LOS ALAMITOS : Council Not Happy With Its TV Image

Local public-access cable operators received some static this week from City Council members upset about the quality of broadcasts of their meetings.

Los Alamitos Television was given a two-month deadline to correct the sound and picture problems. Council members said they will consider canceling the operator’s contract to broadcast the meetings if the problems are not corrected.

Inaudible segments, double images of council members and highly distorted pictures were some of the problems cited by Councilman Anthony R. Selvaggi.

“If this is the type of coverage we are going to get, I don’t want to pay for it,” Selvaggi said. “This is not the way to project a professional image.”

Mayor Alice Jempsa said she was surprised to see Selvaggi on screen during a recent rebroadcast of a council meeting. Selvaggi, she said, was not in attendance at that particular meeting.

Jeffrey Peters, executive director of Los Alamitos Television, said that a wiring error prevented technicians from taping the visual portion of the meeting. The production staff, he said, decided to run the audio portion of the meeting with still images of the council shot at another meeting.

Peters explained that many of the broadcast problems stemmed from outdated equipment and that the company is in the process of upgrading that equipment.