ET Committee Hearing Transcript for 03/07/2008

REPRESENTATIVE FONTANA: Good morning. We will convene this public hearing of the Energy and Technology Committee, Friday, March 7, 2008, at 9:09 a.m. Welcome everyone.

Just to lay out the ground rules before we begin, there is an overflow room in room 1-B down the corridor and to the left as you exit this room, so if you cannot find a seat in this room, I would encourage you to go down there.

We will be doing bills in bill order, so you don't have to worry about missing your turn if you're signed up for a bill further down on our agenda. We will be doing them in bill order.

In addition, the State Police need to maintain order in this room, and that means you cannot stand in the doorways. You need to either sit or go outside or go to 1B. So you get your choice.

We've got a few chairs left, I think, a couple places. So feel free to take those. No doubt, we will ask Mr. Pawloski to close the door behind him there so that we will have a nice quiet hearing room. Thank you, Mr. Pawloski.

Some of the ground rules before we begin. You will have two minutes to testify at which time the bell will go off, and we'll ask you to stop so we can go to questions. You can do whatever you want during that two minutes.

I would encourage you, though, to do things that aren't in the testimony that you offered in written form, because we can read that, and to speak to the legislation that we have before us, specifically, because that's what we're here for.

I would remind everyone to turn off or turn to vibrate, their cell phones, pagers, beepers, iPods, iPhones, whatever, because they are disruptive, especially in a room of this size.

And I would remind all the people who are here, especially including those who are not frequently here at the capitol that we maintain decorum during our Public Hearings, and so there will be no clapping, no booing, no hissing, things of that nature.

And will ask the State Police to maintain order, so if it means clearing the doorways or removing people, we will have them do that. With that, I will reiterate that we will again go through the bills in bill order, so we will begin with House Bill 5814, and our first speaker is Paul Giguere.

PAUL GIGUERE: Good morning. My name is Paul Giguere, president and CEO of the Connecticut Public Affairs Network and president of the National Association of Public Affairs Networks.

I'm speaking today on Raised House Bill 5814, AN ACT CONCERNING COMMUNITY ACCESS TELEVISION. I've also submitted written testimony.

Frankly, I'm surprised that it's necessary for me to comment on a bill governing Community Access Television since it is clear that CT-N is not a community access channel.

I'm here today to strongly object, not only to the misidentification of CT-N as a community access channel, but also to propose constraints that would leave CT-N, the state's network, unprotected against the potential degradation and distortion of our broadcast quality signal that was established by this legislature nine years ago.

The first sentence of Section 8, subsection (a)(4) would essentially grant any provider, current or future, the right to degrade or alter CT-N's viewer experience, if it suited their purposes to do so.

The second sentence of Section 8 would compel CT-N to cooperate with any distortion of our signal regardless of our objections to it.

I realize the purpose here is to allow new technologies, and therefore new competitors into the marketplace, but these technologies allow for broadcast quality signals from other stations, and safeguards must be applied to prevent CT-N from being singled out for degradation of its signal.

We certainly don't object to providing greater choice and competition in the video industry, but we must also ensure that the state's network is not marginalized in the name of that greater choice and competition.

We oppose this legislation as long as it would empower any video provider, present or future to offer CT-N in any manner that would make it more difficult to find, view, or utilize, then programming alongside it.

Unlike legislation in other states, this bill currently provides no standards for minimum video quality or viewer experience. In fact, as written, this bill demands that those who produce the programming have no say in how it's distributed.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Paul. Paul, just to be clear, Section 8 has to do with requiring certified video franchise authority providers to interconnect with public access at no cost to the Public access groups. It doesn't have anything to do with video quality, video size, video time. It's language intended to require them to pay for it.

PAUL GIGUERE: I would argue that there may be some unintended consequences of that language as well.

REP. FONTANA: And there may be. I just wanted to be clear, for the record, that that's what that section is about. Okay. Other questions for Paul from Members of the Committee? Representative DelGobbo.

REP. DELGOBBO: Paul, I guess I want to get it understood and to be clear what do you believe are the unintended consequences. I gather from your testimony that you believe that this would somehow degrade the current statutory framework for provisioning of CT-N.

I don't, sort of I guess somewhat akin to the Chair, I don't see that, and I'm trying to, I guess, reference the point in the statute again where you believe that there is some preemptive authority granted to CT-N with regard to how this coverage and the quality--

PAUL GIGUERE: I can tell you that we have been in discussion with AT&T for carriage of CT-N on the U-verse system, and the message that I'm trying to deliver today is that the state's Public Affairs Network should not be considered on the substandard mechanism that they're using to deliver the PEG channels.

You have to understand something. They are operating two separate systems here. The way that they are delivering the PEG access channels is a web application that delivers our broadcast quality signal at a much degraded level than what is available for all the other channels, except for the PEGs.

REP. DELGOBBO: What do you mean by degraded level?

PAUL GIGUERE: Let me give you the, for example, when we produce our programming it's recorded at 480 lines of resolution, and that's just a technical term, but the rest of the world is moving toward High Definition television, which would increase it to 780 lines of resolution.

So we're almost doubling it.

The delivery of this product would cut our lines of resolution in half to 240 lines of resolution. The viewer experience when you would, when most of our viewers are able to find CT-N by flipping to the channels.

Our research shows that the majority of people who watch CT-N find these hearings by flipping to it, and the cable company has done a great job in putting our channel in their basic tier.

But you can't flip to this. You have to know the number, and you have to insert it into your remote, and then it goes through a period of buffering, sometimes even up to more than a minute before the video actually starts to play.

It doesn't support closed captions, you can't record it on a DVR, and you know, I had an opportunity to talk with Representative Fontana about this, and he said, Paul, you haven't seen it. So maybe you need to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And I really took that to heart, and as a matter of fact, I was so concerned about the implications of this to our state network, and my fiduciary responsibility, that earlier this week I jumped on a plane and flew to Detroit, Michigan, and I rented a car, and I drove to the town of Clinton Township so I could see the only place in the country where I could see a side-by-side comparison of the PEG access solution between cable and U-verse.

It left a very bad taste in my mouth, and I want you to see what I saw. I've prepared a link. I know I can't show a video here, but if you go to www.compare.ct-n.com, you will see a side-by-side comparison of their government access channel between cable, two monitors, cable and U-verse.

This is not, unlike the video that has been circulating from Palo Alto, California that AT&T says is discredited, because it's a hostile group toward AT&T. This is a friendly, this is a municipality who's working with AT&T to establish this beta test site so people can see for themselves.

And I encourage you to take a look at the experience. I can't imagine that in today's day and age the people who watch this network and care about an informed democracy would not wait that long for CT-N to come up before they were able to view it. Especially if you're flipping back and forth, because you can't.

REP. DELGOBBO: And I appreciate it. I think the premise, and I won't belabor it and get in a debate about it, but I guess there are two issues there, it sounds like, and one is the quality or grade of transmission, the we'll say 250 lines of, 240 lines of resolution versus 480 versus the High Def experience that's evolving, and that's one, and then two is how the channel presents itself. Go ahead.

PAUL GIGUERE: And, I'm sorry, and from our perspective, the problem that we have, we have specifically offered to AT&T that we will deliver our signal in broadcast quality to wherever they need it to go in order for us to be right near C-Span, which they said that they would do.

But they won't take it that way, and they say that they're technically not able to take it that way. I would say that if they're able to insert the local commercial networks into the state network, then they could also insert us in the same mechanism, even though we're not a commercial broadcaster.

It is the character--

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That's a key point, you're not a commercial broadcaster.

PAUL GIGUERE: I'm sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: That is perhaps the key point, you're not a commercial broadcaster.

PAUL GIGUERE: Absolutely, we're not. But we're also not a community access channel, and there's an important distinction there. If there C-Span, then we should be, I mean if their intent is to provide access to C-Span through the federal government, they should be providing the same access for state.

REP. DELGOBBO: I guess, so it's not a debate or colloquy. This legislature has been very supportive of CT-N, but we've got an extraordinary network here that's changed, and changing the dynamic of how the public is able to see what goes on in state Government. All that's true. That's certainly been an evolving process from the time when previous, I remember when I first came to the legislature, and just before watching it on CP TV.

So the issues have evolved in terms of carriage, in terms of dedicated channels, in terms of the quality both on what's being produced and what's being viewed, and of course, this committee has in recent years, worked toward issues in terms of where we'll basic package, etc. Clearly an evolving issue.

So I understand your being a little defensive, I'll call it, or protective of your,

PAUL GIGUERE: Our network.

REP. DELGOBBO: Our network. But there's a lot of identity to Paul Giguere in this process and rightfully so.

I guess what I'm concerned about is that, you know, the effort is in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I guess I don't entirely accept the idea that consumers are not, because things present themselves in many formats, and with all due respect to us, I imagine that the priority of High Definition signal for consumers in this state might be to watch the Giants game or a Yankees game or something of that sort, would be a lot ahead of their priority list, or something on Discovery channel, number one.

And number two, how things are presented. I guess to assume that because somebody has to do an interactive menu will eviscerate people's willing to engage and watch this stuff sort of just defies logic when you see the multibillion dollar industry of video on demand and things that people can access on both their cable and their whatever format they get their video product.

And I think we have to understand that consumers are evolving and understanding the technology that's coming to them, whether it's their phones, I know senior citizens who are more adept at text messaging and things with their phones than I am, so I'd ask for your deference to that.

Because, in the converse, right now, and I've seen the correspondences, right now, I don't CT-N at all as available on the U-verse product. I think that's a shame. I am encouraging you as an incentive, you know, work it out.

I gather that there has been offers made to how to present it, and you say that's not good enough. That's fair. I understand why. But in the meantime, there's a growing segment of the population that isn't getting it at all because of that.

PAUL GIGUERE: And I would argue that we could be on AT&T U-verse tomorrow. I'll deliver it to wherever it needs to go, and ironically it would be on AT&T fiber that I would be delivering it to them on.

So the discussion of emerging technologies and how that brings competition to the cable industry is very important. But what I'm saying is that regardless of the technology, there are certain technical standards, quality standards that we should set as a minimum.

And there have been attempts in different states to do that. California, Illinois, and several others that we could look to to say, okay, if you want to deliver cable, we can put a mechanism in place for you to do that, but we all have to play by the same rules, not technically, but as far as levels of quality, and people's expectations of what that product would deliver.

REP. DELGOBBO: Final comment, Paul, and then I'll turn it back over to the chairman is, is that in fact not a part of the competitive experience where if there are priorities of people in terms of a whole range of what they're getting and how they're getting it and what quality, and it's not to their liking, then they're going to go, I know, for example there are people who switched off of certain cable or different kinds of video products, because they wouldn't carry Nesson for the Red Sox. And there's a lot of people I know who did that change.

And the same things in terms of other elements of, you know, how things are presented to them, how easy, how difficult, what they get. That's part of the competitive process too.

PAUL GIGUERE: I agree. And if we were talking about the Red Sox versus the Yankees here, I would suspect that this would be a much different argument, but there are certain public service components that must be protected, because we don't have an army of lobbyists, and we cannot compete with ESPN. You're never going to get the same amount, well maybe on certain days, depending on what's going on.

But we're never going to be able to compete with ESPN. And we're not here to do that. We're here to provide an open window on government that should not be part of the consumer driven part of this component.

It needs to be there so that when issues like this come up, whatever the myriad of issues are that are being dealt with in front of this legislature, that any one in the state who cares about that issue knows where to go and can get to it, and can get to it quickly and with a certain expectation that it will be as good as what we're sending out here.

REP. DELGOBBO: Well, Mr. Chairman thank you and Paul, thank you. But I don't think the debate is, you know, whether or not people are going to have the opportunity to view this or not. It's, the debate is, how is it presented to them, so it's not like they won't see it, and one of these fine distinctions of lines and resolution as things revolving--

PAUL GIGUERE: My written testimony includes some draft language that would impose some minimum standards for video service providers to use specifically for CT-N, but I think that the same could be true for the access channels as well.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you. Other questions for Paul from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, thank you, Paul.

PAUL GIGUERE: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Well next have Bill Durand to be followed by Attorney General Blumenthal if he's here or available. Please proceed, Bill.

BILL DURAND: Thank you Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee. I'm Bill Durand, chief counsel for NECTA. Happy to be here today, and just wanted to state that this bill makes significant changes to a bill you passed just last year. It's only been in effect for a few months, and we urge you not to make any changes at this time, mainly because we'd like some time to have the law take effect and work, and also we shouldn't be making changes based upon theoretical problems that may never materialize.

We've got a good story to tell here in Connecticut. The cable industry, thanks to the cooperative effort with this community, carries CT-N the way we carry CNN. And we carry PEG the way we carry ESPN. I sound like Jessie Jackson this morning.

But, what we want to see is not a lock-in as this bill contemplates, locking cable into one type of technology that exists in 2008. That creates a tremendous competitive disadvantage for us.

For every channel that we have to carry that our competitor does not have to carry, they can load in three High Definition channels, and in some cases have three to six, or even nine more HD channels. I mean that's a nonstarter for a consumer. They'll go to who has the highest number of HD channels.

In my testimony I also point out that even though we are getting these new competitive franchises, all of the existing PEG obligations still exist, and I've set forth several of these on page two of my testimony.

And finally by locking in or dictating [inaudible] technology, you're violating Federal law. In the last part of my testimony, I point out several sections of 47USC544 that specifically state that you cannot dictate the type of technology.

We're not saying that you should be dictating to our competitors the type of technology, because even though John [inaudible] is a cable operator, I'm sure his adult supervision [inaudible] won't be happy about that. But the bottom line is they have the same protections we have. Don't lock us into a particular technology.

In the future, there may be a way for us to do an on-demand that is just as high quality, and maybe has more benefits to the consumer. With that, I'd be happy to accept questions.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Bill. First off, I'm not clear how we're locking you into a technology. Can you explain that today? Not quoting Federal law, but specifically the bill in front of us?

BILL DURAND: Yes, the bill, I believe in Section 5 says that we have to keep the same facilities or number of channels delivering access the same way we did as of January 1, 2008.

REP. FONTANA: Well, Section 5 says that you have to deliver the same number of channels. It doesn't say the manner in which you would provide them. And if you recall, last year's law required AT&T or any other video service provider to honor the same number of channels. So I don't see how this isn't a level playing field.

BILL DURAND: Well, the bottom line is, as you know from the previous witness, AT&T is not going to be required to provide linear channels, and I heard my good friend, Representative DelGobbo more or less supporting on-demand as we do.

What we'd like to see is a clarification that there would be a way not to lock in the number of channels we currently have. There may be a way that we could reclaim bandwidth, thereby being able to use more higher speed broadband connections and telephony, so if we could provide some clarifying language, if that's not what you're intending to do, then you made my day.

REP. FONTANA: Well, Bill, I'm looking at Section 5 right now, and I don't see anything here that precludes you from using a similar approach to that AT&T does. So unless I'm wrong, I don't see anything here that does that.

BILL DURAND: I live in a world where even paranoids have real enemies. So I'd be happy to come up with some language that would make that very clear, and if we're on the same page, then I'm happy, Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Yes, I mean, let me just say for the record that I support and appreciate cable's technology that allows for local insertion points and so-called surfability of channels, including Public access. But again, I don't see anything here that precludes you from doing some of the things that AT&T is doing, and when we talk about honoring the number of channels, I think we've done it in a neutral fashion, s that whether we define a channel as something allocated as a specific amount of analog bandwidth in your system, or something that provides a certain amount of content in AT&T's system, a channel is a channel.

We're offering that content. We may offer it in different fashion. Be that as it may, if you have a suggestion you'd like to offer us, I'd be happy to entertain it.

BILL DURAND: I'll draft some language.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. Thank you, and we'll need it as soon as possible, unfortunately. Representative DelGobbo followed by Representative Nardello.

REP. DELGOBBO: I won't be anywhere near as long this time. One question. To your concern about the terminology of channels and maybe the future flexibility to present, I'm thinking in, for example, a franchise area as it exists today, there might be throughout that, that you might be, we'll say four channels, number 99, number 100, 102, where depending on where you are in that franchise area, somebody sees their PEG or CT-N.

And if I'm understanding what your concern is, is that it may be an opportunity in the future to do that sort of same video-on-demand thing where all right, channel 100 is going to be “the” channel, and guess what, if you, no matter where you live, you can access Naugatuck or Seymour's town meetings, or whatever by pushing a button, and by doing that, now channel 101, 102, 103 are available for other things to offer to the customers. I mean is that where your potential concern lies?

BILL DURAND: Yes, our major concern is not tying our hands at the same time freeing up a competitor to do creative things. And it may not be your intent, but as we read the law, that's what this Act would do.

So what we're hoping to do is to take advantage of some of the new technologies, and there is some great stuff coming out that, it will be seamless to the consumer. There's a bunch of stuff happening behind that channel map that you're seeing on the screen, and it'll be 480, it could be 1080 by the time we get through with the way High Definition is growing.

So we just don't want to lose all our bandwidths so we can't compete with satellites. Just turn on the TV. Every time you see an ad for satellite, we have better [inaudible] than cable, and I'm sure you've wrestled through the same thing. So if they end up getting nine or ten more channels than I have, I'm in trouble. I'm going to have to get another job.

REP. DELGOBBO: Well, we don't want to see you out of a job or anybody else, so. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you. Representative Nardello.

REP. NARDELLO: Thank you, Bill. I have a question regarding enforcement. As I read the bill, the enforcement of much of this is tied to the franchise. Can you please tell me do you know, off the top of your head, how many people in Connecticut still have franchises, and will they continue to do so in consideration of what we passed last year?

BILL DURAND: Yes, I mean a number of our members have applied for the, there are two franchises you created. One is one for AT&T in the first section of the bill. The second one, you could call that AT&T light, then there's cable light, a slightly less onerous regime.

Many of our members have applied for those, but notwithstanding that, as you know in the section relating to cable, we still have all of our legacy obligations. The only things we would not have is a renewal. We don't go back every 10 years or so and have to renew our franchises. But everything else is pretty much as it is.

And no one in the cable industry, I think you've noticed, even though we've had these franchises for months, no one's changing anything. For the most part, we're still doing exactly what we did before. But we have taken advantage of these franchises, and we think that, you know, you did a good job where our guys are very happy with, for the most part, with the new regime.

We'd like to have the AT&T regime, because as you recall, when that bill passed, the court case was still pending. Now it's very clear under federal law that AT&T is a cable company, we're a cable company. What we'd like you to do is treat us the same.

