Supervisors Consider Televising Meetings

When he took office two years ago, Ventura County Supervisor Frank Schillo said one of his chief goals was to get board meetings aired on cable television.

Now the board is set to begin laying the groundwork for establishing a county government channel with each of the six cable television operators in the county.

“The public needs to know what the supervisors are doing,” Schillo said. “And this is the best way for them to find out.”

Earlier this year, supervisors granted GTE a cable franchise agreement with the condition that it provide a government channel and collect a small monthly fee from each subscriber to help pay for the channel’s operations.

The 19-cent monthly fee is expected to raise $315,000 over seven years to pay for the purchase and installation of video equipment at the Ventura County Government Center.

Schillo’s plan calls for similar agreements to be established with Tele-Communications Inc., which supplies cable service to 76% of the households in the unincorporated area of the county, and Century Cable and Jones-Intercable, which serve 16% of the households.

The three cable companies combined serve 19,711 households in the unincorporated areas around the cities of Camarillo, Ventura, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Thousand Oaks, Santa Paula, Ojai, Fillmore and the Bell Canyon area.

If all goes as planned, board meetings could be televised within the next four months, Schillo said.

Eventually, he said, the county would negotiate agreements with the rest of the county’s cable television operators, which include Avenue Cable, serving the west end of Ventura; Falcon Cable, serving southeastern Ventura County and Malibu, and Comcast Cablevision, serving Simi Valley.

The board will consider the proposal at its Tuesday meeting.