Steller: Outdated Access Tucson still has value worth saving

Volunteers Brad Phipps, and Heather and Fred Gonneville are ready to record an edition of “Local Matters,” a television show dedicated to the doings of Tucson-area nonprofits shown on Access Tucson, the local public-access cable channel.

But the mood Thursday afternoon is resigned. Scenes like this, a part of Tucson life for the last 30 years, appear doomed. The city’s real-estate administrator, Hector Martinez, sent a letter Thursday giving Access Tucson notice that it plans to terminate the channel’s lease June 30 at the city-owned building, 124 E. Broadway, that Access Tucson has occupied since 1985.

This is not the first time the city has proposed or made drastic cuts to funding for the public-access channel, which is operated by the nonprofit Tucson Community Cable Corp. But it’s the first time the city has proposed eliminating funding completely and selling the building.

“We’re taking that really seriously, rallying the band,” Lisa Horner, executive director of Access Tucson, said as she showed me around Thursday.

The elimination of city funding, now or soon, is perhaps an inevitable outcome of the city’s repeated budget deficits and long-term advances in technology. What Access Tucson gave the public in the 1980s and 1990s, a way to reach an audience using expensive video equipment and a cherished cable TV channel, is no longer such a rare or desirable commodity.

The easy availability of high-quality cameras and Internet venues such as YouTube have made the World Wide Web the new home of the kind of narrowly targeted productions featured on public-access TV. Indeed, many of the people who produce shows at Access Tucson also have YouTube channels where they post the shows they make at the station.

“It is not (for) the masses,” Horner said. “That has never been the intent, programming for the masses.”

Tucson’s public-access channels are paid for by franchise fees charged by the city to Cox Communications and Comcast, which serves a small portion of the city. The fee — for Cox, 5 percent of gross revenue produced in the city — are the way the cable company pays for its access to the alleys and other rights of way to hook up their cables. Last year, the city’s take from the franchise fee totaled $3.4 million, and the city is putting about $300,000 toward Access Tucson, the rest going to the city’s general fund.

As part of the agreement, the cable company must also provide two channels for the city. Pima Community College and the University of Arizona are also provided channels under separate agreements.

Of course, the only way for Tucsonans to get any of this programming is to pay for cable TV, something that is less and less necessary as viewers buy satellite TV or stream programs on the Internet.

While some of the programming on Access Tucson has a clear social benefit — for example, there are programs aimed at helping local refugees communities learn how local systems work — other programs serve fringe views and interests.

For eight years, Raquel Baranow has hosted a show called 666isMONEY, which the station’s website describes as “a program about abolishing money, law and state.” Baranow told me Friday the show’s departure point is that the biblical reference to the mark of the beast actually is a poor translation of a Greek word and should refer to the “money” of the beast.

“I thought people would pick up on this, especially Christians, but it’s like I hit a brick wall and I’m hitting my head against the brick wall,” she said.

Beyond money, Baranow’s shows deal with conspiracy theories on topics such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Most of this stuff is available on the Internet. But the facilities they have there are great,” said Baranow, who has two YouTube channels. “It’s a tragedy to throw all that away for such a small amount of money.”

Just how much money the city would make by cutting Access Tucson’s funding and selling the building is unclear. The historic building’s value was estimated at about $1 million in 2010, but now downtown is more active, the economy is better and the streetcar line runs right in front of it.

City Attorney Mike Rankin told me that if the council approves the sale of the building, an appraisal will be done, then the building will be put on the market for the appraised value.

Even those who’ve been involved with Access Tucson for decades, such as longtime director Sam Behrend, see that its importance as an outlet for expression has declined. But that’s not all it offers, he noted.

“I think it’s worth fighting for, because, while people now do have other ways of expressing themselves through the Internet or YouTube, there is a function of Access Tucson that involved training,” he said. “They do a lot of training of kids in not just media production but media literacy.”

The Gonnevilles, snowbirds from Saskatchewan, told me training like this is not available in their part of Canada unless you pay for expensive university courses.

It’s clear there is something of value left in Access Tucson. It has equipment, staff, expert volunteers, and a 30-year library of Tucson life on video. There’s a core institution worth saving.

But perhaps now is the time for Access Tucson to evolve into something new, maybe by merging into an existing entity like Pima Community College’s TV station.

The city no longer has the same moral obligation to use its cable franchise fees to fund Access Tucson that it once did. The Internet has made it, in part, a redundant service. But the city ought to give Access Tucson enough money and time to make this transition and save what’s most valuable about itself.