REP. NARDELLO: Maybe I didn't ask this correctly. I guess what I'm trying to get at is if you go to the competitive video service, okay, are you going to be bound by what's I this, because it applies to franchises.

So if you're a competitive video provider, you're no longer under those franchise rules, am I correct?

BILL DURAND: We're not a competitive video provider. That's the AT&T franchise. We're significant of cable franchise authority, but we'd be bound by this, as far as I can read.

REP. NARDELLO: Okay. Would there be some entities that would not be bound by this?

BILL DURAND: Not that I know of. I think, obviously there are specific provisions in here that are aimed at AT&T's, I shouldn't single them out, whoever goes for that section 2 franchise, but I don't know of anybody that would not be covered.

REP. NARDELLO: Thank you.

BILL DURAND: I mean, if I can clarify, Mr. Chairman. The AT&T kind of franchise does not have the obligations we have for public access. All of those provisions on page two of my testimony to not apply to AT&T. They have some level of responsibility for PEG, but not the same as cable. We have far more pages of legacy regulations that they did not apply.

REP. NARDELLO: I guess my concern here is how, you know, how we would actually implement and enforce this legislation and make sure it works the way we intended. And I want to make sure that the language allows us to do that. And I have some questions about that too. I was hoping as I said you could help me and clarify them. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, and are there any other questions for Bill from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, thank you, Bill. Because Attorney General Blumenthal has been delayed, we will go to Representative Tom Drew and then followed by Carol Young Kleinfeld.

REP. DREW: Good morning, Chairman Fontana and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak briefly. I've submitted testimony, but I'm just going to hit a couple basic points.

This bill, as I understand, the advocates of it basically are ones involved in a controversy that has been going on for a few years regarding our specific geographic area. And, I'm not involved in that controversy personally, and probably don't know enough about the details, so I'm not speaking on their behalf.

I think both sides of that controversy, so to speak, are here to express themselves in good numbers as far as I know.

As far as I do know, though, that controversy is kind of rooted in a couple things. The first is that nobody is clearly responsible in the State of Connecticut to provide full production services, and that's a policy decision we've made as a state, and maybe that's a good policy, and maybe it's not, but in my judgment, that's one of the basic root problems here.

And number two, again as I understand, the advocates of this legislation are essentially asserting that the current community access provider basically doesn't provide access particularly to the government channel in that they're in effect, maybe sort of blocking it.

But again, I'm just speaking for myself and nobody else, but that's how I understand the problem. That's what this is root in this bill as far as I know. My own judgment is, again, even maybe the more deeply rooted problem is the government channel just simply doesn't work very well.

It just doesn't work very well, and this controversy, I think, in part springs from that. So if we kind of get to the root of that problem, I think that that would be a good thing to do.

My understanding of this bill is that it uses the town-specific provision as a way to solve the problem, and I think that would be good provided that it doesn't have problems that may be associated with it.

I don't have enough personal experience with town-specific programming that maybe others do to speak to these problems, but I am concerned if basically with the town-specific programming you end up with an elected chief official of a town, a mayor or First Selectman effectively having the key to the government channel.

I think that would be a big problem, but maybe that hasn't occurred. But I do have a concern about that. So I'd recommend it and make sure that that does not get politicized, because I am concerned that that could get politicized.

But other than that, the town-specific, I think, is good. There is a concern, though, that if the town controlled that channel in their town, the government channel, they may not have enough original programming, and I think that does sound like a legitimate concern, so that ought to be addressed as well in my judgment.

Also, when I read this bill I see the solution basically going in the direction of town-specific programming, and I'm concerned that while I support that, that it doesn't have the consequence of eliminating the public access provider. But many of us have had our own television shows. We go to that studio, it has economies of scale, these people have know-how and experience and all these kind of things.

I think those are good things, and I think the idea of the original legislation in creating these public access providers is a good idea, and that we sort of don't want to throw out the baby with bath water.

So I think both of these things can exist simultaneously if somebody wanted to use a public access provider rather than go through the vehicle of the town-specific and have that public access provider produce a show for them or help the produce it, I should say, I think both of those things ought to exist simultaneously, but there is a very real problem in our geographic area today.

And I think what it needs more than anything else is oversight for the community access provider, whether that's done by the cable company or, in this case, they outsource it to a third party provider.

There is not effective oversight. Now I know you've had some of those proposals in the bill, and in my testimony, I suggested a couple other features of oversight.

One is that the local Advisory Council be able to field or consider petitions or effectively complaints, by people with proper standing. So if somebody has a complaint that they be able to go to the local Advisory Council, that that council be giving the power to adjudicate, in effect, that petition.

But also that we not take power away from the Public Utility Commission. That that local access provider, the decision from them can be appealed to the Public Utility Commission, which I know has a lot of experience in that.

In addition to that, that the community access provider, that they file financials with the local Advisory Council, because as I understand, one of the complaints that this bill is rooted in is that the money that we all pay through our cable bill doesn't end up being spent the way it's supposed to be spent. And there's no real way to follow-up with that, as far as I can tell, to prove that one way or the other.

And that ought to be open to the public, and also if we're going to have oversight of the community access provider, then I think we ought to have the same oversight of the town-specific. Whoever's in charge of operating the town-specific, that we ought to have the same oversight with them, because ten years from now, all the players will be different, and if the town-specific is not doing their job and somebody wants to complain about it, they ought to be able to do that.

And in my experience, I've been on a couple of these Advisory Councils in different context over the years, and my experience is they are basically meaningless, because they don't have power.

So what I'm advocating here is that we give them some power. They'd be subject to review and appeal, but they'd be given some teeth, because right now I get the impression that they're pretty much irrelevant and have no teeth.

REP. FONTANA: Representative, I tried to allow you some additional time just as a courtesy. Are you about done, or?

REP. DREW: I am done. Yes, thank you very much.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Tom. I'm glad you're here. And just to let you know, section 4 of the bill does seek to create that oversight that you talked about. A process in which the cable access Advisory Council would receive complaints from groups with standing as you indicate to hear complaints and then ultimately to allow those who are dissatisfied with the manner in which a Council would seek to mediate such a dispute, could then appeal to the DPUC. So that is in the bill.

And I think you've raised a number of good points, and we'll look forward to reading your written testimony to try to sort through how we can make sure that we're providing that modicum of town-specific programming of whatever type to people who like to have it.

Recognizing every franchise is different, but we'd like to make sure that there is some amount of town-specific programming every community has.

REP. DREW: Yes. I support that idea. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Great. Thanks. Questions for Representative Drew from Members of the Committee? I think that was a wave from Representative Genga, so I'll take it that there's no questions for you. With that, thank you Representative Drew, and look forward to getting that written testimony, Representative Drew, if it's been dropped off. Very good. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom.

REP. DREW: Thank you very much.

REP. FONTANA: Carol Young-Kleinfeld to be followed by Mayor Dickinson if he's here. I'm sorry, I see Representative McCluskey and Representative Bye here. They weren't on the list, so I just want to confirm that they're on the list or want to be on the list. So, please, Ms. Kleinfeld. Proceed.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: Good morning. I'm Carol Young-Kleinfeld. I am a member of the Area Nine Cable Council, the advisory council for cablevision of Connecticut's franchise with 121,000 subscribers in the ten towns of southern Fairfield County. Thank you for the chance to comment on House Bill 5814. We have also submitted written testimony for you.

In the past years our cable council has actively supported competition among video providers, but with an emphasis on a level playing field, which we feel is essentially for true competition.

We've advocated for the carriage of CT-N on our cable system, and we have argued for the provision of town-specific community access from the very first time that competition from telephone companies for video services became a possibility in Connecticut.

Today we have four points to present to you. First, in Area Nine educational and governmental access has been operating through a successful locally controlled, well-received, town-specific model since 1997. Each town in our franchise area has its own E-channel, and its own G-channel. We share one public access channel among the ten towns, and there is one public access studio centrally located in Norwalk, which all of our producers use from Area Nine.

We urge your support for the sections of this bill that promote town-specific models of community access regardless of provider.

Second, competitive video service operators should supply the means to transport PEG programs from local communities to the customers. I'm glad to hear that Representative Fontana has clarified that Section 8 about cost, because we strongly believe that companies should not charge local municipalities or the producers of the local paper [inaudible], and they should not charge the cost to the PEG support provision.

We're glad that this was your intent in Section 8, but we do request that we clarify the language. It is a little confusing.

Third, because we wish to promote and not discourage viewers from watching the town's E and G channels, we urge the committee to require that all video providers provide regular full channels for PEG and for CT-N.

We believe that a separate system with a drop-down, scroll-down, slow-loading menu will definitely be totally frustrating for our residents, and will defeat the purpose of PEG.

Finally, our cable council has a privacy concern over the proposed AT&T service and that town-specific programming be available to all U-verse subscribers throughout the entire state.

In educational access programming where young students appear in the programs, the identities of these children will be freely available outside their communities. We urge that legislation require video providers to restrict statewide access to these programs by broadcasting only to the viewers in that community of origination. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Carolyn. We will have to see if we can get the issue of privacy addressed. I think you raise an interesting point. So we'll have to see what we can do on that score if anything. And certainly you're right. As to Section 8, we'll need to clarify that, because the language does appear to be inept due to the issue of cost.

So we may want to just adopt the Illinois law, you know, which so many people have cited as a meaningful way of clarifying that.

And thank you for your testimony. Are there questions for Carol from Members of the Committee? Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Hi, Carol. Thanks for coming today. I'm interested in how your committee access council functions, and how you help the municipalities in your region encouraging programming. Are you empowered in some way to do that?

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: We have a very active council. We meet once a month. Every town has at least two representatives, and they have been meeting for many years, and are very experienced in what each town is doing, and we help each other by sharing programs.

When applicable we provide actual programs to each other's communities. We have an active email communication system where we inform all of the community as to what our upcoming programs are, and in this way, we have a great communication system among the towns.

REP. FAWCETT: And is it true that you also have access to the actual PEG money that cablevision customers pay. Do you have a grant system that allows you to distribute money into the communities?

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: Yes.

REP. FAWCETT: How does that work in your region.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: In our region Cablevision of Connecticut is the official community access provider. But years ago, they worked out an agreement with the cable council and with the municipalities whereby they would collect the PEG fees, of course, and provide a portion of the PEG fees back to the ten towns to run their E-channels and their G-channels. And also a portion would go toward maintaining the public access studio in Norwalk, of course.

These funds funnel through the cable council. We have a grant program. We have procedures in place whereby the local community applies for a grant for equipment, for training, for repair of equipment, upgrading their equipment, to actually run their E-channels and G-channels.

We discuss every branch application that comes before our council. We keep this in a separate escrow fund. The cable council retains none of this funding. It all goes to the ten communities to run their E-channel and G-channel.

REP. FAWCETT: And I think it's about 100,000 a year. Do you spend all that money, and what's the average size grant request from a town, and what types of, what are they buying with the money they're getting from you?

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: Well, I would say the average is about $5,000 per grant. I mean it does vary, of course. And it's for equipment, basically.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: For instance, Wilton, the town that I live in, recently applied for a grant to put three remote cameras in our big meeting room in our town hall where all our government access programming is taped. And that's just one example of how we use the PEG.

REP. FAWCETT: But every year, once a year, you receive $100,000 that's put in an account, and you have 12 months to disburse that money how you see fit through your region.

And then the next year you get another $100,000, so it's an annual thing.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: Yes. I believe that there are high-level negotiations that go on between our cable council officers and cablevision, but that is the neighborhood of what--

REP. FAWCETT: But it's absolutely an annual appropriation.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: Right.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you so much, Carol.

CAROL YOUNG-KLEINFELD: You're welcome.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative. Other questions for Carol from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, thank you, Carol, very much for your suggestions. Again, now we'll have Mayor Dickinson if he's here, to be followed by Jennifer Evans. You're not Mayor Dickinson, I know.

DON ROW: I'm not Mayor Dickinson, and I apologize to the committee. I won't even attempt to do an impersonation. I hope it's okay for me to read his testimony to you. It's very brief. We have--

REP. FONTANA: In the two minutes, absolutely. Go ahead. Please just state your name for the record.

DON ROW: My name is Don Row, and I am here representing William Dickinson. We have two pieces of testimony. The first is from the Mayor. The second is from our government access manager. That one is much more detailed, and we'll leave you to read that.

Committee members, the Town of Wallingford is concerned that all providers have the same requirements. We believe that the basic principle should be that companies providing community access channels should have to meet the requirements of a level playing field.

The older cable television providers should not be placed at a disadvantage because of new technologies. Principles of fairness should not be sacrificed in the interest of technology changes.

Ultimately, if necessary, technology should change in order to provide fairness in operating standards. Thank you for your consideration of this, and that concludes Mr. Dickinson's testimony.

Again, I would ask you to look at Mr. Handley's testimony at your convenience.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Don, and before you go, we add that one of the interesting things about this is that AT&T has represented that their technology precludes the use of so-called local insertion points, which is what the cable TV company, as I understand, use [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 1A to Tape 1B.]

--later to explain why or why not that technology doesn't work with their system. If it can't happen, it's very difficult to make it happen as I'm sure you'd agree.

DON ROW: Could very well be.

REP. FONTANA: Questions for Mr. Row from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, thank you, Don.

DON ROW: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Now, Jennifer Evans to be followed by Andy Schatz. Welcome. Please proceed.

JENNIFER EVANS: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: And please give Representative McCluskey a chair. And I apologize for any miscommunication on my part, Representative Bye.

JENNIFER EVANS: My name is Jennifer Evans, and I'm the production manager of West Hartford Community Television. I'm here today to comment on Section 8(4)(a). We strenuously object to the use of the words “most economical,” as we believe they will undermine the important goals of community television in two ways. First, there's a tradition that all costs of carriage, technical support, all those things have been always borne by the cable provider, and we feel that since the inception of public access, it has always been provided with no strings attached with regard to delivery.

We have always been a full channel. We believe the intent of the bill writers was to rightly extend this responsibility to the video service provider.

Therefore, we request that the language be clarified to mandate that all costs associated with the transmission equipment, installing, connecting, and maintaining the interconnectivity between the PEG facility and the provider's head end shall be borne by the provider.

Second, we should not allow new video service providers to provide substandard quality for community television by use of the term “most economical.” I was here last year when AT&T talked about its commitment to public access and how they understood PEG's important role in local communities.

Now we're learning that we are not a channel on U-verse. Instead, we're buried in a drop-down menu and delivered via a web stream that looks like “You-Tube” on TV.

I have attached findings to my written testimony from a six-week beta test study done in Clinton Township, Michigan that outlines the deficiencies of the U-verse system.

New technology is supposed to enhance, not degrade the delivery of a channel. Instead, we find that AT&T's PEG solution is inferior, and frankly, unacceptable.

We urge you to remove the language “most economical,” and insist that public access be delivered at equivalent capacity, equivalent visual and audio quality and equivalent functionality to that of commercial channels.

Additionally, all providers should be capable of carrying PEG at least at the current NTSC signal quality, with features like closed captioning, SAP, program listings, and DVR recording.

We understand that Comcast is planning an Internet protocol television product much like that is offered by AT&T. Please don't legislate a race to the bottom. You have a rare opportunity here to set the standards that will allow PEG to continue to provide an invaluable local service. We ask you to just aim high.

The citizens of Connecticut are counting on you to ensure that they can have meaningful community access in exchange for their use, AT&T's, or any entrant's use of their public rights of way.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Jennifer. Do Representative McCluskey or Representative Bye have any comments they'd like to offer.

REP. MCCLUSKEY: Just very briefly. First of all I want to thank the Chairs and the committee for allowing us to get on. As you said, we kind of got confused this morning regarding the sign-up.

I just wanted to make three points. First of all that Representative Fleischmann and Senator Harris wanted to be here as well, but unfortunately, their schedules weren't able to, because West Hartford Community access cable is that important to our town.

So we just wanted that for the record. And just two other things. We understand that the technologies involving, but as you know, this is a heavily regulated public industry, because of the importance it is to the public. So we need to get CT-N right, and we need to get the PEG channels right.

Lastly, I would just say as someone who was designated by Chris Donovan to work on the closed captioning issue for CT-N, and as the home of the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, we are very concerned by the testimony of Paul Giguere that possibly the way CT-N may be delivered in the U-verse, that closed captioning will not allowable.

Because, I will say to you that I received so many positive comments by the deaf community about closed-captioning of our CT-N network, that it really made them feel more part, connected to the state.

And so I would say we must insist on closed captioning for CT-N in the U-verse mechanism in whatever fashion the committee deems appropriate. Thank you.

REP. BYE: Good morning, and thank you for giving us a minute here. I've been talking to folks at WHC-TV. They provide such an amazing service, and I thank the Chairs for letting us speak today.

I think there are two things to keep in mind. I just went and saw, if you go to the web link and see what's going on in Michigan where Paul flew out to Michigan with a day's notice to look at what's happening, so we think sometimes as legislators we have to say pragmatically what's happening.

And pragmatically, what's happening is the quality of the signal is much worse, and it takes much longer to load. And I would say in 2008 there are two things that have changed about the way news and coverage of our government has changed and human beings have changed.

When we now look to news about government and what's happening with government, the amount of money that newspapers and resources that newspapers can put on people covering hearings like this and other public events and other government sort of hearings and laws, there is less coverage. There is no doubt there's less coverage, and it's shorter coverage. Newspapers are cutting back. News channels are cutting back. Access provides both local government, a view of local government, and a view of state government and federal government.

Each level of government is very important. And so there's less coverage, but there's more access to things like Access TV. At the same time, people are much more time urgent.

I just looked at how long it took to load to get to a channel. It took over a minute. Nobody, I hate to say it, in our world is going to wait a minute to find a station.

People watch access, because they're scrolling through and can stop. So less coverage of government on the press side, and time urgency among consumers on the other side. I believe if this is acceptable, this sort of lower quality, slower quality, is what we give consumers, that access will be in big trouble as an industry.

So we need to take that into account pragmatically as we look at this law. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you very much, all three of you. And I know we've discussed in the past a so-called Illinois law, and I believe Representative McCluskey may have sent me a copy of it. I don't know. So if you could make sure you send that to me again, because I may or may not have misplaced it. So that would be great Representative McCluskey.

And certainly we do want to clarify on the cost issue. On the technology issue, as I understand it, and AT&T can speak to this if they testify, they offered to provide a separate feed for closed captioning for CT-N Representative.

