Florida Cable System a Model for Others

The city fathers of this Florida Panhandle community launched the state’s first municipally owned cable-television system eight years ago, believing they could do better than private companies.

The system has become a model for other communities nationwide.

“We probably average one (inquiry) a week, a phone call or a visit,” from other cities, said Tom Miller, chief engineer of the Valparaiso Communications System.

Basic Service

Subscribers can get basic service of 28 channels--including stations from New York, Atlanta and Chicago, Music Television, the Cable News Network, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, weather, the Associated Press news service and many other extras--for a bargain rate of $7 a month.

Home Box Office and the Disney Channel are available for an extra charge. Financially, the system is self-supporting.

Modern equipment and a wiring scheme that localizes outages have virtually eliminated complaints.

Mayor Bruce Arnold said recently that the only gripes he gets now are about the lack of a basic-service programs directory, but he said recent improvements in newspaper listings may solve that problem.

Valparaiso is adjacent to Eglin Air Force Base and has a population of 5,200. Cable service is available to all residences, and 1,400 customers have signed up. In fact, Arnold said, only a few homes are not subscribers.

Valparaiso might never have gotten into cable television if it were not for another feature of the system--two-way capability that connects burglar and fire alarms directly to the city’s emergency dispatchers.

Residents also can call an ambulance with the push of a single button and can use the city’s computer to obtain information on any special medical conditions they may have.

‘Saved Lives’

“We’ve saved lives; we’ve saved houses from being burned,” Miller said.

The security hookup is available for a monthly fee of $4 for homes and $10 for businesses.

It is a key reason why Valparaiso was listed as one of America’s 110 safest communities in the book “Safe Places for the ‘80s” by David and Holly Franke.

“We did not go into it with the idea of providing TV-cable service per se,” Arnold said. “We look at it as a utility.”

When the city’s cable franchise with Warner Cable expired in 1976, the city wrote up specifications for the security service and quality improvements and put them out to bid.

“We got no valid responses,” Arnold said. Warner was the only company to respond, offering only the same service it had in the past.

So the city obtained a Federal Communications Commission cable license--no longer required--over Warner’s objections. When Warner declined to sell its lines to the city, the city built its own system from scratch, Arnold said.

Some local residents filed suit, arguing that the city was violating its own charter by competing with private business, but the courts ruled against them. Although philosophically opposed to the idea, some of the critics since have conceded they might be getting better service from the city.

Valparaiso was not the first city in the nation to get into the cable business, but most other early efforts were by municipalities that could not get private service, Miller said.

Significant Size

About 40 cities across the nation now have their own systems. But, according to the Florida Cable Television Assn., Valparaiso’s is still the only municipal system of significant size in Florida.

Arnold attributed Valparaiso’s leadership to the fact that he and three of the four council members at the time were engineers or technicians at Eglin.

“When it comes to technology improvements like this, we have the edge over cities that have just business personnel on their councils,” he said. “The background was there and the technology factor was not an inhibiting one.”