Local access cable TV gets local government, education into homes

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One is a high school student. The other, by his own admission, is "older than dirt."

One talks about sports. The other talks about life, business, politics and other adult issues.

But Jake Sobiech and Alan Miller share one thing in common: They are stars, in their own limited universes, courtesy of government-run local-access cable TV.

The pair are but two of the many comedians, talk show hosts, hobbyists, gadflies and wannabes who populate the 24-hour local-access channels run by area city governments. The channels operate with hundreds of thousands of dollars collected by local governments in fees from cable companies.

Sobiech and Miller have their own shows on Eagan's local cable access channels, which also telecast such offerings as city council meetings and other government hearings.

Each year cities such as Eagan, Burnsville and others spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on buying equipment, producing shows and providing telecasts.

"It's a way of getting local government and education into homes," said Tom Hansen, deputy city manager in Burnsville, which has its own cable access operation.

Municipal channels remain popular, despite the growing availability and use of video-sharing websites such as YouTube.

Local cable is "a wonderful teaching tool, a wonderful vehicle," said Miller, a faculty member in the Cinema Division at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

For more than a decade, Miller has been the host of "Access to Democracy," a show heavy on politics but also featuring "a little bit of everything," he said.

"I don't know if it has an impact on the election," Miller said, "but it does allow people to have more information."

That same philosophy drives Sobiech, who with a group of friends puts on "Offside Sports," a half-hour sports show that runs two or three times a day on Eagan cable.

"The guests we have are me and the crew and some of our friends," said Sobiech, a freshman at Eastview High School in Apple Valley, Minn. His mother drops him off at the studio to record the shows.

Sobiech, Miller and others in Eagan use the studios of Thomson Reuters, the international information company. The firm is in the third year of a public-private partnership with Eagan, which split from its partnership with Burnsville TV in 2009.

Thomson Reuters provides Eagan with free studios in its corporate headquarters and the city provides the equipment. Also, the city provides a few hours of video services for the company each month as part of the deal. The arrangement saves the city, and the company, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"I think it's the only (arrangement) of its kind in the country," said Rick King, Thomson Reuters' chief technology officer in the professional division. "The benefits have been significant. What is surprising is that there are not more of these public-private partnerships."

Tom Garrison, Eagan's city spokesman and executive director of Eagan TV, said the city saves about $100,000 a year by not having to provide its own studio space. The city, in turn, helps produce videos for internal distribution at Thomson Reuters and also helps with company webcasts.

"It's a wonderful partnership," Garrison said. "It's the wave of the future in these resource-constrained times."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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