So it's perhaps not in the law, but that was my understanding, was that AT&T offered CT-N both CT-N as is, CT-N closed captioning, CT-N II, which would be the other feed from a separate chambers not on CT-N, and even CT-N III, which would cover our courts.

So I believe that they have offered to do that for CT-N. We may need to, as you say, make sure the closed captioning issue is put into the statute to make sure that that is offered.

REP. MCCLUSKEY: Again, I don't know all the specifics on this. The only thing I would say is, it's not just the deaf community that takes access of the closed captioning, the people that have hearing impairment, seniors that may not know of the availability of such a product by AT&T as separate distinct product. So I would really think it should just be part of the CT-N thing, that there shouldn't be a separate CT-N closed captioning.

And people's need for it changes over time. You might have great hearing, I tragically know my hearing has declined over time, and I just don't think you--

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Say what?

REP. MCCLUSKEY: --and I just don't think they should be segregated. I really don't think, it should be CT-N, and it should have closed captioning. Not CT-N and CT-N for people that need closed captioning.

REP. FONTANA: So you would advocate for just providing everyone with that CT-N feed with the closed captioning built in as a standard or default. That's an interesting point. Good. Again thank you, and before you go, let me see if there are any questions. Members. Senator Fonfara.

SEN. FONFARA: Representative McCluskey, I'm a little bit concerned about the impression you've left with the committee regarding this industry. It is not a heavily regulated industry.

We think it is, but it's not. It was deregulated years ago, and we deregulated it further last year. And I think that has more to do with the reality of where the world is going with respect to this form of telecommunications than anything else.

Very often on this committee, we're chasing our tails. We're trying to catch up to where the technology is going, and I think that's case with this as well.

And this is not a fully formed thought by any means at this point on my part, but I certainly, the question that's being begged for me here is, does anyone have to go to U-verse. Are we requiring that people take this technology to leave the local cable system and go to U-verse?

REP. MCCLUSKEY: Absolutely not. I guess my only point was, Senator, that I do believe that the reason why this was much like many of the other industries, you're right, we have as a society deregulated a lot, but there was a linkage with this industry and the public's interest.

And I'm saying that we should not allow a product out there that doesn't protect the public's interest. And as Paul Giguere said very eloquently in his remarks earlier, that this is the public's window to their government.

And quite frankly, they're viewing this quite the wrong way. I would like to think that they would think that community access cable and CT-N is a draw, a competitive advantage over satellite as opposed to some detriment that they perceive to be the case.

SEN. FONFARA: I couldn't agree more, which would, would that not support the notion that in a competitive environment, let the market move people or let people move the market.

REP. MCCLUSKEY: Again, I do believe in certain levels of floors, and I believe the floor that we should protect as a General Assembly and as state government is that all people should have access to their government, whether it's at the local level or the state government.

You know, I'm not a huge sports fan. I have no problem with letting the market decide whether or not Yankees are always covered or the Red Sox, but no, the public's interest should be to have access to local community access and state community access.

It makes them better citizens to be informed. We're not going to force them to watch it. But I think having the companies be required as a condition of their doing business with us as a somewhat regulated entity, should be to carry in a decent format that people would want to take advantage of if they so choose to take advantage of it.

SEN. FONFARA: And should the distinguishing factor here be simply that the means by which we get this information is through a telephone line versus satellite, which comes through over the air? Why should we require one in this world versus requiring everyone?

REP. MCCLUSKEY: Well, since we're only the State Legislature, would I like the federal government to require that CT-N and PEG channels be covered by satellite for the State of Connecticut? Yes. But I can't do that.

But what I can control, I want to control, and I believe that the public's interest. Those aren't bad words, and I know you don't believe they're bad words, Senator. But you know what, in the last 20 years the public interest has kind of been shuffled aside, and everything's about competition and choice.

There is something that crosses all our political spectrums, called the public interest. And I just believe I can protect the public interest for telephone-delivered cable. I can't do it, unfortunately, for the satellite-provided television service.

REP. BYE: I would just add that not just having access, but ease of access and quality of access as a state moving up toward opening up our courts so folks can see what's going on there. It's got to be easy to get there, and I think that we need to look at this and our public access TVs in our towns and CT-N as ways that make our government very accessible in a high quality way to residents.

When so many folks are here for a public hearing, they have access to our government, but it's a long time to sit here, and many people can't get here, but they could watch it on TV and send you an email if they had easy access to that.

So it's part of why I think it's so important to make sure the platform is one that makes it easy to access and give us the high quality access.

SEN. FONFARA: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Senator. Other questions from Members of the Committee? Before you go, let me just say thank you, Jennifer. Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: I think I have to wave my hand a little bit higher. Just a quick comment and question. Thank you very much for coming. I couldn't agree more, Representative Bye, Representative McCluskey.

Certainly this type of programming is a window to our government, but one thing I have found from talking to constituents is it can also be a window just into our communities, because I have found many, as you know, I have the PTA mom thing going on, and I have found many a PTA mom that would love to see high school sporting events that they've missed, or other events taking place in the school. So I, again, couldn't agree with you more.

I actually have a question I'm not sure which of the three of you could answer it. It's just specifically about the West Hartford region. I was wondering how many municipalities are served in your region, and how many towns in your region actually benefit from town-specific programming?

JENNIFER EVANS: Each town in our franchise is town-specific. So West Hartford is town-specific, Simsbury, East Hartford, Hartford, and Bloomfield.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. Thank you. That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you and I apologize Representative for missing your arm. No, I just wanted to say Jennifer that I've seen you in a number of meetings, ACDAG down my way, and I also had the good fortune of visiting in the West Hartford studios on a couple of occasions, and I've been impressed by your operation.

So as you know, this matters a great deal to me, and I appreciate the effort not only you, but my friend, Walter Mann, and others here have invested in this, because it really is a great resource and a treasure to have vibrant and viable public access in the state.

So I wanted to thank you publicly for your interest and your commitment to it.

JENNIFER EVANS: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Seeing no further questions. Thank you, all three of you. We'll have Andy Schatz to be followed by Representative Davis.

ANDY SCHATZ: Thank you, Representative Fontana, Senator Fonfara, and the distinguished member of the committee.

Actually, before I start the testimony, I should point out that Jennifer Evans is not only active as you've seen her, but actually when she was with commercial television for a while in between stints at West Hartford Community Television, won five Emmy awards, and that's the kind of really quality that you have now in both the state and local programming.

I'm an attorney, and this week, I happened to be in California on a case and took some time to make a tape of the U-verse product as it is currently being offered in East Palo Alto. I actually made a DVD which I'd like to leave with the committee.

Most of my submitted testimony which was written on the red eye flight back from California this morning was just going through what's on there, and basically to summarize it, it's basically just that it takes basically 45 seconds every time you want to get to the community access channel.

It doesn't matter how many times you go there. If you go back it takes 10 seconds to get back to a regular channel. It takes another 45 seconds to get back to the community access.

In addition to that, which in and of itself, is probably going to mean that no one is going to watch the local government programming, in addition, the quality of the channel and local government under U-verse is distinctly inferior.

And again, it really is sad, because what it means is that those who do put up with the incredible effort to get to watch government programming are going to see something that's not of as high quality as we, and I would think you, would want to show them.

So I think that the question that's been posed by Senator Fonfara and Representative DelGobbo before, which really I think, is a critical question for you, is this notion that yes, we can't require anybody to use U-verse. We aren't requiring anybody to use U-verse. But the real question, I suppose, is are we willing to set some limits here and basically say that we're seeing three channels. That's all we're asking for is basically three channels out of a spectrum that now goes to hundreds of channels, because of the technology. Should we require that three channels be devoted to it.

The problem here is that the slippery slope, as the Representative of the cable companies indicated, was if you say to AT&T okay, they don't have this requirement, they can put it in an inferior position with inferior quality, the cable companies are going to come and say, well we need those other channels for commercial programming. We're going to want to put it in an inferior position, inferior quality, and that gets you to the race to the bottom that Jennifer was talking about.

So I think that this is really a question of making the decision as to whether or not we're going to save three channels. That's all we're asking for. Three channels have to be devoted to public programming.

REP. FONTANA: Any, thank you. One of the things that I think we've had to deal with here is, and I think Senator Fonfara maybe hit on it earlier. If he didn't, he may soon, is that if the technology today, if we make a determination as a matter of public policy, that we want to bring competition to this state when it comes to video, and if the company that would choose to provide that competition chooses not to avail itself of a certain technology, but instead develops another technology, which precludes the ability of local insertion points, we could face a situation where, in essence, if we did that we would have two or three hundred channels of public access, because each channel in the state would have its channel of public access, which would essentially preclude their being able to compete, which would then undermine the public purpose that we established at the outset.

So I'm not saying that you have an answer to that, but as an attorney and somebody who went to law school, I think we can speak the same language.

And that's sort of the circular loop that we found ourselves in, which is given the jobs that will be created as a result of this competition, the variety of interests that are served by bringing competition in be on low price, so offering ESPN-U or CS-TV or whatever, can we work with that within that system?

ANDY SCHATZ: It's a good question, and I'm not a tech guy. However, I understand from conferences that have been held that at least with respect to AT&T, that the technology is not a bar. It may be more expensive, which is why the language “most economical” is a problem in the statute as drafted.

But when you think about it, AT&T delivers phone services. They can do that via town. It's inconceivable to me not as a tech person, but just knowing what happens with your phone service, it's inconceivable to me that they can't deliver this by ton

You may notice that the Internet, when you go and you do a Google search, you can get very localized responses. Again, the Internet allows you to identify very narrow areas.

It's inconceivable to me that AT&T cannot as opposed to it's not as cost efficient, but cannot provide the service on a town-by-town basis.

So I think it's a good point to look into this technology. I think that's essential, and as Representative McCluskey said, the fact that we can't control satellite, you know, it's something where generally the satellite probably it is difficult to do. Although, again, I'm not sure that that's case technologically, but it certainly makes sense that it might be.

But most people are not going that route, and if we have to lose those, so be it. We shouldn't lose that we don't have to, though, and with the AT&T customers we don't have to lose the access to local and statewide programming.

REP. FONTANA: And you can imagine our difficulty being Jacks of all trade and masters of none determining from this perspective whether a particular company can or cannot accomplish technologically the issue that we're trying to grapple with, which is local insertion points.

Questions for Mr. Schatz from Members of the Committee? None. Thank you very much for coming.

ANDY SCHATZ: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Again, we'll have Representative Davis to be followed by Bill Valley of the OCC.

REP. DAVIS: Good morning, Senator Fonfara, Representative Fontana, distinguished members of the Energy and Technology Committee. For the record, I am Representative Paul Davis, 117^th District, representing Milford, Orange, and West Haven. Here to discuss the limited issue involving House Bill 5814, and that is town-specific broadcasting.

I have submitted written testimony, and I will try and be very short and sweet on the issue so that we can move on to some of the other members of the public here.

For several years my constituents and I have worked for town-specific programming in our locality. Last year, 2006, as a matter of fact, we had testimony before the DPUC with thousands of petitions signed indicating that we prefer the town-specific model.

For some reason, the DPUC did not agree with that, and certified Sound View Community Media as a third party provider. Their model was a regional approach to government access television rather than town-specific.

We have been battling with the DPUC and discussing with Sound View, models that might meet the guidelines that the DPUC issued. I know Milford has come to a limited agreement which would provide some town-specific and some regional. Orange has not.

In any case, we don't necessarily agree that requiring town-specific for every community is the way to go, but we do believe in the American principle of choice.

And if a community desires to have town-specific program, we believe that government should respond by granting those wishes and allowing the community to, in fact, be serviced by town-specific.

I know there are some issues with this bill involving that. I hope the committee will look at that, and hopefully make the appropriate changes and see if we can work toward that goal.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative, and let me just ask you quickly. First of all, I do recall last year being here with you and giving the DPUC a year to try to work this out with the various groups, and finding that generally those did not work out. Hasn't with any of them in fact.

What's also something I appreciate your specific testimony is your district as I understand it is parts of West Haven, Orange, and Milford, if I'm correct.

REP. DAVIS: Right.

REP. FONTANA: And what's interesting is that West Haven is part of the New Haven Comcast franchise, which has no town-specific channels, but as I understand it, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, no outstanding issues vis-à-vis town-specific programming, because the programming director there who I've had a chance to speak with and does an excellent job of providing that town-specific programming, albeit through the regional programming center or system.

So even though there is no specific dedicated channel, he nevertheless, meets the needs of your community in West Haven when it comes to that. So I know it's physically possible for a regional system to provide sufficient local programming that communities get what they want.

And then you also have Orange and Milford. One community which may or may not have worked it out, one of which may or may not. So I think you've got sort of, you have a chance to see sort of different models at play and how they work out. So I think that's what we're trying to get out, is to get one way or another, get that amount of town-specific programming out there for people to see, either through better operations of the regional system, or a channel that's dedicated to that purpose.

REP. DAVIS: First of all, what you say is entirely true. My constituents in West Haven appear to be happy with the level of programming that they have. My constituents in Orange, as a matter of fact, also are very happy with what they have, and that is town-specific.

On the other hand--

REP. FONTANA: Paul, do they have a dedicated channel in Orange?

REP. DAVIS: In Orange, Cablevision channel 79 is town-specific, or the regional government access in all communities, and yes it is specific in that channel.

In any case, I have had some discussion with some of our officials in West Haven who are looking at the town-specific model a little bit more carefully in that it would provide greater coverage of the local events.

While the regional model seems to work currently, they haven't seen the town-specific, and they're hearing a little bit more about it, and maybe there are some things that they have been missing that they would like to have seen on their local television.

So that may be coming up in the future. So as I said, they're happy now, but that may change.

REP. FONTANA: I understand. Questions for Representative Davis from Members of the Committee? Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Representative Davis, you and I have talked a little bit about this issue, and one of the things that I have noticed from talking to my constituents in the same region is, I would say really there's two issues. It's a continued concern about the access to or the freedom to have access to town-specific programming, and the second being concern about how the actual PEG provider money is distributed.

About the freedom to have access to town-specific programming, do you have specific stories or examples that you could share with us on why your towns were denied or told that they were denied this when they asked for town-specific programming?

REP. DAVIS: There is some history, particularly in Orange, with government access television, long-time local town-specific government access television, which was started well before the whole problem occurred.

The town of Orange actually funds that government access television to the tune of $65,000 a year, receives no money outside of that. When the public hearings were held by the DPUC, as I said, thousands of letters were turned in, petitions, public officials testifying, and no, I don't have an answer as to why they were not helped. I cannot tell you that.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay, and does the town of Orange receive any of the PEG provider money. They're in that region, right? The area II region, so they are, in theory, supposed to receive some amount of the PEG provider money. If I understand correctly, it's a fee on our Cablevision bill that we all pay. So it's a tax, which we like to call a fee, and we all pay it. So it's supposed to be disbursed back to or towns, and I guess I'm wondering how much money the town of Orange has seen over the past five years, of that money?

REP. DAVIS: To my knowledge, none of the communities in Area II have seen any of that money directly. It's my understanding, and my figures may be wrong, approximately $650,000 a year goes to Sound View. Sound View may distribute the money to those communities, but Orange has not received any, and at this point doesn't want any.

What we'd like to see basically is what Area Nine has, and we'd be happy to receive the money under the conditions that we have the ability to use it in that way.

REP. FAWCETT: And when you say what Area Nine has, what you mean is the Cable Advisory Council that's granted $100,000 a year, and the appointees on the Council have the responsibility to distribute that money based on a grant process?

REP. DAVIS: Correct.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you very much. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative. Other questions for Representative Davis. Seeing none, thank you very much, Paul, for coming.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you very much.

REP. FONTANA: Next is Bill Vallee followed by Dennis Buckley.

BILL VALLEE: Good morning, Mr. Chairman. I'm Bill Vallee with the Office of Consumer Council. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about House Bill 5814.

The OCC believes that some revisions are vital to this bill, otherwise we recommend the committee to deny passage.

If a viewer pushes the remote on their sofa, and they want to watch the ball game, they don't really care how that signal gets there, how the ball game winds up in their living room. They don't choose by technology, they choose by bundle, by price, by innovations, by service quality like everything else they buy.

They want full access to all programs, and most particularly, I think, it has come out today in full force, they want public policy programming that has been set up by this legislature to be more important in a way than other programming. Like, maybe the ball game.

Over the last three years, the OCC has argued and, in fact, litigated that competition is the best route to achieve the goals that this community seems to want to achieve, and Economics 101 teaches us that competition should drive prices down toward cost. They will also drive us toward better service quality, and drive technological innovations.

As Jennifer Evans pointed out, we shouldn't have a race to the bottom. The legislature shouldn't be choosing a winner if they're really developing a competitive market. So why are there different standards for this service and all the services from the appearance of it.

If this committee decides that the level of service that AT&T is interested in delivering is good enough for its customers, then why isn't it good enough for the cable companies?

Really all the OCC is asking for is a level playing field. Why not let the market, the consumers choose a winner with their dollars? If it's not competitive, then what are we looking at? You're setting up a winner, and in my written testimony I have an example of that which I recommend you look at.

Really all you need is a one-line bill. It should just basically say that all video should be regulated as to all providers regardless of technology or brand name by high, medium, or low regulation. That's the policy called for this committee is what level of regulation are you interested in imposing.

But whatever it is, it should be equal for all providers. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Bill. And then like you said, that's the one thing that really troubles me is this issue of technology. If by doing something to that nature we seek to impose on the company something which is technologically infeasible, are we subverting the purpose that we established initially for bringing competition to the state in the first place?

And admittedly, you know, one would hope that would be the kind of issue that one could address prior to passing legislation. Unfortunately, it's very difficult with the new technology to establish conclusively prospectively whether it's got the level of stuff that you're used to.

BILL VALLEE: May I address that?

REP. FONTANA: Absolutely.

BILL VALLEE: Thank you. I certainly agree. Legislation, regulation, all sorts of impositions by government are hardly likely to keep up with technology. It's quite [inaudible].

The issue is why then does this bill, in particular, seek to lock in the cable companies in a certain regime and not the telephone company? That's the part that's mystified me for almost three years on this. When it started at the DPUC and both Chairs will be quite well aware of how that rolled out. There is no reason to treat them differently--

REP. FONTANA: Bill, if I could just jump in. The difficulty as I see it is that the AT&T technology still would allow access to all users to the entire range of public access contact, albeit via a time-consuming drop down menu on one particular channel.

My concern, and the particular section you may be referring to, is that if we allow existing cable companies using their existing technology, to reduce the number of channels for public access, there will not be access to the full range of public access content via the existing technology to all users.

