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Groups laud city cable deal but request some changes
Thursday, December 16, 1999 By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
School and community leaders endorsed the main provisions of the city's tentative cable television franchise agreement with AT&T Corp. yesterday, though they asked Pittsburgh City Council to make changes, as did critics of the deal.
At a four-hour hearing in the council chamber, city and AT&T officials explained the 10-year agreement they announced last month, which would allow the company to begin a $40 million upgrade of the city's cable system that will provide high-speed computer, video and phone services to AT&T customers.
About 40 people addressed council about the plan, which the city had hoped to finalize by the end of the month.
But with council entangled in a budget dispute with Mayor Murphy, that's an unlikely timetable. The city probably will temporarily extend the current cable agreement it brokered with Tele-Communications Inc. 15 years ago.
AT&T bought TCI and took over the city's cable system this year.
Acting city school Superintendent Helen Faison and other school officials said they favored the agreement but urged two changes: exempting schools from the 5 percent franchise fee in monthly cable bills, which goes into the city budget, and adding zoning language allowing schools to have less-expensive aerial connections to the cable system rather than underground wiring.
AT&T has agreed to directly wire schools, libraries and museums with high-speed fiber-optic cable wire, if the company is granted contracts to provide the service and the institutions hire AT&T to manage computer networks they build.
Rick Flanagan of the Pittsburgh I-Net Working Group, a consortium of community groups, also endorsed the city's deal, saying his organization reached a tentative agreement with AT&T yesterday that would allow community groups to tap into high-speed networks built for schools and other institutions.
Elbert Yaworsky, who directs the Electronic Information Network for the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh but serves as advocate for 55 museums countywide, asked council for the same exemption from franchise fees that the schools sought.
Jim Mazur, a regional vice president for AT&T, said the requests for zoning changes and fee exemptions were "appropriate" but noted they'd have to be accepted by the city, which would lose fee money.
Another museum official, Sara Radelet, associate director of the Mattress Factory in the Central North Side, hailed the agreement for raising the city's technological profile and providing better access to the museum's Web site, which gets more than 50,000 visitors per week.
Several officials from local Internet service providers asked council to strengthen rules that would give them access -- at a price -- to AT&T's high-speed cable. They said such access would increase competition and lower rates for residents, and they equated their plea to those of community cable television stations that were given cable access in agreements brokered a generation ago.
Jim Ferlo, who with Sala Udin and council telecommunications chairman Dan Cohen were the only council members to attend most of the hearing, said council would consider several changes to the agreement, including requiring AT&T to provide support to community groups for Internet access.
Council has leverage over the company and "now is the time to resolve the issues," Ferlo said.
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