A new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule change could threaten the funding sources for local public access television stations, including Greenbelt Access Television (GATe), said board member Konrad Herling in an interview with the News Review.
The new rule passed in a 3-2 vote along party lines by the FCC on August 1. It allows cable providers to deduct the market value of in-kind contributions from the fee they pay to local governments to support public, educational and government (PEG) stations. The PEG fee in Greenbelt is $2.57 per month per subscriber, according to Frank Gervasi, president of GATe. Herling, the secretary for the GATe board of directors, added that this fee made up the vast majority of GATe’s approximately $160,000 annual budget.
Gervasi said that this rule change will only hurt the public. “Subscribers’ fees will stay the same. The telecoms will simply take a bigger share of the fee for themselves for services they already have provided us by law for over 35 years.”
For more of this story, see the September 19 News Review.