Stories on Street Sweepers and Ugliest Dog : Brea Premieres Cable Telecast of City Events

The television news program opened with scenes from around Brea, followed by a story on the city’s downtown study, features and on-the-scene interviews with reporters holding microphones and flashing smiles.

With that production, Brea premiered its own information program on Wednesday night--one day after Santa Ana shelved a similar idea because it had received publicity before it was approved.

“The Video--Brea Line,” patterned after TV news formats, will be informational and will not involve the “political arena,” Brea Mayor Clarice A. Blamer said Thursday.

“Ours is objective. It’s another form of communication,” Blamer said.

The first 19-minute program for the city of 30,000 included a feature about the winner of the Ugliest Dog contest, a story about the city’s purchase of truck sweepers and a cartoon from the Fire Department urging fire precautions.

“It’s another method for the City Council to keep residents informed about what’s going on in the city,” Public Information Officer Bonnie Dwyer said. “It also creates a sense of neighborhood. It gives them more information about their community.”

The programs will be changed biweekly and presented on Channel 3 to about 12,000 viewers in Brea, La Habra and La Habra Heights, said Glenn Ross, a producer with Century Cable, which is co-producing the newscasts with the city. The show will air at 8 p.m. Mondays and 7 p.m. Wednesdays.

The tab for the first program is $1,200, but salaries of employees already on the city payroll account for most of that, Dwyer said.

Brea’s news-format show will be the first of its kind in the county, cable TV and city officials said Thursday. Some Orange County cities have other types of city-sponsored programs. In Orange, for example, a TV talk show called “A Slice of Orange” is entering its ninth season, said Sabine Wromar, Orange administrative analyst. In Fullerton, Cal State Fullerton and Fullerton College conduct their own programs on separate educational channels, said Lisa Yale, a Group W Cable program director.

In Santa Ana, officials had planned on five-minute newscasts taped twice a week in English and Spanish and rebroadcast several times each day. Santa Ana’s newscasts were to include issues such as discussions between the city and the firefighters’ association regarding problems in the department. But Santa Ana City Council members, angry about advance publicity, said Tuesday they would put the plan on the back burner indefinitely.