So that--

BILL VALLEE: That doesn't make sense. I disagree that it makes sense to say that--

REP. FONTANA: Well, you say I don't make any sense. Let me just repeat. Cable TV is using technology that was developed in the 60s and 70s probably and refined during the 1980s. They provide a specific channel to each channel of content that the public access system offers, and they do it in basic or expanded basic so everybody has access to it, right?

AT&T seeks to offer those channels of content via one channel of their system. The concern that I have, and that prompted this, was a comment made to somebody that I trust implicitly that a particular cable company was contemplating reducing the number of channels the cable companies bill. The number of channels for public access content.

Under their existing system, using their existing technology, in that case there would be an actual reduction in public access content available to all subscribers. That's the concern.

If Comcast in my area or Cablevision, or what have you, were to offer tomorrow, a drop down menu making all content available on one channel of their existing system, that'll be one kind of discussion.

The discussion we're having right now, though, is unfortunately an apples to oranges comparison where AT&T has one type of technology, and the cable companies have another type of technology, and whether I like or dislike the manner in which AT&T would seek to offer the complete range of public access content to subscribers, the fact is they nevertheless would seek to offer that complete range of content.

The section you're going to be referring to here seeks to ensure that cable companies do not diminish the amount of public access content available to their subscribers as a result of AT&T'S technological difference.

So have I made myself clear as to why that section is there?

BILL VALLEE: You have. May I respond? I still don't agree. And the reason is that you're attempting to regulate by technology. You're basically saying, well AT&T is restricted by the deficiencies of its technology, and we have the cable people who can provide it and isn't that nice, because they have coaxial cable, and they have all this capacity and all that good technological stuff, so let's hamstring them economically.

Because if you say regulation, when I hear the word regulation, I hear money, expense. It's a cost to one party that you're not imposing on the other. That's why I call it an unlevel playing field. I don't think this committee should be regulating by technology. You're basically saying, well they have to do it this way, so we'll give them a break. They can provide it, and they have been providing it for 20, 30 years and isn't that nice, and everybody's happy about it in this room. But that's not good enough.

If you're really going to make a competitive market, this committee believes that competition does drive prices down to cost and service, quality, and technological, and innovations, and that's terrific, then why regulate it by choosing a winner or a loser or imposing regulations on one party, regulations being expenses, that you don't impose on the other?

The only thing, I'm not suggesting to the committee that I know which level of regulation should be, that's your policy decision. But I am advocating that you do it equally. There's no reason to say the cable companies won't do it if it's a truly competitive market, Representative Fontana, then the cable companies would be very foolish to back off the three PEG channels. Why would they do that when they'd have a clear advantage.

I have gone to the CT-N website and seen this demonstration, and it is unacceptable in the words of the West Hartford folks.

REP. FONTANA: I have grappled myself, though, with the issue of whether or not it makes sense for the cable companies to use as a competitive advantage, the ability to provide public access content in the manner they do over AT&T.

I can tell you that in the last couple of days, I've had more complaints about why it is my cable company isn't offering ESPN-U so that people can watch the Women's Big East Basketball Championships than I've gotten in my entire 12 years of service as to why my cable company is or is not supporting public access to the level that we would like.

So I think, ideally you're right. In practice, I could very easily see cable companies seeking to take away those channels of public access to provide ESPN-U and CS-TV and having less than we have now. And I take your point. So thank you. Senator Fonfara has questions.

SEN. FONFARA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll be very brief, but I'm listening to your testimony. You're talking about this, why should we pick a winner. I don't think we've picked a winner at all, number one, and number two, there's been comments made about race to the bottom.

It seems to me that what we're really talking about here is requiring any entrant that's using some regulated semi-regulated technology, because it's on the public right of way, that we ought to require them to maintain a certain type of technology.

The race to the bottom, in my opinion, is by saying you must keep technology at this level. You cannot advance technology to another level, because we want to ensure that the things that we've received under the old technology--what if the cable companies, and I'm betting in our time here we will see this, the cable systems abandoning the technology they have today and moving to another technology.

Let's say that technology is similar to what AT&T is providing. What do we do then? Say no, you cannot move in that direction? They're private companies. Do you require them to stay with this technology that is now 30, 40, 50 years old in some states in order so that we can enjoy a service that we've become accustomed to, and many of us in this building anyway, really value?

I happen to represent a city that 50, 60 years ago or longer was an economic engine until technology changed, and people no longer bought typewriters. What should we do? Say no, you can't buy a computer until these guys start building computers? I mean, you know, I think history is replete with examples of where technology moved, and yes, we want to hold onto things, and maybe we can for a while longer, but I think we have to ask these questions before we're ready to advance through public policy an impact that we may or may not be able to truly have the effect we're seeking.

BILL VALLEE: I agree with you completely, Senator Fonfara, and therefore, I would suggest that you delete section 5, which requires the cable companies to maintain the status quo number of PEG channels.

There's no reason on earth to require them to do something that the telephone company isn't doing.

That's a perfect example. I thank you. I also would like to point out that with regard to, I would like to remind the committee that two or three years ago, CT-N was here and the committee was most vociferous in its demands that CT-N be carried as a channel, because it was somehow perceived as more important.

And I agree it is more important. I think the public policy that this committee had stated at that time, remains quite valid. And I would point out that I think that CT-N may have mentioned that C-SPAN is carried on AT&T's network as a separate channel. There's no reason why on earth they couldn't do it. It is an economic thing, and again I think that's choosing a winner. I apologize for saying that again.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you. Other questions for Bill from Members of the Committee? None. Thank you, Bill.

BILL VALLEE: Thank you very much.

REP. FONTANA: Dennis Buckley to be followed by Stephen Mindera.

DENNIS BUCKLEY: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, honorable Members of the Committee. My name is Attorney Dennis Buckley, 1062 Meriden Road, City of Waterbury.

I am a legal counsel for the designated community access provider and Comcast Waterbury franchise, which is Skye Cable 13, Inc.

Some quick observations with respect to Raised House Bill 5814, several of the points that I would have chosen to make have already been made, and I won't repeat them just for the sake of their coming from my lips as opposed to other persons.

I do appreciate the Chair's clarification as offered earlier as to the intent of Section 8 as it appears on pages and 11 and 12 or 14 of the bill, and I take it specifically subject to correction that the language which appears at lines 348 to 355 is intended to remove any ambiguity as to, we all know it to be at the present at least, AT&T.

Others may qualify for the language, but that at the moment AT&T would assume all costs for connectivity as that has previously been identified. And we've had some initial conversations with AT&T. Nothing has been finalized. They obviously were describing and reacting to the law as it presently exists as a result of 07-253, the Public Act of last session.

And several cost factors were being explained to the community access provider with respect to that in coders, routers, etc. There seems to be at least three individual areas that I would ask be considered for the inclusion within this cost assumption by AT&T.

The first is what I will loosely identify as being the equipment package, what's necessary physically to make the connection. Secondly there seems to be what I understand to be an access fee or router fee being able to send the signal.

The third may also be, and we really are awaiting a response on this for identification, so I raise it without knowing whether I'm accurate in my understanding. The third may be a cost that's attributable to the identification for the listing of the channel within their menu for the drop down as it has been referred to.

Those would be three distinct avenues that may generate costs, and there, of course, could be subsets within each of those individual channels to borrow the term, that they drive those costs. What's the level of equipment that has to be purchased, etc.

There's one other factor with respect to this, and I'm certainly not going to go back to the 1960s and the red line case to talk about where access came from, but my recollection of it, having been involved for years, and I'll be very brief on this, is that there was the desire to ensure two things. That it was the functional equivalent of the public's milk box for being able to speak to one another through cable franchises, and [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 1B to Tape 2A.]

--signal, which was the terminology, of course, of the 60s and 70s, that there was not to be a degradation issue. Access was to be of the same quality.

In fact one of the determining factors that's reviewed by the DPUC is the quality of access programming, and that doesn't just mean content, in fact it's not supposed to address content on editorial aspects, but the technical components for the medium of conveying a message of communication. Whether that is occurring on the PE end or the G.

And I would very much urge the committee therefore, within the limits of its jurisdiction and understanding the limits of technology to do the best you can to keep a level playing field with respect to the medium for the delivery of the message as opposed to whether it's AT&T or the classic cable provider.

And with the permission of the Chair, if I could just raise one point that is not presently within your bill, but I would submit for your consideration, as a possible additor to your bill.

To the degree that elements of this address 07253, I respectfully ask that you take a look at, and I will supply subsequently, I didn't have a chance to do written testimony, a return to what is in the 2008 supplement section 16-331 cc, which frankly is the investment account that was created by Public Act 07253, split into two halves 50-50.

Class A for the competition of application. If there's a pending DPUC docket number to fill in the blanks, so to speak, affords to my reading and understanding educational interest, the opportunity to be a competing applicant for one 50% of that fund, and then it is the exclusive applicant with respect to the remaining 50% involving matters of educational technology.

I don't understand truthfully, why education gets two bites of the apple, and I secondly don't understand what was intended to cover educational technology in the nature of its relationship to the service that's being provided here.

If it goes toward the E-channel, fine. Is it to be a technology grant to put up a computer system in the grade school and the high school that has nothing to do with the E-channel. I don't really know, and the other thing on this is that in the first portion of the 50% class, and then I will stop, doesn't just involve either the cable company or the designated community access provider.

It also has language that makes reference to programmers. Are we allowing an individual access user to make an application and to draw down money, to buy what, a portable camera that will be his or hers, and not available for use by other persons within the franchise area?

I can't seriously think that that was the intent, but the simple language of the law would arguably offer at least conceptually making that type of argument and that of application.

So if permissible, please expand the reconsideration within this bill to revisit that particular account, and perhaps offer better instructional guidance both to the DPUC as well as active members within the community to understand what was intended. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Very good, Dennis. Thank you. You've given us a lot to think about, and I appreciate that, as we will try to look at those sections of last year's law. Questions for Mr. Buckley from Members of the Committee? Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Buckley, quickly in your opening statement, you said you represent Skye Cable?

DENNIS BUCKLEY: That is correct.

REP. FAWCETT: I'm sorry, I missed, could you share with me the towns that Skye Cable serves?

DENNIS BUCKLEY: Sure. We're the designated community access provider of the Comcast Waterbury franchise, which includes Waterbury, Connecticut, Middlebury, Connecticut, Prospect, Plymouth, Terryville, and what am I forgetting, Stephen? Oh, a small portion of Naugatuck, the Flatsville section. In the way in which it comes together in Waterbury, there's five communities that are being served.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. And I'm just interested in town-specific programming today, and wondering if you know offhand of those five towns that Skye Cable serves, which ones of them have access to town-specific programming, or to E and G channels.

DENNIS BUCKLEY: Okay, and I won't be long, and I hope not to confuse it. If by town-specific you mean a dedicated channel on the E or the G which is exclusive, let me just use Waterbury. Waterbury programming on either E or G can only be viewed within Waterbury, and nowhere else. That isn't the way in which we are wired.

We have caused, when Skye was given this designation ten years ago, the installation of what is referred to very often as narrow casting capability. As the towns come online and signal that they desire to access the E or the G channel, we have the ability to communicate programming to Waterbury, while remaining other programming to be available in Wolcott or Middlebury--

REP. FAWCETT: You maintain, Skye Cable has that technology?

DENNIS BUCKLEY: That is correct.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay, and you do use that technology if the towns request so.

DENNIS BUCKLEY: That's correct.

REP. FAWCETT: I think that answers my question. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you. Other questions for Mr. Buckley? Seeing none. Thank you.

DENNIS BUCKLEY: Thank you, sir.

REP. FONTANA: And please feel free to forward to us that other content that you suggested.

DENNIS BUCKLEY: I shall. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Stephen Mindera followed by Coralee Reiss.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: (Whispering.) Oh, Coralee, I don't know if she's here.

REP. FONTANA: Well, okay then. We'll skip her. Welcome.

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: Mr. Chairman and Honorable members of the Energy and Technology Committee, my name is Stephen Mindera, president and founder of Skye Cable 13. We're a 501C3 entity, and we've been a community access provider since April 15, 1998. I want to thank you today for this time you're allowing me to speak on the Raised House Bill 5814. I also want to thank Tom Buckley and Mary Pat Healey from AT&T who have been out to our station on two occasions now. Once to talk to all the school access providers in the different school systems in the five towns we represent, and also they spoke at our executive board meeting.

At the present time, Skye's configuration with the narrow casting, we would need 11 encoders at a cost, this is the quote I got yesterday of $5,000 each. It will be a total of about $55,000, and also a transport fee of $700 per 11 channels that we would use, which would be another $7,700.

And I should have passed these figures by my wife. She has been in banking for 30 years, but I come out to about $62,700. This is something that we don't have, and it would take us about five years at the present subscriber rates that we're getting to really take and be able to afford this.

Now this is something that I think would be great for our franchise area, with AT&T coming online with U-verse. I think it would be a plus for us, and that's why I started talking to them early on.

But I am thoroughly supporting Section 8 of the Raised House Bill 5814, because otherwise, there would be no way we could take and support meaningful community access in our area.

When we received our permit 10 years ago, Paul Giguere came to us for CT-N, and he says you want to be a pilot program, and we said, yes. And they gave that, hooked everything up for us for nothing. At that time, we were dealing with Marcus. Marcus hooked everything up for us for nothing.

Then we went to Telemedia/Adelphia, and now Comcast. And with their support, we're able to keep meaningful community access available for the communities. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Stephen, thank you very much. Any questions for Mr. Mindera from Members of the Committee? That is the intention of Section 8. It may not say it now, but trust me, it will say it on Tuesday. I thank you very much for your testimony, and trust me, I've heard the same from many people.

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: Thank you. Okay.

REP. FONTANA: Oh, Mr. Mindera, if you could come back, because Representative Fawcett's got a question for you.

REP. FAWCETT: Sorry. I have a question about Skye Cable and how you operate, and I'm wondering do you operate under the same format where you take in PEG provider fees from your resident cable bill that was provided for you--

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: Yes. Comcast gives us a monthly bill per subscribers, and this is what we use to pay the salaries, keep up the equipment, keep up the facility, buy new studio mikes, whatever is needed.

REP. FAWCETT: And do you have an area Cable Advisory Council that helps to also distribute your funds to your towns?

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: We have the Greater Waterbury Cable Council which I'm a member of. They don't distribute any funds. They're just there to kind of give oversight.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. So how do you distribute the funds to your area towns to assist them in developing programming, or do you not.

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: We don't, no.

REP. FAWCETT: At all?

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: No.

REP. FAWCETT: And how then are they assisted in developing programming? You develop all the programming for the towns?

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: For example, Wolcott when they have a council meeting, they'll call us and say we're going to be going live in five minutes. We'll switch over for Wolcott. It'll be directly to Wolcott.

REP. FAWCETT: Because their rooms have a direct link.

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: Right, right. Because we can narrow cast to our video commander so that the other towns will see what they, you know, what their programming is in their towns, where Wolcott will have their meeting going on. Same thing with Waterbury. It will be automatic meetings. It will be sending it right back to Waterbury, they'll see the meetings, and if CT-N is live, we'll keep CT-N on so that people could see that in the other four towns.

REP. FAWCETT: Excellent. Thank you.

STEPHEN MINDERA, JR.: You're welcome.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative and thank you Mr. Mindera, again. And let me take this opportunity to thank CT-N. I noticed Senator [inaudible] was here earlier, and I didn't thank him. I'd like to than CT-N for covering this public hearing, and with that, is Coralee Reiss here.

REP. FAWCETT: I think she was unable to make it due to a prior commitment.

REP. FONTANA: Very good, Representative. We will then skip over Ms. Reiss. Is Pua Ford here? To be followed by Sol Silverstein if he's here.

PUA FORD: Good morning. Let's see. My name is Pua Ford. I live in Bethany where I do pubic access. I work in the town of Woodbridge on government access television.

Basically, I support everything Paul Giguere said about CT-N. I share the concerns of Jennifer Evans and Carol Young-Kleinfeld about community access in general, and I'm relieved to hear that there is language about fees for interconnection with the U-verse, because I couldn't find it before. I'm sorry, I find this language very hard to read.

So let's skip to the internecine warfare in Section 1, and basically, I thought it was pretty funny when I read it, but we had an opportunity to look at this with more general principles about the prerogatives of towns to choose town-specific programming if they have the technology available.

And what I really want to emphasize is that respect for local standards and local culture is at the foundation of community access. Recognition that towns and schools are just as much customers of community access as viewers is basic. And the customer is always right. These ideas are obvious, I think even self-evident.

And I wrote a lot more. You can read it if you like. The other thing I'd like to address is what Representative Drew said about keeping town-specific government channels from being too politicized.

In Woodbridge I have an oversight commission bipartisan five members that looks at what I do. For financial oversight our town director of finances has received an award for his financial reporting from the government financial officers association for several years running.

I have policies I have to follow regarding purchases over $2,000. We can make that available. I think most towns have the same thing. Thank you very much. Any questions?

REP. FONTANA: Ms. Ford, thank you. Are there specific changes to Section 1 or any other section of the bill that you were requesting, or was it more that your testimony was encouraging us to consider cultural and town or educational consumers of public access? I was trying to get a handle on your testimony.

PUA FORD: Okay. I think what I want to say is targeting one entity shouldn't be necessary if everybody recognizes that towns should have the choice for town-specific programming if the technology is available. Is that good?

REP. FONTANA: I think so, and if not, we may have a question from Representative Fawcett. See, I read her mind. Maybe she'll illuminate me. Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Pua, thank you very much for coming up today. It's nice to meet you. Yes, I have a question about town-specific, and if I understand correctly, the town of Woodbridge actually has provided town-specific programming for more than a decade.

PUA FORD: I think since 2002.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay, close. And really had already negotiated that town-specific programming into their agreement when the third party provider joined in.

And I have heard stories from our region about the freedom that you have enjoyed to provide town-specific programming has been threatened and starting to be chipped away or reduced.

And have you seen that you are losing more hours? Did you used to have more hours of town-specific programming and now you have less hours available to you?

PUA FORD: That's true, but that's part of an agreement that we did make with Sound View after four hours and 45 minutes of negotiation. We used to do 24-7, now we have provided 48 hours a week as a window for Sound View to provide regional programming.

And to be truthful, I have heard no complaints from any viewers, but I haven't heard any comments either way.

REP. FAWCETT: But this agreement was based on, what was the agreement? Just, why would you give up hours that you already had.

