Here is the testimony that Mike Wassenaar gave this morning.
My name is Mike Wassenaar. I am the Executive Director of the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, the non-profit community access television center for Saint Paul. I also serve as the chair of the Alliance for Community Media, a national organization which has supported the work of Public, Educational, and Government or PEG access television channels and facilities across the United States for the last thirty years. I have been asked to present a brief look at Minnesota’s experience with PEG television, and give some perspective about the state’s role in helping Minnesota communities use television to support community education, better inform our citizens, and strengthen local culture.
Public, Educational and Govenrment channels have a strong history in Minnesota. Since the early 1980s, municipalities and community groups have used the cable television franchising process to help provide local media content to their citizens through cable. In 2007, there are some twenty different PEG operations serving approximately 50 municipalities in the Twin Cities, and there are approximately 60 local channel providers across the State of Minnesota. This compares with approximately 40 operations in Wisconsin, 30 in Iowa, and a handful of operations in the Dakotas. Minnesota is actually a leader among the states in providing PEG services to its citizens.
PEG facilities in Minnesota range from larger, urban and suburban operations, serving tens of thousands of households, to much smaller facilities in communities throughout Greater Minnesota. In some communities, the local government operates one channel carrying government meetings, school content, and publicly produced programs. In other cities with greater communication needs, local communities have negotiated for more channels on the local cable system to carry more content. For example, in Saint Paul, there are six channels carrying PEG content, and a seventh state mandated PEG channel, Metro Channel 6.
One of the unique characteristics of the cable franchising process in Minnesota has been its responsiveness to local need and circumstance. For PEG community television, this has meant the development of many solutions for local communication needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. The community television operation in Little Falls can be set up in the area High School, and coordinate its operations with the school’s curriculum; in Saint Peter, in can be in the local recreation center. In some communities, production centers have been located as anchor tenants in once vacant shopping malls, where the PEG facility acts as a center of community development. My favorite example of this comes not from Minnesota, but from our neighboring state Wisconsin, where WalMart left Wisconsin Rapids, and town leaders were faced with what to with the vacant building in their commercial center. They decided to build a Senior Center and Community Television Center as a way to increase the social connectedness of their community.
Another effect of this localized process is that governance of channels varies in each locality. Some PEG operations are run by a government or municipal office; others by a school district; others by a non-profit that contracts for service with a local government; and in smaller communities, operations are run by individual volunteers. As well, some municipalities have chosen to have PEG operations run by the local cable operator. In a similar fashion, funding of operations varies by locality. Funding typically comes from cable subscribers either from the franchise fee cities negotiate with cable companies, or from a separate PEG fee negotiated to support the operations. In Saint Paul’s example, viewers pay $1.50 per month to support PEG operations, separate from the franchise fee our City negotiated with the cable provider. An independent poll of cable subscribers in St Paul conducted by the Wilder Research Center in 2003 found that viewers of the cable system were comfortable with paying that amount for the service they received, and would actually pay a higher amount if necessary.
One characteristic common to all PEG operations is their mission to serve as part of the civic communications backbone in their locale. Government channels public safety and emergency communications to citizens. As well, they carry local meeting coverage and help citizens understand the workings of their government, replay programs at convenient times for viewers who can’t attend meetings, and increasingly they make those meetings available to viewers on the internet in either a streamed or archived fashion. Just as importantly, public access channels give citizens and political candidates the ability to express political views in an open, unbiased and unfiltered format throughout the state. In many Minnesota communities, the only television media that covers local political debates is community access television.
That local presence is important in communities like Willmar, which has approximately 4500 cable subscribers, and has an increasingly diverse community which now demands educational programming in Spanish, English and Somali. Willmar’s PEG center operates three channels, with two and a half staff, and airs approximately 11,000 hours of local content each year. Compare that with an operation like North West Community Television in Brooklyn Park, which serves nine communities in the west Metro, and is probably the largest access and community television operation in Minnesota. NWCT serves 75,000 cable subscribers on the Comcast system and produces daily news programming for its communities. Even though it is located close to the heart of the Twin Cities media markets, residents will tell you that NWCT is the best and most consistent provider of television news and public information that focuses on life in their area.
Another example of local service and local response by PEG happens in Saint Paul each year, when our station works with a local synagogue to provide high holy services to the elderly who are shut in and cannot attend ceremonies. We can’t put a dollar value on the meaning that creates for the elderly, their families and the congregation. As a non-profit that serves all religious denominations in Saint Paul, and supports religious expression, we have the ability to provide this level of service in a way that government
perhaps cannot.
One other unique aspect of community television in Minnesota is the heavy concentration of ethnic and non-English television production that takes place in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. For example, between our center and Minneapolis Telecommunication Network, there are nine regularly produced programs by, for and about the Somali Minnesotan community, ranging from political discussion, to popular entertainment, community health, language instruction and vocational education. Some of the producers of these programs are professional producers trained by the BBC, and Italian and German state television in Somalia who now want to better the refugee community now making its home in Minnesota. Community television played a similar acculturating and educational role with Minnesota’s Hmong community through the 1990s, when SPNN was the home to the first public television program in Hmong in the United States, Kev Koom Siab. PEG channels in the Twin Cities provide an important outlet that diverse communities cannot find in the commercial media market.
One final aspect of PEG community television is the economic benefit that local communities derive from their operation. For many artists, religious organizations, community groups and non-profits, the cost of media technology and training is prohibitive. Production centers make computer and media technology tools and training available to the public much like a public library provides useful community education. We can put a dollar value on this worth. For example, in 2006 in Saint Paul, the public acquired in-kind media technology service and production equipment use at our studios that were worth the equivalent of $1 million. This has a real impact on the non-profit and creative economy in our community. There is a similar effect in cities of all sizes across Minnesota.
I want to leave you with several brief observations about what the state can do in the future to assist these operations as you deliberate this session. One recommendation is to act like a well-trained doctor and first do no harm. Minnesota law has encouraged an important civic sector to flourish in the last 25 years. Many states that have tinkered with their cable franchising laws in the last few years have put forward one-size-all solutions that fit no community well, and the jury is still out as to how well they accelerate infrastructure investment and spur price competition in cable. In one instance, state legislation has severely cut channel capacity and financial support for PEG operations, forcing them out of operation. Many proposed laws in other states say that PEG channels can exist, but the financial mechanisms that allow them to flourish – particularly PEG fees that companies and communities negotiate - should be eliminated. This in effect places an extra burden on municipalities and creates an unfunded mandate. The State has already done this through its mandate of Metro Channel 6, which is a mandated channel in the Twin Cities that has no sustainable funding mechanism. Creating more situations like this will hurt communities in Minnesota.
Second, all of the PEG operations I talk with welcome cable competition and want their services to go to more people in their communities. However, they do not want government to choose winners and losers in the marketplace, and they want their services to reach the entire community. This means that PEG programming should be carried and supported by cable competitors in an equitable fashion, as Minnesota law currently allows, and that governments have equivalent build out requirements for cable competitors. It makes no sense for community service benefits like PEG to only accrue to certain consumers who have been chosen by an industry. If a community wants these services, they should have the ability to allow them to flourish.
Lastly, I would encourage you to consider ways for our industry to grow capacity and expand services to all Minnesotans. One small example is by furthering the financial support or creating incentives for captioned services for the deaf and hard of hearing. Currently, few if any local PEG programmers have staff time or technical capacity to provide this necessary service for a growing sector of Minnesotans. From talking with service providers working with deaf and hard of hearing communities, I can tell you there is a definite need for more public safety, community education, and public information available via video captioning.
With that I conclude my remarks, and thank you for this opportunity.
