Public access channel tunes in more funding

Daily Southtown
Published August 31, 2004
BY Jonathan Lipman, Staff writer

Chicago's public access cable television provider is pushing for a change in the funding rules that keep its free studios and airtime open to the public.

Supporters are hoping to force a vote in the city council Wednesday on a new structure that would have the city directly pay for the studios for the first time. Aldermen face a $220 million budget shortfall this year.

Chicago Access Network Television, or CAN TV, has five channels of bulletin boards, public announcements and locally produced shows. It is funded almost entirely by the three cable companies that operate in Chicago, under rules contained in their city licenses.

But executive director Barbara Popovic said the funding formula set up in the late 1990s is broken. It asks for fixed annual funding from each of the three companies. One of them, RCN, has stopped operating and stopped paying.

As a result, CAN TV's $3 million budget dropped by about $600,000 last year and could drop by another $350,000 this year. Popovic said that would force major cutbacks in community programming.

The city gets 5 percent of gross revenue from all cable operators as a franchise fee. That money goes to the general fund. Popovic is asking for one-fifth of it, about $2 million, to go to CAN TV.

"People have learned to come to us as a resource for information they can't find elsewhere," Popovic said. "It leaps over normal communication roadblocks."

An ordinance to change the funding structure passed the city's finance committee in June, Popovic said, but city budget officials asked chairman Ed Burke to hold it from a final vote because they wanted time to consider other options.

Ald. Bernard Stone (50th), who has championed the ordinance, said he plans to bring the issue up Wednesday if Burke doesn't.

Stone said Mayor Richard Daley hasn't directly opposed the ordinance, but his budget director has.

"We're talking about $2 million in a budget of $5 billion and they're talking about it like it's $2 billion," Stone said. "Because it is a tough year, they're looking to scrape the dollars anywhere they can scrape them."

back to top