Changing channels

Last April Butte College announced it would no longer broadcast the local public-access television Channel 11. The school had actually indicated its intentions to the city of Chico four months earlier. The station has long carried local programming, including the Chico City Council meetings, area school board meetings as well as Butte County Board of Supervisor meetings.

When news of the pending shutdown was made public, a group of local citizens calling themselves North Valley Cable Access contacted the city and said they would form a nonprofit organization to run the station.

Last December the City Council authorized City Manager Dave Burkland to enter into a contract with the association. The transfer should be complete by mid-March, said NVCA member Mike Donnelly. The group is working with local cable provider Comcast.

“We’ve filed our articles of incorporation, we have draft bylaws in place, as well as a draft business plan, and we have a board of directors,” said Donnelly. “So we are looking pretty solid. All we really need now is some money.”

According to that draft business plan, the mission “is to promote community media and to encourage, educate and engage residents in Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties, as well as the greater Northern California region, to use new media and technology, to improve civic involvement, learn new media skills and enhance the culture, the economy, health and quality of life in the North State.”

Donnelly has a background in television, first as a cameraman for The Moriss Taylor Show in the 1980s, then as a reporter and later a news anchor for KHSL Channel 12 news. He is currently in the real-estate business.

“I’ve been in media a long time and was sort of following community access from afar,” he explained. “I was kind of wondering what was happening with Butte County’s community-access television.

In April he read an article in the Chico Enterprise-Record that Butte College was getting out of the broadcast game.

“I met a few people who said we should save community TV because it is a vital component of democracy. So we started looking at ways we could kind of keep it going.”

He said community broadcasting has come a long way over the years and mentioned Al Mitchell, the late political commentator who hosted a show in the mid-90s called A Work in Progress.

Mitchell was a firebrand who sat in a chair in front of the camera and warned people about the political storms that were brewing here and abroad. He would regularly tell his audience, in what seemed a bit counterproductive, to turn off their TVs and throw them away.

Butte College, Donnelly said, has been cooperative through the transaction.

“They’ve extended their deadline to let us to put all our affairs in order and work with the city to allow the community to take over the station,” he said.

The city is putting up about $20,000 from its Public Education and Government (PEG) programming fund, which is generated by a fee paid by cable TV customers.

Donnelly said equipment must be transported from Butte College to the basement of the Old Municipal Building in downtown Chico. NVCA is renting out a small office in the KZFR studios on the fourth floor of the Waterland-Breslauer building, which is also in downtown Chico.

Part of the franchise agreement with Comcast says the station cannot go off the air.

“We will probably have to run some filler programming like community calendar or something like that just to keep it on the air while we hook up the computer equipment,” Donnelly said. “I think within a couple of days of that move, we should be able to resume exactly how it’s being run now.”

NVCA board members include Sue Hilderbrand, former director of the Chico Peace and Justice Center, and political activist Quentin Colgan. Cathy Emerson serves as the board chairwoman.

“I like to think I got named [chairwoman] because I know nothing about community-access public TV,” said Emerson, who is project manager for Chico State’s Center for Economic Development. “On the other hand, I understand groups, I understand people management, I understand accessing and motivating people who show up with passion and desire to participate. I know that I can make order out of chaos.”

She said she will be in charge of fianancing the station, which will include fundraisers and business partners who recognize the value of community access TV

“We need to figure out a way to start the mechanisms so that NVCA is at the forefront for anybody who wants a public voice,” she said. “We represent the means by which individuals can have a space to be heard, to make their voices known.”

Donations, she said are more than welcome.