Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MR. HAAS: Hi. Thanks for giving attention to public access. I'm David Haas. I'm not representing an organization today but I'm a citizen of Philadelphia and have been since 1981.

For eight years, I ran the Philadelphia Independent Film Video Association and worked with independent video and filmmakers. I also worked on an independent film in Philadelphia.

Currently, I serve on the Board of Directors of a foundation that funds many community groups throughout the City, working with arts and culture, children, youth and families, and natural and physical environment.

I just wanted to five points if I could, some of which, obviously, will be a bit duplicative.

One, public access can provide an invaluable community resource. There are innumerable examples from around the country, as we've already heard, of how citizens, churches, community groups have been able to bring their ideas to a wider audience through public access. A well-managed public access system in the City of Philadelphia would serve to address unserved audiences, to provide an opportunity for cross cultural learning, understanding, and provide the City's many community groups with an invaluable tool to further their important missions.

I don't mean to leave out citizens. As one of the citizens, I had hoped to do my own, but I want to point out how much work community groups do every day to try and improve the quality of life in this city, and public access cable would be an enormous boost to the work that they're doing.

(Applause.)

MR. HAAS: Number two, public access cable embodies equity of access. As has been noted already, access to media is really prohibitive due to time, cost, and simply getting in the door. And the principle is that if the voices and concerns of all the people matter, then public access matters.

My point number three, there's no reason not to move ahead now. When the cable franchise agreements were first enacted in '83 and in the subsequent years that the systems were being constructed, there was no physical capacity for providing the mandated public access channels. When the system was finally in place and able to have citywide public access channels later in the '80s, when I actually started getting involved with this, the City was experiencing a serious deficit, the funds that should rightfully have gone towards operating costs for public access were swallowed up by the deficit. I'm editorializing, this is my interpretation of the history.

Now, when the City does not have this deficits consuming these funds and with dollar amounts coming from the franchise fees paid to the City by the cable companies ever increasing, there's no reason not to move ahead now with public access cable.

Number four, with all due respect to Mr. Riddle, people in Chicago, New York, and Baltimore are no smarter or capable than we are. These are just a few of the cities in the country, not to mention rural and suburban municipalities that have thriving public access channels and community programming addressing all kinds of concerns and interests that reflect the true diversity of perspectives and cultural and ethnic backgrounds of citizens and groups in those cities. Some like Chicago have been doing it successfully for many, many years. Public access cable is not a new, untested idea. They are no smarter than we are; we can do it too, maybe even better.

Number five, a deal is a deal. And when these franchises were awarded for cable companies to serve the City, public access cable was a part of deal, and capital operating funds, the channel set aside, and the nonprofit corporation to oversee, to responsibly oversee these channels was a part of the deal. It's simply time to carry out what the City has already committed to and what the cable companies long say they have agreed to do.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN ORTIZ: Councilman Cohen?

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Councilman Ortiz?

COUNCILMAN ORTIZ: The main issue that has been brought up and the videotapes that were shown to us were, in essence, by shows put on by the KKK and hate groups, along those lines.

Mr. Riddle, you've had some experience along the lines of hate groups and KKK. I know that in Reading -- I've been on public access in Reading actually. What is the experience, and obviously other cities have withstood KKK coming on public access, and I don't think they've gained any adherents in Reading or in any of the other cities. I don't believe that they can do it in Philadelphia. Mr. Riddle?

MR. RIDDLE: I'd like to tell just a little story. I was the program manager in Atlanta. And this is -- the good thing, I think, is that a lot of these things have been worked out so that you don't have to re-learn these lessons, and that's one of the advantages that Philadelphia has.

But as the program manager in Atlanta, which is a majority black population, and we were approached by the program "Race and Reason," which was the White Aryan Resistance Movement. And a lot of access centers were having, you know, legitimate problems trying to figure out, Do we show this, do we not show this? So I felt that, you know, it being in the birth place of Martin Luther King, that it would be hypocritical for me to only show the programs that I agreed with. And even though, as an African-American. I didn't agree with this program, we went ahead and showed it.

Unfortunately, the producer at some point was incarcerated for some of his real hate crimes. And the local producer -- I mean, 'cause this was a national show, so the local producer came and he said, you know, Could I continue the show? I said sure, you know, you take the training and use the equipment, and you're welcome to do the show. But the thing is, it's a volunteer situation. So in order for you to do your show, one person has the difficulty of doing a show of this type in the studio, so you have to encourage other people to work with you, which meant that he had to work on other people's shows to get them to work on his.

So eventually, he's doing this hateful, racist, anti-Semitic program, using a cast that was made up of two Muslims, a lesbian, a couple of -- you know, and then they'd go do lunch and talk about production and so forth.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you.

Councilman Nutter?

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The young lady who was testifying, Miss Sheehan?

MS. SHEEHAN: I haven't been called a young lady in a few years.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Is that right? It's okay. Well, maybe at the end of this, you'll call me a young man.

