Meck Commish Sets Remote For New Government-Bailout Channel
Facing a bleak financial future and the near certain death of its programming this summer, public broadcast station WTVI got a million-dollar, midnight-hour reprieve when county commissioners late Tuesday night approved merging the station with Central Piedmont Community College.
As part of the deal CPCC, which will take over administrative management, operation and programming of the station, will receive $357,000 from the county to cover transition costs, along with $800,000 over the next four years to pay for equipment replacement. After that, college officials say taxpayer subsidies long used to keep the station afloat will no longer be necessary.
Also part of the deal, CPCC will use $5 million in previously approved bond money to help renovate and transition the college’s currently vacant Citizens Center into a data center and classroom space, instead of a production facility for CPCC television as originally slated. The college’s cable TV production will shift to the WTVI studio, which will be turned over to CPCC for a $1-a-year lease from the county.
County Manager Harry Jones last week recommended that commissioners not approve the proposed merger, which he called “a government-funded bailout of a failed business model.” In turn, the county board this week approved the merger by a 6-3 vote, with Republican commissioners Jim Pendergraph, Karen Bentley and Bill James in dissent. But not necessarily because they didn’t like WTVI, or wanted to kill local public broadcasting; nearly all commissioners voiced strong appreciation for the programming WTVI produced and the community benefit it provided.
“I support this merger,” Pendergraph said. “I think it’s a grand idea, but I don’t believe that taxpayers ought to have to pay for it. I have a hard time spending other people’s hard-earned money paying for it.”
Commissioner George Dunlap, a Democrat who sits on WTVI’s board of directors, didn’t share the same level of consternation. The only failure of WTVI’s business model, Dunlap suggested, was that county funding for the station had dwindled from a high mark of nearly $4 million a year to “only $1.1 million” during fiscal year 2011.
“By anybody’s imagination, that would put you in a hole,” Dunlap said. “Anybody who could see that could understand why they’re in the situation they’re in right now.”
Jones on Tuesday night reiterated his concerns that repurposing the $5 million in capital funding for CPCC’s Citizens Center would leap frog it over other projects that had already been vetted through the county’s capital prioritization process.
“It would represent a lack of discipline on the part of the board,” Jones said. “It’s a matter of staying committed to [the capital projects ranking list] you approved just nine months ago.”
Bentley shared those concerns, arguing that placing CPCC capital needs ahead of already-ranked and prioritized projects “opens a Pandora’s Box” of potential funding conflicts in the future.
Bentley also questioned why commissioners were being pressed to reach a decision after only two weeks of formal discussion over the merger proposal. While she expressed confidence in CPCC President Tony Zeiss’s ability to make the merger a success, Bentley said the board needed and deserved additional time to consider the specifics of the proposal.
“Test your popularity in the market,” she advised WTVI. “Go to the private sector and say, ‘we need $150,000 or $300,000 in bridge-funding to keep the lights on until we get a business plan together, until we walk this through the capital process, and we can bring it back to the commissioners to get a unanimous vote.’
“If WTVI has the support that has been communicated to me,” Bentley said, “I think the private sector can step up to the plate.”
Commissioner Dumont Clarke, a Democrat, viewed it differently.
“You can tell this story as a failing business model, a last-minute, midnight bailout of an organization, that you’re putting good money after bad,” Clark said. “And that serves the purpose of the folks who are going to vote against this motion. It’s the story they’re going to tell themselves and their constituents, and it’s what they believe.
“I can tell the story totally differently, and it’s what I believe,” Clark said. “So what is the truth? To be honest with you, there is no truth. It’s tied to what our values are and what we think is important.”
Clark, like most good tax-and-spend liberals, values other people’s money and thinks it should be spent according to what he blesses as important.
“The way I can tell this story is we’re not throwing good money after bad,” he opined. “The taxpayers have supported WTVI forever. We have put enormous amounts of money into this. To simply say we’re going to be disciplined, that it’s too late in the game, when there is a very viable proposal on the table to transition this vital community asset to a new platform, one that will provide an enduring asset to this community, is not throwing good money after bad.”
James disagreed.
“If the county had started funding buggy whips in the 1890s, we’d still be funding buggy whips today,” he said. “I think the county never knows how to get out of funding hardly anything unless their back is to the wall, a gun is to their head, and a great recession looms.
“I think this is a great deal for CPCC,” James said. “I don’t think it’s a very good deal for taxpayers.”
After an unsuccessful attempt at trying to get a substitute motion passed that would have seen a separate vote on repurposing the $5 million for CPCC’s Citizens Center, Republican Neil Cooksey voted to approve the original motion.
Commissioner Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, said the merger was taking proven programming in CPCC TV and expanding its reach through its union with WTVI, while paying off county debt and eliminating the bill for ongoing operating expenses.
Lost somewhere in that rosy assessment is the county providing $5 million in newly repurposed bond money for an unranked capital project, along with the $800,000 the county will give CPCC for equipment replacement and the $375,000 the county will provide for transition costs. Roberts’ vision, of course, also assumes CPCC can make the newly merged public broadcasting financially viable without future taxpayer subsidy.
In that vein, she picked up the story where Clarke dropped off; explaining in true progressive fashion how your money belonged to everybody and it was the government’s job to best decide how it should be distributed.
“It’s not county taxpayers losing and CPCC winning,” Roberts said. “We’re all getting our money from the same sources. It’s public money. It’s public money for our community college, public money for the county, public money for education.
“Because there’s public value,” Roberts said, “there are winners and winners in this.”
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