PUA FORD: Money.

REP. FAWCETT: Yeah. So the PEG provider money that your residents in Woodbridge pay--

PUA FORD: Have been paying for over a decade.

REP. FAWCETT: Before you had this agreement to give up hours of town-specific programming, how much money did you get of the PEG provider money?

PUA FORD: Oh, none.

REP. FAWCETT: But under the agreement, if you agreed to give up town-specific programming, did you then get some of the money?

PUA FORD: Yes, we did.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you very much. Thanks again for coming today.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you. Any other questions for Ms. Ford? Seeing none. Thank you very much. Sol Silverstein. He's here? Very good. Followed by Ron Davis.

Actually, Sol, I'll let you proceed, and because the Attorney General has come, as long as Ron's okay with it, I'm going to let the Attorney General follow you Mr. Silverstein.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. My name is Sol Silverstein. I'm a resident of Orange and the chairman of the Orange Government Access Television Committee or OGAT.

We are the governing body for the Orange Government Access Television channel, and we support House Bill 5814, especially Section 1 concerning town-specific programming.

As you may be aware, in Area Two, we have been battling a totally unsympathetic DPUC and a third party community access provider, Sound View Community Media to retain our town-specific cablecast status.

We have been a 24/7 town-specific station longer than Sound View has been in business. It is a status we have successfully grown and used to make local government more accessible and more understandable to the residents of Orange and to maintain transparency in town government.

OGAT is entirely funded by the taxpayers of Orange. Since its beginning in 1998, the Town of Orange has appropriated over $400,000 to OGAT. We have never needed nor requested funds or help from Sound View Community Media. In fact, we have helped our neighboring communities in Area Two come up to speed on government access programming when Sound View failed to do so.

Section 1 of the bill as well as several other sections are vital to our ability to continue to provide this service to our community. The continuation of OGAT as a town-specific entity is demanded by our viewers. I say this with great certainty as a result of the petition letter we circulated supporting the town-specific position.

Our goal was to get 1,000 letters signed. We easily exceeded this in two days when we got 1200 letters, and we stopped collecting them. We also conducted a survey of our viewers and learned that 96% of the respondents do not want to see regional programming on OGAT. Ninety-eight percent get their information about town government and related events from OGAT.

In spite of the 1200 petitions, testimony in favor of maintaining our town-specific status by town officials, our legislators, residents, the Attorney General's office, the Office of Consumer Counsel, and the DPUC's own needs assessor, the DPUC is requiring that we negotiate away our town-specific rights.

It is now up to you, our legislators, to correct this situation. Please act favorably on the town-specific aspects of House Bill 5814. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Sol, thank you very much. And let me just say that we may be getting to this point shortly, but I've been hearing a lot of very distressing reports out of how your public access has been offered and your, not OGAT, the regional programming, and as I understand it, you said that you do not receive any funding at all.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: No.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. Even though funding is collected from your cable TV subscribers for public access, you do not receive it at all.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: That's correct.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. That's a problem. That's a big problem. I'm a lucky guy. I have three town-specific channels in North Haven. I don't know, what do people in Orange who have a not governmental contact, what do they do? Like if your high school tapes a basketball game or, you know, you've got Cooking With Sol, I mean, where do those guys go for their programming?

SOL SILVERSTEIN: If they want to provide us content, and if government-related, we will broadcast it. But they're on their own nickel if they want, you know, to--

REP. FONTANA: So if it doesn't relate to government, then they can't put it on OGAT, they've got to go elsewhere.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: They have to go to public access, and basically request time from Sound View.

REP. FONTANA: I see. Thank you, Sol. Questions. Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you. Hi, Sol, nice to meet you. Thank you very much for coming up today. Clearly, the Town of Orange, I have heard, not just through your testimony, but from many people, has provided for years just top quality programming when it comes to town-specific, and it sounds very exciting.

I have to tell you in Fairfield I have never experienced that type of programming, and looking forward to it someday. So maybe you can give us some guidance when we come online.

And Representative Fontana, I think, pretty clearly asked one of my points. It was that you don't have access to PEG provider money yet the residents in your district pay that fee, a tax, we could call it, but again, you don't have access to it.

I'm wondering about the Cable Advisory Council in the region. Do you have members that serve on that council?

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Yes. In fact, Ron Davis, our, the next speaker after the Attorney General, is the chairman of that council. He is from Orange. In fact, he's our coordinator. He runs our day-to-day operations of our station, and my wife is also a member of that council, by the way.

Yes, and they are very supportive of our town-specific position. And they're upset that we might have to give it up. In fact, when we first went on the air, the Chairman of that council came and asked me, how are you doing this so quickly. I was so surprised that we got up and running within a few months of basically starting our operation.

So as you said, we've been fairly active technologically. Also, we were probably one of the first stations in, certainly in our area, to be using DVD technology. And every year, we're looking at the leading edge to try to improve what we do.

REP. FAWCETT: And you said you would be sad if you have to give it up. Why would you have to give it up?

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Well our customers don't want it. They're really not too thrilled maybe about watching a sewer commission in Bridgeport. They want to see what's happening in the Town of Orange. You know, we're a town of 13,000 people. There's about 4600 homes wired for cable. And like I said, we did a survey, 96% said we want to maintain town-specific.

And we did a lot of things in that survey. We asked, do you think we show too many re-runs, because one of the issues the DPUC used to try and justify taking it away from us is we might be showing too many re-runs.

Well, the response to the survey was, no, we don't show too many re-runs. We show just the right number. And the reason for that is the way people watch government access is they don't necessarily watch a show from beginning to end. They come home from work, they'll turn on the TV, they'll catch a few minutes, they say this is interesting, I got to go cook dinner.

They'll come back later. It might be on again, or it might, you know, we always have a little throw to say when the program will repeat. So basically, our viewers are accustomed to the way we operate. They like the way we operate. They do not want to see a change in that operation.

REP. FAWCETT: And I'm sorry, just clarifying, you said that you don't want to see the DPUC take it away from you. Is that threat imminent?

SOL SILVERSTEIN: They have ordered us to negotiate away our town-specific rights and give Sound View some time for regional programming. Now in Milford that turned out to be a 50/50 split, in Woodbridge, apparently it turned out to be 70% for the town and 30% for Sound View.

In Orange which has more programming than those two stations combined, we can't reach an agreement.

REP. FAWCETT: And I have done a lot of research on this issue, but I didn't know that piece of it, so thank you. Have you been offered a deal in relation to this access to the PEG provider money from the third party provider? Have you been offered money, we had someone before you testify that Woodbridge gave up some of their access to town-specific programming willingly, because the money was an issue, and they needed the money to sustain their operation, so they had to make that compromise.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: The DPUC, when it renewed the franchise in the end of 2006, ordered that Sound View set aside $60,000 total for the government and educational access stations, and I think Milford gave up their 50% for $10,000, and I think that's what Woodbridge gave up their 30% for.

REP. FAWCETT: Yes. I think you're right.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: And, we have a $65,000 a year budget. The $10,000, we don't really want it if we have to give up hours, so, I guess that we have, since 1998, probably spent over $400,000 of our taxpayers money to develop this technology, this broadcast capability.

REP. FAWCETT: And you're committed to doing that, going forward.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Oh, yes. And somebody earlier had made some comment about politics. This entity, OGAT, is supported by people of every political persuasion in town. It's amazing when we had the public hearing, the DPUC came to Milford, we went to Milford. All or elected officials, regardless of party, spoke in favor of it. It's totally apolitical. It's amazing. And our committee makes sure it stays that way.

REP. FAWCETT: That's great. I can't, again, thank you enough for sharing your information today. One last question. On the Cable Advisory Council, would you be supportive of an idea that empowered, worked to empower the Area Two Cable Advisory Council by giving them an annual grant similar to what's done in Area Nine where you had $60,000 a year at the council to distribute to the area towns? Is that something that the council is prepared to or would be able to easily implement, spending that money?

SOL SILVERSTEIN: I can't speak for the council, maybe Ron Davis can, but from my point of view, it sounds like a way to go. Without knowing all the details.

REP. FAWCETT: It does indeed. Thank you.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you Representative Fawcett, and are there other questions for Sol from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, we just thank you again, and let you know that this troubles me greatly, and I intend to solve this problem this year one way or another.

SOL SILVERSTEIN: Thank you very much for your support.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Mr. Silverstein. Now the Attorney General followed by Mr. Ron Davis.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: Thank you Chairman Fontana and Members of the Committee. I want to begin by thanking you and your Cochairmen for your leadership and your vision in bringing before us a number of these very significant proposals, and I want to join you in saying that I am troubled by what I've just heard about Orange as a great fan and admirer of their programming.

I have seen personally the kind of issues that have been raised before you, and I commend and thank you for devoting your personal attention to that situation and to the four bills that I'm going to discuss with you today, and each is important in its own way.

Let me begin with the CT-N Bill, which I feel is very important for--

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Attorney General let me just state for the record so everyone is clear. Traditionally, we've taken them in bill order by number, but because of your, we know that you're busy working for us, we're going to allow, we're going to focus on that, and then move on to the other three that you wish to testify on, so that way we can accommodate your testimony.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: Okay, and I'd be happy, I've submitted testimony, if you want to confine my remarks to the one that you're, I think it's House Bill 5814. Is that the one that you're taking first?

REP. FONTANA: Well that actually was more to my colleagues. I want to limit our questioning of you if we can to 5814. In terms of offering your testimony, I would welcome your testimony on all the bills.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: Great. Thank you. On 5814, you know, I have to confess to a certain sense or irony. As you may recall, as I'm sure you do recall, we had a little difference of opinion with AT&T on issues relating to Regulatory Authority and Federal State Preemption issues and so forth on so on, and in the course of that debate, one of the issues I raised was community access.

And I was told repeatedly when I raised this issue that the quality of community access television, CT-N, all of these issues would be absolutely the same or better than it is right now. And in fact, AT&T very much respected the will of the legislature to assure that the quality of community access and CT-N would be maintained.

I was, in effect, told that raising the issue itself was delusional and irresponsible.

REP. FONTANA: I wasn't the one who told you that, was I?

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: No.

REP. FONTANA: Good. Whew.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: If you had said it to me, I would have taken it much more seriously than I did. But I began to wonder, you know, whether in fact it was an issue, and now unfortunately, and I have to say, very unfortunately, I told you so. Not in a sort of personal way I told you so, but just in the sense that regretfully there is a need for the legislature to clarify its intent.

And I want to make clear that my view is the legislature is clarifying its intent, because its intent all along has been, as I quote, I believe it's yourself, on the floor of the House of Representatives, quote, we ensure that public access continues to thrive by requiring certified competitive video providers to carry all existing public access programming in every community, end of quote, during the debate on Public Act 07253.

So I'm not here to make a long speech or offer extensive testimony. The details are in my written submission, but essentially I think that we need to assure that the quality for CT-N and other community access is at least as good as any other station and any other programming, because we all know from consumer habits that there's a tendency to go through, to surf, and that people will be discouraged from watching these programs if they are of lesser quality.

Just briefly on the other bills, I want to most important, offer my assistance, views, insight on House Bill 5819, AN ACT CONCERNING ENERGY RELIEF AND ASSISTANCE, which would establish a Connecticut Electric Authority concept I first proposed and urged during the last session of the General Assembly.

I'd be happy to work on the details with you. I'm here to support it. I commend you for raising it. I've suggested in my testimony some specific measures to improve it and enhance it, and I would be delighted to talk with you either in further hearings or in other forums or meetings about the details of that bill.

And the same is true of House Bill 5783, AN ACT CONCERNING ELECTRICITY MARKET INCENTIVE REBATES. I understand there have been some legal issues raised about this bill. As you know, it is very similar to the windfall profits rebate, as I called it, that I proposed and urged during the last session of the General Assembly. I believe it is well merited. Again, I'm here to support it. I'd be happy to work on the details with you.

And finally on the energy, AN ACT CONCERNING RESOURCE RECOVERY FACILITIES, House Bill 5817. Profoundly important for the future of trash-to-energy and resource recovery facilities in the State of Connecticut. I can't emphasize how important this measure is, and I would be happy to talk to you about the details. I'm here to support it.

These plants were built with our dollars. The Resource Recovery Facilities were constructed with taxpayer money. We ought to act now to prevent these facilities from being used by private corporations to create a monopolistic stranglehold that has towns and cities and consumers at their mercy, and enable them to charge huge windfall profits at public expense.

So thank you very much Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Attorney General, thank you very much, and you know, we appreciate your leadership on behalf of community access and other issues. Having just stated a rule, we're now going to amend it slightly.

There may be Members of the Committee who would like to ask you questions on the record that either you or your staff could answer either later in the day when we get to those bills, or in writing subsequently.

So if you'd allow me to, I would like to allow people on the committee to ask questions on the record, but would ask that you not answer as much as that seems odd, because of the interest of trying to proceed in our fashion.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: As long as they're not questions about my personal life, I'd be happy to operate under those ground rules.

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Attorney General I certainly hope not. With that, I understand Representative Nardello has a question that she would like to ask you on the record, and there may be others.

REP. NARDELLO: Mr. Attorney General I hope, I realize your schedule is busy, but I hope that you will make someone available for the rest of the afternoon to possibly answer questions from your office since we are taking up some of the most important issues of our committee today.

But the question that I'm just going to state, for the record, that again you're not to answer. There is testimony sitting on my desk, I know this is crazy, sitting on my desk about a city market rebate incentive and the testimony says that it's actually illegal, and it's not possible for us to impose this. All I need to know, and again, is whether or not you agree that is illegal and not possible for us to impose. That's it.

REP. FONTANA: Very good. Thank you. That was not too painful. Mr. General thank you again for coming, and thank you for your offer of help to this committee on a number of bills facing us. As you know, we have a very long schedule today, and doubtless you'll be able to turn us on as you get into bed this evening if you choose to onto CT-N, and we'll still be here.

So I thank you very much for your offer to help this committee, and we'll seek to do whatever we can to work with you on language on these issues going forward.

ATTY. GEN. BLUMENTHAL: Great. And I will try to come back for the other bills and provide answers to Representative Nardello's question and others. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Good. Thank you very much for your leadership. Ron Davis, to be followed by Gerard Speno.

RON DAVIS: Good morning.

REP. FONTANA: Welcome.

RON DAVIS: That's a hard act to follow, the Attorney General. Well, back to 5814, members of the Energy and Technology Committee, my name is Ron Davis. I'm Chairman of the Cable Advisory Council for Cablevision Area Two representing Bridgeport, Stratford, Fairfield, Milford, Orange, and Woodbridge. Also I am coordinator for Orange Government Access Television, best known at OGAT.

I'm here today to speak for the Area Two Advisory Council, nearly legendary for its stance on town-specific government and educational cable television.

This council applauds your efforts to champion town-specific access, but only reluctantly supports your committee's decision on House Bill 5814 to provide towns with one exclusive channel for town-specific programming.

Speaking only as the council Chairman, I note that a simpler and far more effective manner of guaranteeing town-specific government and educational channels to towns desiring to use them would be to provide the towns with free choice that's been brought up a lot today.

This can readily be accomplished by nullifying Section 1.5 of the Cablevision Sound View Interconnection agreement which gives Sound View the ability to refuse choice of town-specific programming over the Sound View preferred model of Area Wide programming.

By eliminating the Section 1.5 control, Sound View may continue to serve area wide programming to towns with little or no programming or possibly no interest to do so. While left alone, the vital and active towns like Milford, Woodbridge, and Orange can and do produce as many as 230 local meetings and events annually.

We need to protect their rights to have the unfettered choice to provide town-specific local G and E productions to their citizens.

I see many aspects of this bill and its recommended changes that reflect the energy and intelligent research expended by your committee in order to bring these complicated issues to this point.

Probably owing to the complexities of merging and emerging technologies, I see a number of areas which I believe to be unbalanced, if not even unfair.

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Davis, please conclude.

RON DAVIS: Yes. I was going to cite a few, but obviously they've been cited. So as a result, the Area Two council respectfully requests that your committee consider a more inclusive and more level playing field for the provision of community access television and for the mutual benefit of all producers, providers, and the viewing public. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Mr. Davis. And you raised a good point. It's tough to come up with a one size fits all solution, but we're trying to create a framework that allows towns to get the kind of solution that works best for them.

RON DAVIS: I get that feeling today. I feel a little different as I hear all the other questions and comments.

REP. FONTANA: Good. So how to create that sort of flexible framework or cloth or fabric is the challenge. So we're trying to figure out the best way to do that. So what you've seen in the bill are some ideas that we came up with. Hopefully the testimony you've given us and some others will help us to better craft that flexible framework for you.

RON DAVIS: While it would be more flexible that way, it is in fact the way that all of us assumed it was for the first eight or nine years of the franchise that included Sound View.

When the franchise time came and Sound View raised their feathers I should say, and let the world know that they have control of access, which they did not do through that eight years, suddenly they have to prove their existence is the way we saw it. And we're all feeling the pinch of that.

Orange as an example was, which I am the coordinator of, has been in operation for, I've been running it for ten years or better now, and we never saw Sound View during that period at all. And now we're being told by the DPUC that we have to negotiate with Sound View, and we're not looking forward to that.

REP. FONTANA: I don't blame you.

RON DAVIS: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Are there questions for Mr. Davis. Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Davis, very nice to meet you. Thank you very much for coming today. Clearly you have been involved in this issue for a very long time, and Orange in particular has, it appears from the testimony today and conversations that I've had with other people, the most advanced town-specific programming in our six-town region. Even just basing it on the number of hours of programming that you produce.

And yet you received none of the PEG provider money that viewer residents pay, and I know we've made this point before, but it seems counterintuitive to me that the one town in the region that actually is producing hours of education and government access television is not actually getting the money associated to it. That is more a statement than a question, and I will, I'm interested to know how you provide the town-specific programming in Orange from a technology standpoint.

And what I mean is, can you run through the nuts and bolts of how it works from the time a board of selectmen or board of finance meeting is filmed and the channels it goes through to be shot back to people's homes?

RON DAVIS: Yes, I can do that quickly. I might remind you I'm here for the council, but I am also the coordinator of Orange--

REP. FAWCETT: And I'm taking advantage of your two hats clearly.

RON DAVIS: Very quickly, the meetings are all shot in the main studio which is armed with cameras all around the room, much as this one is. There's a control board near the main meeting table, which is operated by the cameraman who has a portable, large portable camera similar to this one. Matter of fact it's one of them, who can operate the cameras around the wall, so if a person over here is speaking, he can bring that person to bear.