A couple questions. One, do you have any materials that you can share with us? And even if you don't have them today, on -- I was very impressed, I guess, with the list of programs or the layout of the programs that you articulated that appeared around, I think you said, virtually 24 hours a day in one way, shape or form.

So I was interested in -- with all due respect to Berks County TV, I believe I've never been to Berks County so I don't know how big it is and what its structure is or anything, but what's the budget of this operation?

MS. SHEEHAN: Our budget for this fiscal year is $428,000. We do not receive any money from the franchise fee.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Well, how do you do this?

MS. SHEEHAN: A lot of fund raising. We do receive money from the city. As the access channel manager, we have a contract with the city. The money does not come from the franchise fee, however; it comes partly from community development funds because we do so much work with the community development arm of the city, and also from the general budget.

We also get money from the county, from the general budget of the county and from the community development arm of the county. We also get money from the Office of Aging.

We do a lot of fund raising, we do corporate fund raising, we do program underwriting, we have a membership campaign, we do an auction every year, and it's, you know, grant writing. We everything that a nonprofit does to get money.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Sounds like Channel 12.

MS. SHEEHAN: Kind of.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Could you provide to the Chair for us then, I guess, both a budget of where your dollars come from.

MS. SHEEHAN: Sure.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: And then on the other side, what they are used for.

MS. SHEEHAN: Okay.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: A full layout of what your programming is and, I guess, either --

MS. SHEEHAN: I brought with me for each of you -- actually, I brought 20 copies with me -- a copy of our annual publication, which is called The BC TV Monitor, which lists all the programs that we do, all our subscribing members, our program underwriters. And we have -- because we have to do so much fund raising, we do kind of look at what Channel 12 is doing.

And it lists, you know, our board of directors, the mission, everything about BC TV and about the municipal access and about Reading public access. It's all in this book.

I also brought with me a four-minute tape that kind of encompasses everything about Berks Community Television.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Okay. I'm very interested in that material. I think many of the folks who are here know -- some may not -- that I share interest and have had a long-standing interest in the issue of public access television.

But listening to your presentation, I just really wondered, one, from a financial standpoint how you do what you do. And then, secondly, if you could get us -- I don't know whether the materials have it but, you know, what set various programs are.

MS. SHEEHAN: The programming is all in that book.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Okay. Are there any details about the number of people who work there and where you get your programming?

MS. SHEEHAN: Yes. The staff is listed in there, everything's in there.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: How does Berks County TV, or possibly more importantly, I assume this is the Berks County government? Berks County is run by a what, county commissioners?

MS. SHEEHAN: The government is -- the county government is run y by a board of commissioners. The city now has a strong mayor and a councilmatic form of government.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Now, what's the city?

MS. SHEEHAN: The city of Reading.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Now --

MS. SHEEHAN: Reading is the county seat of Berks County. And our contract is with the city, not with the county.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: I understand, but you get money from the county?

MS. SHEEHAN: We get money from the county. We have another contract with the county.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: I think you know that -- and I doubt -- I don't know whether it's on this particular tape, but we were shown, as Councilmembers and some staff, we were shown a tape at a meeting a couple months ago in the Mayor's cabinet room. I believe it was associated or said that some of the material on this particular tape was showing one of the programs on Berks County TV, and I believe it was this Klan person going through their whole little act.

How does the government deal with issues like that if people call or complain either about that or other things that may be on? And how in any way, shape, or form do you control or monitor or oversee what kind of programming is on the community access channel?

MS. SHEEHAN: Well, there are three separate sets of guidelines. There are public access guidelines for Reading Public Access. That program that you saw in the Mayor's office is Reading Public Access, which is part of the umbrella of Berks Community Television.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Okay.

MS. SHEEHAN: And that's traditional public access where people come in, they sign up for a workshop, they do the training, and they do their whole program. I mean, we have very little to do with it as an organization, as a staff.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: So --

MS. SHEEHAN: So Berks Community Television --

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: So take me through that. So this is somewhere in Reading and, what, there's a studio?

MS. SHEEHAN: It comes out of our offices, it comes out of our studio.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: There's a studio, the person was in a studio?

MS. SHEEHAN: We have -- in downtown Reading, we have a studio and office space. We have an editing room, we have a control room. The programs that are on Berks Community -- it gets a little bit complicated, just bear with me.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: I understand, it's all right.

MS. SHEEHAN: There's BC TV, which is the live community programming, and that's what we do mostly, and that's where we're a great resource for the community. It's a tool for people to engage in dialogue and it doesn't cost them -- you know, we don't charge for any of our programming.

So we have BC TV, we have MAC, which is the municipal access channel, which is where we do -- things like this would be live on MAC. And we have Reading Public Access, which is what the Klan is on. The Klan is on public access because the person who represents the Klan in Reading came to BC TV, which has a board of directors and a program committee for BC TV, not for public access.

He came to BC TV, to the program committee, he put in a proposal, and the program committee said, What you want to do on BC TV doesn't really meet our guidelines and doesn't help us fulfill our mission, it doesn't do anything for the community. If you want to use public access, we'll be happy to show you how to that, and what's that we do.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: And so how does a person do that? I mean, what do they do? And who's in charge of public access? Or is that under the umbrella of BC TV?

