I know that sometimes Coastsider can be earnest enough to gag a Smurf. Take the ownership of public records, for example.
I’ve been wrestling with MCTV over the right to publish newsworthy clips from their cablecasts for a couple of years. Through property taxes and cable fees, you and I pay for their palatial offices in Comcast’s El Granada equipment closet, executive director’s $45,000 [Correction: $60,970] annual salary for 25 hours of work a week [PDF of MCTV’s 2005 IRS filing], token payments for their dedicated camera crew, equipment, and even the actual, physical videotapes they use to record the public meetings of our elected bodies.
But MCTV will tell you that they own the contents of those tapes and will not allow anyone to redistribute them. This would be a shocking theft of public property if MCTV’s crime weren’t so penny ante—like stealing pencils from the library.
Last week, Supervisor Rich Gordon weighed in on the controversy [PDF] [Click here for a PDF of MCTV’s county charter] I’ve been bugging him about it for a while, so I only have myself to blame. Sensing that he was unprepared to declare all the recordings to be public property, I asked that the county at least assert its ownership of the tapes it paid for directly—those of Midcoast Community Council meetings. However, I was extremely disappointed that Supervisor Gordon declined. He was willing to say that boards could negotiate ownership with MCTV—but they have every reason not to.
As I told Supervisor Gordon, MCTV’s policy panders to the worst instincts of our elected officials by promising to bury their newsworthy and controversial acts in hours of tedium. Darin Boville looked into how the rest of the county handles this, and learned that no San Mateo city that streams their meetings allows a private party to own its copyrights. MCTV’s policy is so weirdly at odds with their mission and the whole point of taping public meetings that you have to wonder about their motives. Fortunately, the Montara Water and Sanitary District and the Coastside Fire Protection District are more committed to openness than MCTV gives them credit for.
What does all this mean? If you want a copy of last week’s Midcoast Community Council meeting, you can pay MCTV $50, roughly four times what you’d pay for a copy of ”Citizen Kane“.
MCTV’s executive director Constance Malach has made a lot of noise about MCTV’s nonprofit status, continually referring to Coastsider and Montara Fog “commercial” sites. This is a red herring, because (1) MCTV makes more money from its commercial activities than Coastsider and Montara Fog combined, and (2) MCTV has not answered questions about whether it would permit noncommercial sites to redistribute these public meetings.
MCTV is a private organization—in all senses of the word. Their board is self-selected [CORRECTION: elected by a small number of members], and their meetings take place behind closed doors. MCTV has not answered my questions about what material they will accept for cablecast, how they are organized, the names of their directors, or even their price for DVD’s.
I also asked MCTV whether it would cablecast Coastside board meetings that were created by the boards themselves. I received the following reply from Ms. Malach.
MCTV will not accept public meeting videos from third parties for regularly scheduled meetings of local agencies. There are a large number of reasons for this that we can review with you at an appropriate time in the future. We are aware of the sentence in the Gordon letter that you have referred to. Upon seeing the letter, we discussed the matter with the County and we believe they now better understand the rationale behind our policy. Our understanding is that Supervisor Gordon’s letter was not intended to ask us to change our policy, and we are not changing it.
I asked Ms. Malach to set a time, as she promised, when she could explain her reasoning. She replied, “You have my answer.” MCTV is stonewalling, because they are not accountable to the public.
I’ve tried reasoning with MCTV. I’ve tried taking my concerns to the boards themselves. And I’ve tried to talking to the Board of Supervisors. I’m convinced that the only solution is the reform of MCTV itself, but it may not be worth the trouble. More on that later.
How about settling this with an old-fashioned duel at sunset—between Barry Parr and Connie Mallach—standing at opposite ends of the new indoor mall at Princeton-by-the-Sea?
June Morrall