He's got a monitor which he can see this in. All this material is transferred from the mixer to the hard drive. We don't use tape. And the hard drive records the meeting. At the end of the meeting, the hard drive is reviewed and both ends are cleaned up, and a pre-developed title for the beginning and end of that particular meeting is inserted to it, a button is pressed, and the DVD pops out, and the meeting is ready to go onto the players. And the players have five discs in them, and it's a continuous thing. The oldest one comes off, the newest one goes on, and it just keeps rotating.

REP. FAWCETT: And then, I think what I'm interested in is then you, where do you shoot that show. You don't shoot directly to your residents in Orange. The way I understand it, you shoot it to Cablevision, and they shoot it back out. Their head end is in Norwalk?

RON DAVIS: At the same time as it's being shot and recorded for later playback, it is also being broadcast directly to Cablevision's head end in Norwalk. They redistribute it back to Orange on channel 79.

REP. FAWCETT: And so in the production of town-specific programming, you really are not required for your E and G channel in Orange to have any relationship with Sound View. Your relationship if anything is with Cablevision who provides the head end and your own people on the ground, but Sound View is not part of that production or even sending the--

RON DAVIS: That's not true. That's the way we played the game for ten years, however, as I said Sound View is now saying that we've had this on paper for a long time, and now we're going to enforce it. So yes, we are required by the DPUC at this time to negotiate with Sound View to give up some of our hours for them to put area-wide materials on.

REP. FAWCETT: Yes, and the area-wide materials would create a relationship between you and Sound View, but the way I understand it, when you are doing town-specific programming, you're not going through a Sound View facility, you're going through it directly.

That third party provider is taken out of the distribution of the programming. It goes directly through Sound View, I mean through Cablevision.

RON DAVIS: Right, well nothing really goes to the third party provider anyway, they just use a telephone, but--

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. And I, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate very much your mentioning Section 5 of the provider agreement. That's actually something that I had recognized as well and so your point is well taken. You clarified that, and I think that that is a recommendation we can use as we try to refine and clarify this language in the bill.

Certainly addressing getting consent to the towns so that they can access town-specific programming.

RON DAVIS: Again, the word is choice. If the town has the capability and the desire to do it, they should be able to do it. If the town does not have capability or the desire to do it, and there are some, then Sound View can certainly fill the bill there.

REP. FAWCETT: Absolutely. I agree. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

RON DAVIS: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative. Other questions for Mr. Davis from Members of the Committee? Seeing none. Thank you. Gerard Speno followed by Wyland Clift.

GERARD J. SPENO: Good morning. My name is Gerard Speno. I'm the Cable Advisory Council member from Fairfield in Area Two. And pretty much what I have written has bee discussed [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 2A to Tape 2B.]

--I simply want to address an issue here. Community access as an entity nationally, locally, has been in existence for 35 years. At this point in time, it could be considered an adult.

Certainly there are issues and concerns with local production whether or not it's appropriate or whatever, but it seems to me organizations like OGAT, Woodbridge, the other 900 community access channels throughout the country get by.

The function of the third party provider as far as I understand it is essentially a switching station, and in our particular case, it controls the funds that support local or not public access. That being government and educational.

Many communities don't want to participate in public access, the “public” part of community access, per concerns over litigation, etc.

I simply want to state that as far as I understand it, the cable concept is essentially a non-censored entity, and so the concerns that may limit the participation of a local community are not necessarily the end-all, be-all for presenting a particular level or type of access.

I do have a statement that you gentlemen and ladies have that addresses this along with some other basic concerns in the bill, and with that I end my testimony.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Mr. Speno. Sorry I mispronounced your name.

GERARD J. SPENO: That's okay. Everybody does.

REP. FONTANA: I should have known better, but thank you. Yes, clearly there's funding issues, there's production issues, there's programming issues, a lot of different issues. We're trying to do the best job we can to get a handle on all of them, and we thank you for helping us do that. So thank you for being here, and there may be some questions. Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: Hi, Gerry. How are you, and thank you Mr. Chairman. So I was hoping you could just elaborate a little bit on possibly sharing an example with the committee of a time when people in Fairfield, for example maybe requested that they desired town-specific programming, and what barriers have existed to bringing that town-specific programming specifically to Fairfield, and I know that's a long story. Many stories you could share with me, but maybe one or two examples of attempts to produce programming that have been thwarted.

GERARD J. SPENO: Well, I would say that in the town of Fairfield which has never had any kind of G or E production at all or many long and whatever stories. Recently, we formed the Fair TV Committee, and I had prior to that time started to collect and create content on a government access basis. The idea was that okay maybe when we finally get to air these pieces may be dated or whatever. But nonetheless, they were content, and my intention as a member of the committee was to get started.

The committee, which I have to admit I left, just can't seem to get started.

REP. FAWCETT: And would you say that one primary barrier is access to funds and equipment or funds to buy equipment.

GERARD J. SPENO: Well, no, I mean the First Selectman negotiated some funding, which people can't seem to figure out what kind of camera to buy or whatever, regardless of input on my part and others. But that's out there. They've made a fairly generous overture to our local historical society. However, you know, we're waiting on whatever particulars Sound View will employ there.

REP. FAWCETT: And you mentioned that there was a negotiation to get some funds. This is something that is a consistent them from Milford, Orange, Woodbridge that there's negotiation, and again I'd ask you to share what was negotiated.

GERARD J. SPENO: Well, my participation in the negotiations as a Cable Advisory Council member were cursory, I would say. I mean, I understand that through the DPUC agreement central negotiation is the territory of the municipality of the First Selectman.

So I wouldn't really know other than, you know, a request for a schedule, which is what I understand to be the procedure. You negotiate a schedule and then funding, and then you go to work. But we don't have a schedule. We have some money, and that's basically the situation.

REP. FAWCETT: I thank you very much, and I just again think it's interesting that the PEG provider money that we pay as residents of the Town of Fairfield, Milford, Orange, Woodbridge, money that we pay that is intended to be used to generate this programming is distributed to us only when negotiated deals are made, and there are requirements that have to be filled before we're allowed to have the money. There's a carrot-and-a-stick approach, and that was more what I was getting to, because that theme seems to be coming up as we hear from representatives from each town today.

GERARD J. SPENO: Well, if I may comment?

REP. FAWCETT: Sure.

GERARD J. SPENO: Networks, you know, commercial networks. They establish a schedule, they sell commercial time, they create specific zones of time that become, you know, prime time. There's really no difference in creating an effective public access entity like Orange has, because what they have is control over their schedule. And this is where the discussion of town-specific comes in.

When you have control over your schedule, you can, I mean you know, the money from Sound View is in Woodbridge or even in our community where we need that support is fine, but without the ability to control your schedule to a certain degree, you cannot develop a viewer base. You don't have a, say hey, this is on everyday at this time, and we'll repeat it, etc., etc.

Now granted in some of the negotiations the blocks have been set up where yes, you know, Milford's here, town-specific and then they get stuck into the regional aspect.

And you know, it shifts and starts, kind of works its way through. But quite honestly I want to be of the most effective, I would like to see the most effective access that we can possibly have. And since this is not a commercial entity we're talking about, and the evaluation of time is expressed simply in the use of it, not what is it, or I mean, you know, how much content do you have. It does no good to create content if you don't have a schedule, plus the ability to create viewership.

REP. FAWCETT: I couldn't agree more, and I thank you again very much for coming out today, and thank you Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: You're welcome, Representative. Any other questions for Mr. Speno? Thank you Mr. Speno.

GERARD J. SPENO: You're welcome.

REP. FONTANA: Wyland Clift, to be followed by Tom Castelot. Welcome. Please proceed.

WYLAND CLIFT: Yes, thank you and good morning Mr. Chairman. I'm Attorney Wyland Clift, and with me is Mr. Castelot, the president of Sound View Community Media. You may recognize us by the large targets that have been painted on our back. But we are here to first of all, it's difficult to know where to start.

There has been a tremendous amount of misinformation that has presented here, because Sections 1 and 2 of the proposed legislation, I think it presupposes that there is no town-specific dissemination to the town subscribers so that they can see local town programming. That is simply not the case.

There are large clocks of time devoted for town-specific dissemination in the towns of Orange, Milford, and Woodbridge. It is also the case that the three largest municipalities, Bridgeport, Stratford, and Fairfield presently do not desire to limit the subscribers in their towns to see only what is created within their towns. And the simple reason is that they don't have enough programming at this time. They would be seeing a blue screen.

Everyone has been saying, well how could the DPUC do this and come up with this decision. Well, the issue is the department found that none of the six municipalities presently have enough programming to warrant a 24/7 dedication of that channel so that only the programming that is produced within their towns is the only thing that is seen by those town subscribers.

Now as disturbing, and it's all in the formal, the final decision in Docket 050409. Now as disturbing as it has been to hear some of the things that have been said, the most disturbing aspect of this whole attack is, I think it's a direct attack on the DPUC's quasi-judicial role in hearing contested cases.

We had days of testimony and the Sound View--

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Clift, we'll allow you a few more minutes because of the two of you up here, but we will hold you to the four minutes.

WYLAND CLIFT: Okay. Thank you. Sound View certainly, you know, there have been days of testimony, reams of exhibits during this contested administrative proceeding. Sound View followed all the proper procedures, and when the DPUC decided, it assigned its alternative dispute resolution to come up to assist us in reaching agreements with three municipalities that did have town-specific issues that, in the past, have been 24/7.

We actually have met with these mediation sessions, and at this time, we have agreements with two out of those three municipalities that had those issues, the one holdout being Orange.

And we're just saying that at this 11^th hour to take this precipitous action is just, I don't understand how that makes any sense. And I do have written testimony, and I hope that you will review it and certainly my email is there, and if you want to question me on everything, I can back up everything that is said in our written testimony.

The one final comment I would make is that I am concerned about the provision of signing the local advisory boards to a role in mediating customer inquiries, and I have three reasons on pages four and five of my testimony that I hope you would look at and consider. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: All right thank you and we'll make sure that we've got copies distributed to the committee. I don't have it currently.

Doubtless we'll have some questions for you. I'd like to begin with a couple of them, and that is, as I understand it, no one is suggesting that no town-specific programming goes out over the three channels controlled by Sound View. As far as programming is concerned, it's the fact that there is unsatisfactory amount of it, unsatisfactory time slots for it, and unsatisfactory funding to support it.

And I mention that because we have had more complaints about Sound View than all other public access providers, third party or otherwise, throughout the entire state combined.

I mentioned earlier the New Haven franchise of Comcast Cable television, and I mentioned that, because they have in their franchise area three large communities, New Haven, West Haven, and Hamden with say a quarter of a million people.

And so their franchise is probably comparable to yours in terms of size. And there is no town-specific channels in that franchise, but Mr. Schofield who runs that system has no complaints to my knowledge. Maybe one complaint, one complaint possibly at this point, about the level, the amount or the funding for town-specific programming.

So he's figured out a way to accommodate people who have needs in a very large district and to satisfy their needs. Alternatively, we've heard from people from Area Two and maybe I'm wrong, but let me say, is Area Two in Cablevision franchise extremely Southwestern Connecticut?

WYLAND CLIFT: I think you mean Nine. I think that would be Area--

REP. FONTANA: You're Two and they're Nine.

WYLAND CLIFT: We're Two and they're Nine. That would be Norwalk.

REP. FONTANA: Very good. So we've had people from Area Nine testify, and what they've said is, look, we're in Cablevision same way as Area Two, they've got some regional, and they've got some town-specific, and everybody's happy with that too.

The problem is people are very unhappy with the way it's being done in your area, and it goes from the amount of time it takes to get certified to use your equipment in your facilities to when your programming is put on, to the fact that there are no town-specific channels at all, or only in limited circumstances.

So the fact that funding is not being provided to them, and I have to tell you that disturbs me greatly that there is no funding going to local groups to provide that local town-specific programming.

WYLAND CLIFT: That's not true, Sir.

REP. FONTANA: On an ongoing basis, is funding being provided to Orange, Woodbridge, Milford, Fairfield, Stratford, and Bridgeport and their public access groups to provide town-specific programming?

TOM CASTELOT: For town-specific programming, let me clarify some things if I may. The funding from the cable subscribers comes to Sound View every quarter via a check.

REP. FONTANA: Please speak into the microphone, Mr. Castelot.

TOM CASTELOT: The funding for community access comes via a quarterly check from the cable operator to Sound View. With those funds we do not designate that money to the towns. The funds are designated to the entire operation of P, E, and G together.

For example, all our facilities, staff, the assets of the organization, are available for P, E, and G. We don't differentiate. We don't say we're going to put a quarter to here or that.

Let me compare it to Area Nine. In Area Nine which is run not by a third party, but the cable operator, they have set aside $100,000 of the total amount of the year that is to go to E and G programming and what Cablevision elects to do is they give that to the Cable Advisory Council to administer to those ten towns. We don't have that. We don't administer any funds to the cable council.

Whenever a town--

REP. FONTANA: Okay. If I could stop you for a second. Thank you. You raise an interesting point, and I want to just ask you if I could, what is your annual budget?

TOM CASTELOT: Our annual budget is about $650,000.

REP. FONTANA: Okay, $650,000. Of that amount, what is your annual salary?

TOM CASTELOT: The annual salaries for the organization?

REP. FONTANA: Yours personally, Sir.

TOM CASTELOT: It's about $95,000.

REP. FONTANA: Very good. And as far as Mr. Clift who is here representing Sound View, is he operating under a contract to you personally or to Sound View?

TOM CASTELOT: He is the legal counsel for Sound View Community Media, the corporation.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. And how much do you allocate per year to pay Mr. Clift and his fees and the services of his firm?

TOM CASTELOT: What we do is we budget, we have a budget line item for legal fees in the amount of $5,000, and that's in the budget.

REP. FONTANA: So Mr. Clift only gets paid $5,000 a year?

TOM CASTELOT: Yes. He gets paid for his services.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. And can you give me an example of how much he was paid in your last fiscal year for his services?

TOM CASTELOT: Well, probably, he's close to $70-$80,000 at this point, because most of it had to do with franchise renewal in the last year, two years, it's in the last two years. I'm sorry.

REP. FONTANA: I guess my point would be that for roughly the amount of money that you had to pay him to represent you, it sounds as if in Area Nine that money has gone to public access, and those public access entities in Area Nine are happy with the manner in which public access is provided on a town-specific basis.

So I have to tell you that it seems somewhat unusual that you would have to pay that amount of money to hand legal matters from funds that are being provided by subscribers who are not getting the things that they feel that they're paying for.

TOM CASTELOT: Mr. Chairman. This is news to me about all the, quote, complaints you claim. And what's disturbing to me is the fact that those complaints have never been forwarded to Sound View, so I can answer or address them.

I will tell you the majority of Mr. Clift's fees had to do with franchise renewal in Docket 050409 in franchise renewal--

WYLAND CLIFT: Which happens once every 12 years or so.

TOM CASTELOT: Also, if you look at what the cable operators and other providers spend in franchise renewal for legal fees you're going to find that we are probably the least, it's cost the least, and he is representing the corporation, he's representing the interests of the subscribers in our franchise where we provide PE and G programming.

REP. FONTANA: Well, doubtless, I'll have more questions and there'll be other questions, but I have to tell you, I just don't see how this can't have been resolved.

And last year, as you recall, we had a public hearing here, and I allowed a year for you and the DPUC to work this out, and as you can see, these aren't complaints that I'm claiming. These are people who have chosen to take their free time to come up here on a workday to testify in front of us that there is a problem.

And I can only tell you that whether it's in a franchise like the New Haven Comcast franchise that has no town-specific but everybody's happy level of town-specific programming, or it's in my Comcast franchise, which is East Shore with seven towns that only has town-specific, and we're all happy.

There's got to be a way to provide the level of town-specific programming that makes everyone happy. And what we've tried to do here in this bill is to create a very flexible framework so that depending on what a community wants, they will be able to get what it is that they feel they need.

TOM CASTELOT: We support that. That objective is our objective. However, the misinformation that we have been hearing today is there's a presumption made that there are communities that have enough original programming to warrant a town-specific channel for a long length of time. That has never been proven.

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Castelot--

TOM CASTELOT: Wait, wait--

REP. FONTANA: Now, with all due respect, you know, again I'm not going to say that North Haven is the paradigm here or the paragon of examples, but we have three channels, and certainly there are times when my local channels run what are called bulletin boards, or they download material from military TV, NASA TV, Arts TV, but that's not a choice for anyone else to make as to whether or not my communities have enough programming.

The fact is I have three channels, and if you added them all up, my P, my E, and my G, you could have stuff covered 24/7. It's not the issue about whether there's enough or not. The issue is, is it available to the community to use when they have stuff to put on there.

WYLAND CLIFT: Absolutely. We've always had that program available to them.

TOM CASTELOT: If I could just add one thing. It isn't so much about how much programming, it's whether the particular town-specific group wants to exclude from their town subscribers receiving anything other than what they have produced and approved of, that's really the issue, Sir.

They say that unless it is produced in Orange--

REP. FONTANA: I would argue with you, Sir. It's an issue of control and funding and who has it. Currently you have control and you have the funding. Okay.

TOM CASTELOT: Yes.

REP. FONTANA: Thanks. Representative Fawcett. I was reading your mind.

REP. FAWCETT: At least you give me a chance. Thank you Mr. Chairman. So throughout the morning as people have testified and clearly as I flip through these packets of submitted written testimony and as well as the many conversations I've clearly had with people all over this region, there are two common complaints.

People want freedom to choose town-specific programming when they want it, and this is something that technology has given us the gift across the country, town-specific programming exists throughout the State of Connecticut, town-specific programming exists.

Yet in region two, our six towns, one person decides whether we get to have access to that, and you happen to be sitting with me today. And we have been denied it, and people have requested it, and we are not allowed to have access to it.

The other point, the other complaint that has been common is that we, the towns feel, and the six towns in this region feel, I think justifiably, that if they pay a fee on their Cablevision bill, a PEG provider fee, a tax as I've said over and over again, although we don't like to use that word up here, a fee that goes into a fund, we are thinking that that fund is going to be used to generate public access television, and yet none of our towns have any access to that money.

So two issues, the freedom to choose town-specific programming, and access to the PEG provider money. Now other regions have also testified today that they use their Cable Advisory Council to distribute grants to towns. This is one way to get the money out there so that the towns have the ability to create the programming.

Because without the equipment, it's quite difficult to create the programming you claim we don't have. We don't have it, in some instances.