MS. SHEEHAN: BC TV is in charge of public access.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: BC TV.

MS. SHEEHAN: Yeah.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Okay. And who determines what goes on in public access?

MS. SHEEHAN: Public access is public access. People come in, they can take a workshop, or they can give us a tape. And, you know, if it doesn't violate any obscenities or lotteries or, you know, any of those things, then it goes on.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: And when you say "take a workshop," what does that mean?

MS. SHEEHAN: We offer workshops in public access several times a year if we have enough people sign up for it. But in Reading, because BC TV has been there since 1976 and because it's always been live and interactive, people in Reading tend to want to use BC TV rather than public access.

You know, people do complain. We don't get a lot of phone calls about the material that's on public access, but every now and then, we do when the Klan is on. And we always tell people that they can do counterprogramming.

We also have on public access, we also show poetry. You know, there's a local poet who comes in and who actually goes out and tapes different things. You know, we have a classic arts showcase. We show Free Speech TV.

We show a lot of great stuff on public access, and public access is really a wonderful tool -- and that's what it is, it's a tool. But because BC TV has been live and interactive and in the community for so long, that's what people tend to use. The Human Relations Council, for instance, and the NAACP use BC TV rather than public access because they can have that immediate dialogue with the community, too.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: All right, okay. So you've brought us some information and you said we have budget data?

MS. SHEEHAN: I'm not sure if there's budget information in there. If there isn't, I'll send it to you.

COUNCILMAN NUTTER: Okay, all right. Thank you very much. I appreciate it to you.

MR. BRAND: Councilman Cohen, can I --

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Yes, go ahead.

MR. BRAND: You gave us a charge here not too long ago that we should take responsibility for injecting this into the mayoral election this fall and the City Council elections this fall, and this is something that we take very seriously.

But you also asked if we had any information as to why this has not happened after 15 years. And, again, I go back to the fact that we have invited the Administration, we invited the Mayor's office, and we invited the Public Property Commissioner to take part in these hearings today. And we were told that they were not going to be taking part in these hearings today.

And we hope that you can ask you in return to maybe hold their feet to the fire, hold the Administration's feet to the fire to try to find out what exactly their objections are. We're not willing to let go of the fact that it's only a half a month left -- or their administration only lasts until November. We want to know why, after eight years, that this administration, the Rendell administration, has done absolutely nothing about public access television.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN COHEN: One of the best-kept secrets of the current administration is that the mayor usually ignores telephone calls from Councilmembers, sees practically none of them, it's very rare. In the past seven years when President Street was president of City Council, basically the only Councilmember that ever saw the Mayor on anything like a regular basis was President Street, whose job it apparently was to guide everything through City Council.

The Mayor is responsive to groups other than the City Council, and we have tried every way we know how to hold the Mayor's feet to the fire. The media's fully aware of the fact that the Mayor pays no attention to most of the folks in City Council, but they don't cover that story. So I'm saying elected officials tend to be most responsive to those who influence whether or not they continue to hold office or will vote for them the next time around.

And we will be doing our share to try to get the Mayor to act, but we have problems like the legislation that was passed at 3:30 this morning in Harrisburg that takes a City-owned property, the Philadelphia Gas Works, and removes it from City control and puts it under the control of the State Public Utility Commission. That was done at 3:30 in the morning.

Last March, the Mayor sent a letter in opposition to that, and ever since then, we could not get him to make a positive statement about Philadelphians having the right to run their own gas company. He just refused to it, which has created suspicions that he probably had changed his mind along the way and had reached a different conclusion.

Mayors are difficult to deal with from the point of view of City Council, and that's the reason we're asking. It's an equal bargain -- you want us to work on behalf of this issue, and we want to because we think it's very good and very important to the City of Philadelphia that there be public access.

But we're asking you for the kind of help we need to make this a reality, and that is to inform all of the people of Philadelphia as to what's going on in this field, demand to know why it is that public access has been denied to the people of Philadelphia, and try to commit the candidates for mayor that they will adopt a different attitude and a different approach than Mayor Rendell. That's the plain story.

And in City Council, as you can tell, we've had six different members of City Council present today. That's a very good showing for a committee late in the afternoon when they've been meeting day and night for many weeks in a row to finish up our work before the end June. We're interested in public access, we want to move it. But in this case, we need your help, and we will help you in every way possible.

I think what you did today is the most effective thing that's been done in the last 15 years for bringing public access. I've never seen, as I mentioned in the beginning, a group of people this size and number in support, and I think that's extremely important. I think it's a message that the Mayor's also going to be here.

MR. BRAND: Thank you, Councilman.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN COHEN: The next panel will consist of Ed Pardini, from Comcast; Ed Schwartz, the Institute for Civic Values; Bernadine Hawes, Government and Community Affairs University; Wendell Young, of the Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776; and Tamar Zuromaskis, American Civil Liberties. Mr. Pardini.

(Above-named witnesses come forward.)

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Mr. Pardini?

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