I attended the scheduled cable board meeting in the TV studio at GRA on October 22, 2014. On arrival, I discovered I was the first person there, so I took a seat at the table and waited for the others to arrive. A moment later, Councilman and Cable Board member Loren Boyum came in. I said, "Hi, Loren."
Without returning my greeting or even meeting my eyes, Loren said, "You're not allowed to sit at the table with us." He crossed to a stack of extra chairs and began unstacking and setting them up several feet away. "This is the gallery. This is where you can sit."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because this is a city council function." He slammed a chair into place. "So were going to have a gallery here, just like at City Hall."
Another meeting functionary, whose name I don't know,entered the studio from the gallery. "The cable board meeting is in the gallery," he said. "We're all set up in there."
Loren and I followedhim into the gallery, where a couple more functionaries were already present. By the time I reached the table, they were already setting up chairs to form a new gallery, again well back from the table.
Since the meeting wasn't yet in session, I stepped away to make a 90 second phone call. When I came back, a few more people had arrived, and three sides of the meeting table were now largely occupied. I picked up one of the gallery chairs, took it to the empty end of the table and placed it directly behind one of the two empty chairs.
"You can't sit there," one of the functionaries said sharply.
"I'm a little hard of hearing," I replied. "I can't hear people from over there."
It doesn't matter," the functionary said(I believe this was GRAA president and Morrison County Public Defender, Scott Wonderlich). "You'll have to sit in the gallery or leave the meeting."
"Why?" I asked.
"You're not part of this meeting, and we don't have to explain anything to you," he said.
I took up my chair and returned to the side of the table I'd come from, but, again, pulled up close behind the one unoccupied chair.
"You can't sit that close," a functionary said.
Exasperated, I frowned and leaned across the table toward him. "Why? Are you afraid I'll contaminate you?"
"We placed the chairs over there because that's where we want the gallery; move your chair back there or leave."
I moved my chair back.
From what I could hear from there, I gathered there wasn't a quorum present, so for five minutes or so, they all explained to each other, who hadn't emailed whom (Lori Kasella was implicated, I think), and gosh, no single person there had all four board members' phone numbers, but the one member who was there, claimed to have been notified by US mail - presumably Pony Express - but in the meantime, gee whiz, they guessed they couldn't hold a meeting today after all. Maybe they could try again in a week, if anybody happened to stumble across the missing three in the meantime, but if not, they'd come back next month.
They could easily fail to gather a quorum until hell freezes over, if they wish, and in the meantime they've received many thousands of dollars, in money paid by Charter subscribers (like me) as a fee of a few dollars a month designated for public access subsidy*. there have been no programs aired since November of 2013, but we all haven't stopped being charged. Where's that money? Upwards of $10,000 out of our pockets. Can we have it refunded to us? Has it already been spent? Who's overseeing that for us?
The people who hold city offices, or in some cases city jobs, and who sit on city committees, pass around hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually, most of which comes out of either our pockets or our hides. So that money doesn't come out of nowhere, but sizable amounts of it occasionally seem to vanish into nowhere, whenever we're not paying attention.
Of course, it's hard to pay attention when you're not allowed to sit close enough to hear what they're saying in meetings, and even harder to monitor them when they abandon meetings before they begin because three of the four people who must attend can't be found for a month at a time. The cable board has managed to take our money and give us nothing in return for 330 days and counting. Who else would you stand to pay for nothing, eleven times in a row? (So far.)
I'll keep you posted.
*The public access surcharges on your cable bill, appear as "Franchise fee" and PEG access fee. The amounts vary from subscriber to subscriber, because people with more expensive tiers of service pay more in franchise fees. Look at your last cable bill, and multiply what you're paying by thousands of other local customers. No matter how you so the math, it's pretty staggering.