So I wonder why there is a reluctance to do this in Area Two, to allow the Cable Advisory Council some nominal $50,000 a year or something so that they can distribute small grants to the existing towns and those towns can start to get up and running with simple recording of Board of Ed meetings. The towns that don't already have it.

TOM CASTELOT: Let me respond, because that's erroneous information. Funding has always been available to the towns, and some towns have been using it and some towns aren't. And I kind of take offense to when you say that none of the towns.

I'll give you an example. We don't, when a town is interested in producing programming, we will try to work with them, and I'm going to use your own town of Fairfield as a great example.

Fairfield is interested in starting to produce programming. They've never produced program before. Despite lots of attempts and efforts to encourage them. Sound View is a station. We don't produce the programming. We disseminate the programming that's given to us. And what we've done is, and it came through in the franchise renewal, a grant program has been established. There's criteria in the grant. It's a $60,000 grant that is being tested at this point--

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. And I don't mean to cut you off, so in the past 12 months, of the $616,000 that I have that you received in ratepayer money, how much money did you distribute to the towns to generate town-specific programming?

TOM CASTELOT: Through the grant program at the moment, we've completed three towns, Milford, Woodbridge, not completed, we've--

REP. FAWCETT: Three $10,000

TOM CASTELOT: Three $10,000 grants.

REP. FAWCETT: And each of those grants came with conditions that all three towns have reported today. There were conditions associated.

TOM CASTELOT: The conditions, there's a criteria to receive those grants. It is really to be used for equipment that they, the town has choice. They may want to identify and purchase the equipment themselves, or they may ask us to do that for them.

REP. FAWCETT: So now is it your intention that this is now an annual grant, or was it a one-time process.

TOM CASTELOT: Actually it's a process that the department is going to review after the first year to see if it should be continued, modified, or discontinued.

REP. FAWCETT: So it's not your intention that it's an annual grant. It's your intention that it's a one-time thing.

TOM CASTELOT: No. I did not say that. I said we just started it and we're going to be reviewing it at the appropriate time toward the end of this year to see the feasibility. Let me just share another thing. We still have money available to towns outside of that grant.

For example, we are in the process of putting in an installation at the new Fairfield Historic Center. We are also going to be putting in an installation in the Town of Stratford.

REP. FAWCETT: What are you putting in the Fairfield Historic Center?

TOM CASTELOT: We're putting in a very similar system as you have here.

REP. FAWCETT: Are you sure that Cablevision's not funding that?

TOM CASTELOT: No. We are positive we are funding that.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay, I wanted to move on--

TOM CASTELOT: As the custodian of the community access funds, the community access budget is funding that.

REP. FAWCETT: Certainly. I wanted to move on to follow-up a little bit on Representative Fontana's questions about salary. Now this sort of goes into a lot of the concern about if this money is not being distributed the way that many, many people in the region think it needs to be, how is it being used?

And my follow-up would be that Mr. Clift, there's a lot of concern even expressed from Cable Advisory Council members and former Sound View members that your salary is extraordinarily lucrative.

And I'm wondering for either one of you, why does Sound View, a small third party provider of public access television that has a budget of $616,000 a year need to have a lawyer, and a lawyer that our records, the spread sheets that I was sent to you, was paid $100,000 last year. Why do you have a lawyer on retainer for that much.

And I ask it sort of from an innocent standpoint in that my own personal experience is my husband has worked for many small businesses, small companies that, when I say small businesses, generate between $3 and $10 million dollars a year depending on the company he was with.

And they don't have hundred thousand dollar lawyers on retainer. So I guess I wonder, and they're for-profit businesses, so I just wonder--

WYLAND CLIFT: Let me just evaluate something. I absolutely have not received $100,000 from Sound View over the last year. Absolutely not. I am on an hourly basis. My hourly rate is $180 an hour. I think I might have bumped it up maybe to $200 just recently, and absolutely that is not the case. Way, way below. I mean, I don't know, I mean it's up to Tom, but--

TOM CASTELOT: I'd like to really respond, and I know the document you're referring to. A hundred thousand dollars was budgeted for franchise renewal, $50,000 for Area Two and at the time, we were looking, we had an interest in pursuing Area Nine.

And what we did is we pulled that for $50,000 for Area Two, $50,000 in Area Nine be designatd for that. And that was designated by the Board for that purpose. This was our very first time involved in franchise renewal.

REP. FAWCETT: And yet $100,000 was designated in your budget for legal fees for these issues. And again out of a $600,000 budget, one-sixth of it is for attorney's fees to essentially make sure the towns you serve don't get town-specific programming.

WYLAND CLIFT: No, that was not the reason of--

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. I've one other follow-up question on the salary issue that Representative Fontana brought up, and that's just that I also did a little research, and the presidents of Nutmeg or Citizens TV make anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a year less than your annual of $95,000 salary.

I don't know if you were aware of that, but I, I guess I'm interested in the different demands that our region at our public access studio put on you to justify such a large differentiation in the salaries.

TOM CASTELOT: Well, your definition is not agreed upon by other members. My salary and the salaries of our organization are controlled by the corporation. The corporation sets the salary. And the do look at [inaudible]. When you look at the franchise, we are the second largest franchise in Connecticut with over, with 100,000 cable subscribers.

In Nutmeg television, and in Citizens television in New Haven where they have roughly 70,000 to 75,000 subscribers, their budgets are smaller and that. And what we have, our facility is probably the most state of the art facility in the State of Connecticut which is available to all our subscribers including P, E, and G.

And they've audit, and we are audited, we are independently audited each year. You can find our audits and reports on file, which I'm sure you have, and we have been, in our audits, we have been told year after year, and this is nonprofit auditing firms, saying that we run a very, very efficient operation.

REP. FAWCETT: And that's an interesting point you bring up, because the nonprofit auditing firm that you use, I believe, and Senator Fontana you may be able to add to this, but there was a federal law passed, the Sarbanes Oxley law, that says that because of previous problems we all know about in this country, nonprofit organizations or organizations in general, should change auditing firms every few years.

And yet I believe some of your board members have notified you of that federal law, and yet have you changed your auditing firms in the past several years?

TOM CASTELOT: We have never changed our auditing firm, and I will address that. We are well aware of Sarbanes Oxley. We brought in our auditing firm. Our finance committee of the board addressed that, and the auditing firm we have is probably the top auditing firm in the nonprofit business in Connecticut who audits 70% of nonprofit. What they do do is we do not have the same auditor for each time an audit is conducted.

They rotate auditors. We use the same firm, because the alternative that we have, and we have looked at other audit firms. We just don't see the level of expertise that we gain from this auditing firm that represents us. They also provide our tax 990 filings to the IRS.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay. So I see your point, but at the same time, you know, the federal recommendations are in place, because there's a problem when the same auditing firm is associated to one organization for 10 years in a row, and the same information is in-house.

And the reason they encourage you to go out to another firm is to start new and to have a new fresh look at the books. But I want to finish us, because I know we have many other bills to hear today.

I just wanted to ask a few questions about this other issue of the freedom of the towns to have access to town-specific programming, and Mr. Clift in your comments submitted in 2006 to the DPUC docket you said, and I'll quote it, the carving up of government access channel amongst the towns is not in the public's best interests.

And did you mean it's not in the public's best interests to view local government meetings or to have the opportunity to engage or be informed of what their local government is doing? Would it not benefit the people who cannot attend? For me, example. I can't always attend Board of Ed meetings. I would love the opportunity to see those on TV. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

WYLAND CLIFT: Certainly, what I meant by that is it was not in the public interest to have the same one, two, or maybe even three meetings repeated over and over and over again 24/7 when there was the opportunity for the subscribers in that particular town to also, at limited times, see what's going on in other municipalities with their government proceedings and their meetings.

Plus some of the additional programming that Mr. Castelot is able to bring in such as some of the locally based State Legislators sometimes will bring programming to Mr. Castelot to air, and that is appropriately placed on the government access channel.

The problem, again, and I repeat myself. The problem is not that these programs that are being produced by the towns aren't getting out to the town's subscribers, it's that there are certain groups within these local municipalities that say, we don't want our subscribers to see anything else other than what we are producing, and what we approve of, because we know best what the subscribers in our towns want to see. And I think that is censorship.

REP. FAWCETT: Or freedom of speech.

WYLAND CLIFT: I think it's censorship.

REP. FAWCETT: Now I'm going to, thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chair, I'm closing up, but I'm going to jump ahead and throw some things at you. I think that this issue is not about programming or about whether a town can program town-specific programming, or even the control of which towns see what.

A lot of that is part of it, but isn't it about, Mr. Castelot, you may be able to answer this best, technology. I believe you don't control the technology to provide town-specific programming.

The way I understand it, the head end, the actual physical equipment to flip the switch and give my town of Fairfield town-specific programming is owned and controlled by Cablevision.

And in order for our town to achieve town-specific programming, the way I understand it, two things must happen. The first thing is written in our agreement in Section 5 you personally must give your written consent to Cablevision to allow them to step in and essentially take you out of the mix temporarily and work directly with the towns to send out the town-specific programming.

So the first thing that happens is the third party provider, his influence is reduced, and the second thing that begins to occur is that a new relationship be formed between those towns and Cablevision.

And what really is happening is Sound View as the middleman is being cut out. I guess I would ask you to comment on that as far as the technology and the physical equipment that's I place.

TOM CASTELOT: The technology is there. It is in place.

REP. FAWCETT: But you do not own it.

TOM CASTELOT: We do not own the technology, however, we do control as the cap for Area Two on channels 77, 78, to 79. We do not control the point of origination, for example, we'll use Fairfield as an example. If Fairfield has a town-specific return line, which they do, which all the towns do, which is called the Cablevision Institutional Network, that is a proprietary system owned exclusively by Cablevision.

The town disseminates their programming on the I-Net feed that goes to the head end in Norwalk. From Norwalk they would then have to switch it to either 77, 78, or 79, which is controlled by Sound View, and that is why if the municipality wants to go town-specific, and they do, they simply send us a request to do so, we authorize the head end to make the switch, because in years past there have been unauthorized persons making switches, and this was an agreement that Cablevision and Sound View developed to correct that.

REP. FAWCETT: But again--

TOM CASTELOT: And wait, we have never ever refused to switch any town-specific request, and Cablevision has never ever abused it either.

REP. FAWCETT: Okay, but again, the point is that I was trying to make is that you don't actually have the capability on your own to provide our region with town-specific programming. It involves bringing Cablevision into the mix, and what would happen if five of the six towns request town-specific programming, and they start producing their own programming, which is the direction that this region is going?

REP. FAWCETT: It's happening, well two of them have been up for a long time, and so their own programming, they would be sending out directly to Cablevision. Some people, I think, would start to question the value added by a third party provider, in particular, I believe the next step would be that those towns in our six-town region would start to request that some of those valuable PEG provider subscriber fees start to be sent directly to Sound View.

So the way that I see it is that this third party agreement you have has really been surpassed over the past 11 or 12 years by evolving technology and evolving society, and this idea of town-specific programming doesn't fit or mesh with your provider model.

TOM CASTELOT: No, that's not true. You know what you're, you're concentrating solely on government programming, the G. You fail to think about public programming, educational program and G program. That's what we are, the third party's accountable for.

REP. FAWCETT: So in a situation that we are all requesting in our region that we be given access to government and education channels, you would still be the third party provider for public. And I think there's a value added there, but my point is that your value added as a third party provider would be diminished and that--

TOM CASTELOT: I don't believe that, the P, E and G structure in Connecticut is by two entities, either the cable provider or a third party. And in Connecticut probably half of our franchises are third party run and half of them are cable operator run.

We took over community access from the cable operator, because it was, at the time, determined that we could do a better job. We still believe we have, and our franchise was renewed.

In this past franchise go-around, Cablevision looked to take back the E and G portion, and it didn't happen. We're still the P, E and G provider. So to say by having them do that it diminishes the third party, I don't think the third party model is going to go away, or I don't even see it threatened. If anything, I think we have strengthened it.

REP. FAWCETT: I think that just I closing, Mr. Chair, really what this region is desiring and asking for is the opportunity in each town to open government and open our communities to public television so that people can engage.

And they're asking for access to the money that they pay every month on their cable bills that's supposed to help generate that connection. That public connection with government and community. That's what that fee is for. We're asking for access to our money and freedom to more easily have that switch filled.

And I hope we can come to some compromises to get there. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Representative. Mr. Clift before we get there, I think that what Representative Fawcett's getting at is it's not about censorship, with all due respect, and it's not about freedom necessarily. It's about self-determination.

What we've got going on in practically every franchise in the state to some degree is some amount of local control. And that's what we're about as a state. It's repeated over and over in every aspect of our law. It's about having the ability one way or another to have that self-determination.

Like I said, at a minimum, you've got a situation like you've got in Comcast New Haven franchise where you've got a third party doing it all, and everybody's happy. But in every other franchise that I know of, you've got some blend of regional and town-specific, or even in my franchise where there's no regional at all. Comcast gave that up several years ago. Channel 21 went away. The fact is it's about making those decisions for ourself, right or wrong.

You talked about repeating shows over and over and over again. That's the virtue of my channel 20 in North Haven, that it's a government channel, where every second hour or every third hour for an entire weekend, the programming director puts two or three tapes in or CDs in, DVDs, and they rotate.

And so it's not incumbent upon me or my constituents to tune in Saturday night at 6:00 so they can watch the PNZ. They know that over the course of that entire weekend, they can check back with channel 20, and they can see whatever it is that's been going on in government over the past week.

And so, you know, the way you frame that, I think is it's fundamentally at variance with what it is we're talking about.

WYLAND CLIFT: I respect your point, Mr. Chairman. Would you buy me 20 seconds, though?

REP. FONTANA: Well, I have one more question and I'll let you. You mentioned, or Mr. Castelot mentioned that you were paid $70,000 a year or so ago to participate in a refranchising. Is that correct? Did you state that?

TOM CASTELOT: Honestly, if I had known this was going to be issue, I would have brought my billing. I really don't

And I don't have my finances with me, but we've expended in the neighborhood of about $70,000 for legal fees for the Area Two and the Area Nine franchise renewal.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Two franchise renewals, but

TOM CASTELOT: It happens once every how many years?

REP. FONTANA: No, I understand that. My question would be why. I can understand Cablevision spending $70,000 on legal fees. They're the ones with the franchise. You're just a third party provider with whom they're contracting to provide public access. Why are you spending $50 or $70 or $100 thousand dollars on legal fees to participate in franchising?

TOM CASTELOT: Because Sound View Community Media believes that it is the best qualified provider, and we want to present the best professional light and make sure that what we're doing is legally okay. We went up against about six or seven law firms in the franchise renewal.

I could not, and our corporation couldn't do that without legal representation.

REP. FONTANA: Again, I think it's getting to the same issue where you have chosen to spend the subscriber fees to pay Mr. Clift to represent you in franchising decisions to preserve your ability to provide the programming without regard to whether, in fact, it is the best way. It's the best way in your opinion to do that.

But what we're getting at is there is more than one way to provide that and satisfy your viewers, and part of it involves sharing the subscriber fees with them, and part of it is accommodating their view for town-specific programming, either by a dedicated channel, or by some sort of mechanism whereby you would do a better job of providing that programming.

Mr. Clift wanted to respond so I'll let you respond, and--

TOM CASTELOT: Mr. Fontana, first of all, we don't control [Gap in testimony. Changing from Tape 2B to Tape 3A.]

--if I had channels to give them. To me that makes great sense. The cable--

REP. FONTANA: --either by a dedicated channel, or by some sort of mechanism whereby you would do a better job of providing that programming. Mr. Clift wanted to respond, so I'll let you respond, and--

TOM CASTELOT: Mr. Fontana, first of all, we don't control the channels. If the town wanted, and we controlled channels, and the town wanted their own channel, and I had channels to give them, to me that makes great sense. The cable operators own those channels. We don't. We have one channel dedicated for all the six towns for government programming.

And my second point that I want to make is, our corporation believed, and we were with legal representation, and what we put aside for franchise renewal was in the best interests of the subscribers and how we can be the best PEG access provider to our subscribers.

So that is why we went the route we went, and we don't regret that.

REP. FONTANA: So are you saying you're willing to surrender control out of one of your three channels to local groups in every one of your six or seven communities.

TOM CASTELOT: We do that now. We've been doing that. But we are the authority, but we're responsible and accountable for those channels. Are you asking me would Sound View relinquish its control and authority of that channel?

REP. FONTANA: Yes.

TOM CASTELOT: Well, guess what, I don't know how we can do it, because those towns are not recognized under the law as a CAP. It would have to go to a CAP. As an example, if we were to dissolve today, all our community access assets would (a), go to another third party, or go back to the cable company or the cable operator. We're just the trustee and the provider of that.

REP. FONTANA: But if each of these six towns created a CAP, you would surrender control of one of those three channels to them.

TOM CASTELOT: We'd have to take a look at that.

REP. FONTANA: No, no, no, no, no, that's a yes or a no question. Not a take a look at, you just said that they haven't formed them, they don't exist, but if they did, you would. So is that a yes or a no.

TOM CASTELOT: What would happen is they would apply through the department, and the department would render that decision, and if the department rendered that decision, we would abide by that decision.

REP. FONTANA: Would you support or oppose that decision? That ruling on the part of the department to do that.

TOM CASTELOT: It would all depend on who's applying and how strong their, what they could deliver that was inferior or better than ours. If they have a product better than ours, I think we would support it.

REP. FONTANA: Mr. Clift, I know that I owe you some time, so I'm done with my questions. There may be some other questions from other Members of the Committee. If not, I'll let you respond as you see fit.

WYLAND CLIFT: Just, what I would like to, in my observation here, and the point I would like to make is that I think that this really is not the correct forum to be discussing such substantive issues that are complicated, and that's why I don't understand why the process that was set forth in the DPUC proceeding, it was a contested administrative hearing. Everyone had their shot. Everyone had their opportunity to submit testimony.

The documentation, and now, I mean, we're really supposed to be limited to only two minutes, and I do appreciate your allowances with me, but it just seems that, you know, how do we respond to questions that we don't even know who, or complaints, and we don't have copies of them. How do we respond, and in a forum like this?

That's why I feel that we should leave it with the DPUC. They have jurisdiction over this matter. We've got two out of the three, we have two agreements out of the three have been signed, and we have a motion pending before the department on the final one with Orange.

