05-24-2017 Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES CITY COUNCIL MAY 24, 2017 commission in the metro area. She stated that some of the fees are paid to the Commission for their operations, and CTV gets a piece of the funds. Ms Wilson reported that they are still working on the agreement with Comcast. She explained that starting in 2018, there will be a different formula in calculating the PEG fee and it will reduce the amount received by about 40%. She stated that they have drafted two different budgets. One version would be doing government access only, and involve laying off several staff. The other budget would be government access and. continue some community access, but it will still involve laying off some staff, and would leave a budget deficit of about $200,000. Ms. Wilson explained that they could pull some money out of the reserve fund for a couple of years to cover the deficit, and they would sell one of the production trucks and the van for additional short term revenue, but they need to find a way to make this plan sustainable for the long run. Ms. Wilson explained that Roseville schools are the biggest user of the CTV productions truck and produce 71 school events annually. She noted that this costs CTV $73,000 annually and the school district has gotten it for free. She stated that St. Anthony and Mounds View schools are also users of the production truck. She explained that they are looking at ways for the schools to be able to continue to do their productions. Ms. Wilson stated that the Board prefers to do the government access and some of the community programming, at least for a while, and look for ways to diversify their funding in order to continue. She stated at this point, she is asking the cities to think about what they want to contribute to help continue their community programming, otherwise they will have to do government access only. Fischer asked how NSCC compares to other commissions with the reduced budget. Ms. Wilson stated that NSCC is still ahead of other commissions since they negotiated a higher percentage of gross revenues. She noted that for communities of our size, they were getting a lot of money. Keis asked how long the next contract was for. Ms. Wilson stated the current one is for 10 years, but the CenturyLink contract was only for five years. She noted that a 10 year contract is fairly standard now. Montour stated that he is a liaison on the NSCC Board, and explained that if they go to government access only, residents will not see any community events or sports, and possibly no school board meetings either. He stated residents would only see city meetings. He noted that viewership on the channels is down since more people are streaming their television online versus watching on cable. He stated that some cities are open to releasing some of their franchise fee funds to support the community programming and some are not. He noted that Little Canada