to longtime business relationships with the cable company.

Charter faxed a letter to the city council late yesterday offering low income discounts and an as-yet undeveloped system to "map" the analog band channels so that surfers may find them when they have been banished to the digital tier graveyard at Channel 200+. (Charter killed the Truckee Meadows Community College learning channel several years ago by moving it from the double-digit analog tier to channel 200. See below.)

Andrew Barbano told the council it needed to re-form its now-defunct Citizens Cable Compliance Committee and give it regional authority to develop and outreach the low income program with the other affected governments in the region. Barbano chaired the CCCC for two years during Charter franchise negotiations.

In meetings with Sierra Nevada Community Access Television (SNCAT) Executive Director Les Smith, Charter representatives refused to offer any resources to outreach and advertise such a discount or any "channel mapping" capability. Lip service means never having to say you're sorry. (See below.)

Barbano noted that Comcast has been stopped cold in Michigan due to an injunction issued in January. The parties were in federal court in the Great Lakes State yesterday.

In Wisconsin, public pressure caused Charter to back down. The city council noted the success in other jurisdictions.

Stay tuned.

On Monday (Aug. 18) , the Reno City Council held a joint session with Sparks and Washoe County. On the top of the agenda were items dealing with the budget cuts for K-12 and the Washoe County School District. As analog channels, public and government access channels actually can provide a way to mitigate these cuts. Currently SNCAT Channel 16 is running higher education programming 6 hours a day, 6 a.m. to 12 p.m., on school days. This time will soon be available for educational programming to be used in Washoe County classrooms. Channel 200 is useless to the Washoe County schools, because it's on the digital tier and the schools can't afford enough digital boxes to make the channel accessible.

This coming Monday, every fourth grade teacher in the Truckee Meadows will be facing down 30 students for the first time. During the school year, she will have to prepare these students for proficiency testing, Terra Nova, ITBS and No Child Left Behind testing. And, somewhere in there, she'd going to have to try and teach them something. There is no context in education. That's why Nevada's students are doing so miserably in the national rankings. Educational programming in the classroom can provide some of that context. It can lift a heavy burden from the shoulders of the teacher. To give you an idea of the scope, Westergaard Elementary in Reno's northwest has four wings, with 12 classroom in each wing. Multiply that by $5 a month and then by the dozens of elementary schools across the valley, and you get the idea of the cost.

If the PEG channels are moved to the digital tier, would Charter have enough resources to make these channels available to schools in the Truckee Meadows?

Attached is a letter from Tom Fitzgerald of Nevada Works, the government agency that distributes federal funding for workforce development training, occupational rehabilitation training and all the other workforce and professional development programs in northern Nevada. I'll let him speak for himself.

Believe it or not, I testified before the legislature in favor of the bill that would become NRS 711,

That's because, like the majority of the legislators who voted for it, we were promised that "PEG would be taken care of." Now, we are here and it's obvious that Charter never had any real intention of taking care of the PEG channels or their own subscribers. If they are that soft on promises made to Nevada's legislators, how committed are they to the cities and counties of Nevada and to their citizens and viewers?

Les Smith
Executive Director
SNCAT
775-828-1211
www.sncat.org

Marsha Berkbigler, Charter's Government Relations Director and the regional Government Relations Director, George Jostlin, came to meet with me yesterday to demonstrate how much they cared about public, education and government (PEG) access in this community. After the meeting, I remained unconvinced. You likely will too.

George Jostlin said that Charter had a program to take care of the poor, the handicapped, the homebound and the elderly, who couldn't afford the equipment necessary to get PEG channels on the digital tier. When asked if Charter would take the lead on getting the word out, both George and Marsha very quickly responded that they had no intention of doing that. And, Marsha warned me that I would be in "big trouble" if I sent anything out.

In the end, George described their program as a free installation of the digital box and no charge for six months. After six-months, if people didn't want the box or couldn't afford it, Charter would come out and remove it and not charge them for the time they had the box. The short answer is
that Charter has no program and no intention of dealing with the problems they are creating for this at-risk segment of our community. (Emphasis added.)

In addition, George said he was "working with TV Guide" to direct people to the 200 tier for the PEG channels. This appears to be vastly different from the "channel mapping" that George described to Kevin Knutsen, the Reno community relations director. George said he had $500 to produce advertising to let people know about the move. But, there appears to be no timeline or plan regarding production and distribution of the advertising. (Emphasis added.)

Moving day is two weeks from today. Even if Charter started running their advertisement today, every hour on the hour, on all of the 44 channels that George told Kevin they would run on, this would barely reach a small fraction of the total affected audience — and to what effect?

The bottom line is that Charter made it very clear that they don't have any real interest in working with Reno, Sparks, the county or SNCAT to make this a workable transition. They don't care about the people of this community and they are not willing to live up to their legal and moral obligations to this community. 

This move to the digital tier, without an honest effort to take care of the people of this community, violates both the intent and the letter of federal law and circumvents the intent of state legislation.

Please consider whatever measures necessary to either stop this move or have Charter help mitigate its consequences.

Les Smith
Executive Director
SNCAT
775-828-1211
www.sncat.org