Why do we need to go and precipitously adopt some legislation that, I think is going to have a lot of unintended consequences and further muddy waters. And that's the thought I'd like to leave you with, Sir. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you both. Other questions for the gentlemen? Seeing none. Thank you both for coming up and answering our questions. Just to let people know we're nearing the end of the testimony on 5814. Just to give you all a preview, the people I've got are Susan Huizenga, followed by Dennis Guagliarone. Have I got that right? Walter Mann. Pardon. (“gual e oan”) Sorry. All right, very good. Followed by Walter Mann, Nancy Holk, if she's here, and John Emra. So just to let people know. So if Susan Huizenga is here to be followed by Dennis Guagliarone. I'm half Italian. You'd think I'd do a better job than that. Apologize. Welcome.

SUSAN HUIZENGA: Members of the Energy and Technology Committee, I am Susan Huizenga, current Chairman of the Cable Advisory Council Comcast Branford and Statewide Video Council designee from that area. I do not support House Bill 5814, AN ACT CONCERNING COMMUNITY ACCESS TELEVISION.

And sitting through this hearing, I feel committed to my original statement that as a 30-year advocate of community access television, I wish I either had the opportunity to be testifying to repeal Act 07253 or to support a bill that better defines funds and enables community access.

And I don't feel that this, I think fundamentally, the 1995 Act was based on the idea of cable cowboys and needing regulation and trying to understand technology. The 1997 Act basically was based on an argument over technology that's too discrete to be really public policy. The level at which policy should be established is what is community access, what is clarity, what is self-determination.

And I think when you're delving at this level of detail in terms of technology and infrastructures of franchises that have been reasonably determined over years of negotiation and franchise renewals and public comment, to just throw away the rulings of the DPUC and to codify the limitations of the video services is a disservice to our community.

There are reasons for, I believe that the town's model is the best, but there are limitations in terms of public access. Funding is a criteria that is crucial to how you can do this, and in Wallingford, there's a government television station. I am from Wallingford.

Part of the DPUC's influence on how to handle discussions related to town-wide are based on whether the town government is perceived as a producer of television versus the provider of the technology, the training, the services, the oversight.

As a producer of TV, they don't allow for live programming. They only allow for town sanctioned programming. The last franchise renewal insisted that the public access provider took on government.

So I think that has been missing in this whole discussion of who is actually providing versus oversight, and we don't have enough information on lessons learned.

I would rather see a study taking lessons learned from the variety and flavors of community access that we have in this community rather than rushing to judgment on a fundamentally, what I perceive, as a fundamentally flawed rush to judgment on the technology aspect of a new competitive environment.

It's not a level playing field for cable. They're opting light. My concern is by opting light, we don't know what happened to the senior discounts, we don't know what happened in Wallingford with respect to the funding.

They have $150,000 taxpayer-based station competing against a $72,000 public access station. And the Ed channel is kind of missing in action.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. Susan, you've raised a lot of good points. I really do believe that we probably should schedule a public hearing just for public access next year where we could air all these issues and try to look at things more broadly.

Our goal this year is to try to address some of what we consider to be the most grievous problems that arose from last year's bill, or that we face as a result of last year's law, so that's what we're about this session. But again, I take your point, and I think we have to have that large discussion at some point.

SUSAN HUIZENGA: I, if you don't mind my commenting, I believe that you're attempt is actually aggravating some of the points rather than helping, because there's just so much variation in the foundation.

REP. FONTANA: Okay. Thank you. Are there questions for Ms. Huizenga? Seeing none, thank you very much. Dennis followed by Walter Mann and Nancy Holk if she's here.

DENNIS GUAGLIARONE: Hello, again, Representative Fontana. I was here on February 20 of last year. My name is Dennis Guagliarone. I came here to speak on 5814. I reside at Milford, Connecticut. I am a lifelong Connecticut resident, single father, Civil Rights Advocate, Cablevision subscriber. I am the line producer for all filming at Milford Government Access TV.

My resume includes over 20 years as engineer, program manager, marketing product manager on projects such as global positioning satellite, data communications, and telecommunications systems.

I'm also a freelance filmmaker. I recently completed a film at the U.N. Women's Conference just this past week.

I'm speaking as a private citizen, but I'm also the one of the Cable Advisory Council members from Milford, and I'm on the Milford Government Access TV Committee.

Let me put some numbers down in front of you. Mr. Clift claimed that Bridgeport, Stratford, and Fairfield were the three largest communities. He is inaccurate. Bridgeport is the largest. Milford, with 53,000 residents and 18,900 households installed with cable TV is the second largest, followed by Stratford and Fairfield, almost in parity.

Our residents, the people I represent, pay over $110,000 a year for P, E, and G funds. Since 1999, we have paid over $1,009,260. Last year when I testified I didn't want to get into the numbers, and people came up to me from Milford because I have this, not only on the Milford Government channel, but through the assistance of OGAT, the Orange people, we are now on Google video, and all of our programming ends up on Google video.

They showed me how to do it. I invested my own funds to prove if we have the funds we can do things that make Sound View a dinosaur. We have what I call micro studios. Whereas the other towns have concentrated on government programming, I have also created two more studios that are on the I-net now, and are broadcasting public and educational.

I have a plan right now as we speak. I could bring Milford into the world of CAP for P, E and G with the $110,000 a year. Let me make another statement.

REP. FONTANA: All right, and then please--

DENNIS GUAGLIARONE: Oh, okay, really quick, really quick. All right, I'm sorry. And then I'll finalize it. We also share with other towns. If Orange produces something like the voter registration guide, we show it on our station, in fact, we showed it for a month before the election, and everyone was very happy with that.

They've shown other things that belong to us. It's not censorship. What's happening to us is censorship, and that ends my statements.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Dennis. And I have just one quick question. You mentioned that over that period, $1.9 million dollars of Milford subscriber money had gone to public access. How much money have you or public access in Milford received during that period? Do you have any estimate of that?

DENNIS GUAGLIARONE: Yeah, absolutely. In 2002, we received the loan of some equipment which we handed back to Sound View in 2005, when we wanted to go town-specific. It was approximately $3,000 worth of equipment.

The DPUC directed Sound View to give us $10,000 if we reached an agreement last year. We reached the agreement by mid April of last year.

They refused to give us the money until further directed, and they finally gave us $10,000 in November of 2007, and my understanding is that's it for 11 years, and I've already recommended to the mayor, give them the money back. I can give you $900 a year just so that we can get rid of these people, and we'll be completely town-specific. Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Very good, Dennis. Thank you. Questions for Dennis from Members of the Committee? Seeing none. Thank you. That was very enlightening.

DENNIS GUAGLIARONE: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Walter Mann, followed by Nancy Holk if she's here.

WALTER MANN: Thank you Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, and I'd like to start off by saying that I do want to give a quick background. My name is Walter Mann. I'm executive director of NHTV in North Haven. I've been involved there since 1985. I'm also station manager of BCTV in Branford. In addition, I have worked on the broadcast side of things as general manager of what is now known as MikeTV9, but used to be WCTX with channel 8 in New Haven. So I do have a broadcast side of knowledge too.

And I do want to thank Mr. Fontana for his hard work put forth so far with regard to issues related to access.

First of all, and I just have several points to go over quickly, and a couple questions.

With regard to AT&T I do agree as well that if the preference would be to have PEG, carry it on a level playing field in terms of the reception at home by viewers. I do recognize there are technical issues with AT&T in terms of having basically two systems in Connecticut, the Fairfield County VMA and the Hartford, New Haven VMA that prohibits them from local insertion at this point.

I would ask, though, however that AT&T perhaps be given a time frame over a period of whatever the time might be to come up with some technical answers to the problem that maybe eventually at some point local insertion will be possible at AT&T.

With regard to the number of PEG channels specifically mentioned with regard to cable operators in the proposed bill, it's the company's choice if Comcast or Cox or cable is their charter, they are historically cable television companies, and that's the architecture they use.

And IP TV companies are IP TV. The companies themselves choose their architecture, but regardless of that, I don't think that should affect the amount of PEG channels carried, whether they're IP TV or whether, you know, the traditional heritage cable television franchise.

In addition, another point with regard to a level playing field, I think that CT-N as well as local PEG and commercial broadcast, all should be on the same playing field. I think that, for example, if you look at the local broadcast outlets, WTNH and WFSB, they're subject and protected by federal communications commissions Must Carry Rules and Retransmission Consent.

That's their protection and that allows them cable carriage. Cable networks is the same way. ESPN, of course, being very popular, for example. They have contracts that protect them. There really is no protection for PEG, and I think that's what an important part of this proposed bill as well is, is to protect the amount of PEG channels, and that's another important point.

With regard to CT-N versus PEG, I do want to take exception to a speaker earlier today that said that CT-N was more important. I think that CT-N and local PEG are both just as important, and just as well as people have a desire and need to see state meetings, I think people at the local level have just as much of importance placed on local planning and zoning meetings. So I wanted to make that point.

Also with regard to town-specific, just to touch on things, in North Haven and Branford, we have two very well-established local PEG groups, and I can tell you one of the reasons why town-specific is more preferred over regional in terms of governmental, is Branford residents have no desire to see North Haven planning and zoning commissions, and vice versa.

And I think the key to a successful town-specific group in addition to receiving funding from the cable companies and IP TV guys is fundraising which we do a lot of. Almost done.

With regard to the repetition of meetings as Steve has alluded to before, it's important that meetings are repeated, because people as Steve said, don't just tune in Saturday nights at 6 to see the police commission or fire commission or whatever.

In addition, to that too, we also have aired other programming besides just local meetings, whether it's Governor Rell's program that no longer exists, or whether it was Kevin Sullivan's program when he produced it, Susan [inaudible] supplies us with programs, the U.S. Military when CT-N first launched before they had cable carriage we carried CT-N in North Haven.

And the only other questions I had, those were the points I wanted to make were quickly specifics, I guess I'll just pose these to you, in Section 4(a)(b), I just wanted to clarify the phrase “local cable access advisory board.” Is it safe to assume that that really means local cable advisory council? That's something that Scott Hanley as well brought up.

In Section 6(b) for clarification purposes with regard to employees of cable companies serving on an advisory council, I think that the wording, “or employee of a PEG access center” should also be added to that. Especially since advisory councils handle a lot of PEG issues, and the people who know the most about PEG are PEG employees.

And the other thing was with regard to employees of cable companies versus PEG access centers. I do think there's more of an important role for PEG access center employees to serve on advisory councils whereas I think there could be more conflicts with cable television employees serving on advisory councils. And I hope I've been quick enough, and that's really the points that I have to make today.

REP. FONTANA: Thank you, Walt. As a constituent and as my local public access guru and director, I thank you for coming up and testifying. To your points, you and I discussed the section for, you're correct, it should be “cable access advisory council, not board.” That was what we intended, so we will address that.

As far as section 6 is concerned, I'm taking from what you're saying that it's less important that, although it could be valuable to have an employee of a company be on the cable access, it's more important or equally important to have an employee of a public access center, is that the term you prefer to use, center or group or provider?

WALTER MANN: Yes, provider, group, especially since most cable advisory councils if not all to my knowledge. I was chairman of the council Susan is now chairman of from 1996 to 2002, serving the Branford franchise. And we had ex officio members at the time from either TCI or Heritage or AT&T which is now Comcast in that area.

So, I think that cable companies have had representation, but I think that the PEG employees are the most knowledgeable of anyone with regard to PEG issues. That's their life and I think they would make a tremendous contribution to be able to be on the cable advisory council.

REP. FONTANA: So would you recommend that we not do what we're doing here, or do what we're doing, but add the public access aspect that you're talking about? In other words do you see a problem with employees from these companies being possibly on the cable access advisory councils, or is it your position, no it's not really that much of a problem, it's more important to have the other people involved.

WALTER MANN: I think that there could be a lot of problems with having cable television or IP TV company employees on an advisory council simply because of the importance of the council and their focus in being an advocate. I think that having those company employees on it could be very problematic. PEG access center employees, I don't see problems. If there were ever a financial issue, they certainly could recuse themselves.

Years ago, most advisory councils were passed through the funds to PEG facilities and PEG access groups. For the most part with a few exceptions that is no longer the case. The funds are directly disbursed, at least in the Branford system, for example, from the cable company to the recognized PEG provider, and I think that there is very, very small chance for any issues with regard to conflicts with PEG employees, whereas the opposite could be said for IP TV or cable TV company employees.

REP. FONTANA: Well said. Thank you. Questions for Mr. Mann from Members of the Committee? Seeing none, again, Walter thank you for everything you do.

WALTER MANN: Thank you.

REP. FONTANA: Nancy Holk, if she's here. Very good, Nancy Holk to be followed by John Emra, and that should conclude us unless there's somebody I'm missing. Welcome, Nancy.

NANCY HOLK: I want to thank you for your patience. It's been a long hearing. I can see everybody is really tired. And I'd like to--

REP. FONTANA: Nancy, you don't know the half of it. You're just the first bill out of 20, so like I said. I'm not kidding you. Turn on CT-N when you get home tonight. You'll be watching us, but go ahead.

NANCY HOLK: I believe you have copies of my prepared testimony, which I will read in a minute, but I would like to speculate on why we have returned to this forum in order to gain local access programming control in our communities, and that I believe is for a couple of reasons.

One is, frankly, people felt it was an unfair decision that was tainted by the close relationship of Tom Castelot and the DPUC Commissioner, Len Betkoski who's right over there. And the second thing is that Area Nine--

REP. FONTANA: Nancy, I would just caution you, let's be very careful about what we say, all right, but that's--

NANCY HOLK: I'm speculating--

REP. FONTANA: All right, and also I think it was Jack Betkoski, not Len, but that's okay. Please proceed.

NANCY HOLK: Oh, sorry. He's not my friend. He's Tom's friend.

REP. FONTANA: I, okay. Please, Nancy, just--

NANCY HOLK: Okay. And the other thing is that Area Nine got what they wanted, and Area Two was terribly disappointed that it wasn't treated in the same way. So now I will return to my prepared remarks. I am from Woodbridge, which is in the Area Two franchise. It's a small community with about 2800 homes, and so it's possible to really know the opinions of a lot of residents.

REP. FONTANA: Nancy, there are some conversations going on in this room that either need to stop or go outside. Okay. Thank you. Nancy, go ahead.

NANCY HOLK: So as I work out in the gym with the guys or I go to the dump or go to the library, I have raised the issue of the G channel and town-specific programming and have gotten the same response from everyone. And I should tell you that I served as the Chairman of the Cable Advisory Committee for many years, and after Cablevision's refranchising 13 years ago, the last one, not the current one, I took a break. But I returned to serve on the Sound View board of directors until two months ago when my term was not renewed.

I urge you to provide legislative support for our town-specific government access channel, and all the time I served on the Sound View board, I never heard a logical or compelling argument for forcing residents to watch the Monday matters of local government from other communities.

Because of the configuration of the Area Two franchise, which perhaps not everyone knows, Woodbridge is up here, and Fairfield and Stratford and Bridgeport are here. It looks sort of like a snake along the coast.

And Woodbridge residents are interested in their neighboring communities and those are Bethany, Woodbridge, Seymour, Hamden, and New Haven. We have a shared school district. We have issues over roads and so forth, and so those are the communities where there might be some interest. We have nothing that we do, as far as I know, with Stratford or Fairfield.

I want to tell you about a typical--

REP. FONTANA: Nancy, if you could just wrap it up.

NANCY HOLK: Yes, I will. I want to tell you about a typical Woodbridge G channel viewer. My neighbor, Sam, is 87 years old and homebound with Parkinson's disease. He watches school board, selectmen, and board of finance meetings with keen interest. He is bewildered by the new programs from Fairfield, Milford, Bridgeport, Stratford, and Orange. Although I have explained why the other community meetings are now appearing on his G channel, he still doesn't understand what they are doing on the Woodbridge channel, although Tom Castelot director of Sound View has asserted at meetings that the channel, quote, belongs to Sound View, and not to Woodbridge. That really doesn't make any sense to Sam. He contributes his $5 annual fee to Cablevision for access programming. So in wrapping it up, I would just like to say that local government programming holds residents' interests, but tapes from the other communities do not.

REP. FONTANA: Great, Nancy. Thank you. One question for you, if I could. You said that your term expired on the--

NANCY HOLK: No, I said it was not renewed.

REP. FONTANA: Okay, very good. It was not renewed. By whom was it not renewed?

NANCY HOLK: There were board members who were appointed by Tom to organize a nominating and so forth committee, and for the first time to my knowledge, a board member was not reappointed for a second term.

REP. FONTANA: Okay, so the board of directors are chosen by the board of directors?

NANCY HOLK: The board of directors are chosen by one person. There is no input from mayors and First Selectmen or community or subscribers. The board of directors consists of people selected by Tom Castelot, and he did select me, although he had cause to regret that decision.

REP. FONTANA: Very good, thank you. Questions for Nancy from Members of the Committee? Representative Fawcett.

REP. FAWCETT: And if prior testimony is correct, this board of directors is also responsible for deciding salary and benefit packages for the employees of Sound View.

NANCY HOLK: Absolutely.

REP. FAWCETT: So there's a perceived conflict of interest in that the person who selects the board of directors also selects their salary. I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on some experiences you had while on the Sound View board, decision-making processes.

NANCY HOLK: Well, I will just describe what happened with one issue. We get an agenda, and on the last page was a small paragraph that said, we want to eliminate this bylaw section that invited officials from town to attend meetings in an ex officio capacity, that is come, but not vote, a representative of the Cable Advisory Council, and a Representative from Cablevision.

And that was sort of rolling along, and my colleague from Woodbridge, who could not be here today, who is our First Selectman designee, took exception to that, and so it was just tabled. It was not abandoned, and because the meetings were closed, and the documents were confidential, I have no idea how that has gone forward.

But I do know that the proposal which came from Tom, was to eliminate the automatic notification to the mayor's First Selectman, Cablevision, and Advisory Council, that another quarterly meeting was coming up.

REP. FAWCETT: Sorry. And as a process, these boards are held in confidentiality you just said. In secrecy, is that that you're instructed that the information is not public knowledge?

NANCY HOLK: Well, on my notes for one of the board meetings, I have written down a quote that says everything that happens in this room is confidential, which is what we were told. The votes are always unanimous, except for me for years.

REP. FAWCETT: And I was wondering if you, Representative Fontana, some time ago, I guess it has been over an hour, asked some questions about the disbursement of funds for legal fees that seemed excessive on the surface, and you were on the board when those funds were approved, and I was just wondering if you could share conversations or concerns that other board members had, or what the discussion was.