SLOVAKIANS FILMING TV SHOW HERE; CREW TO FOCUS ON GOVERNMENT

Cape Girardeau will be on television in Senica, Slovakia.

Three television journalists from that town are spending four days here to learn about the way people participate in the running of the city. They are incorporating what they learn into a documentary.

"We want to know how volunteers work in small cities and how they can improve local government," said Andrea Chomova, the only one of the three who speaks English.

Thursday, they met with city officials and toured KFVS-TV. They shot films of Cape Girardeau from the 12th floor of the KFVS building. They plan to tour city facilities today and go to the Business Expo.

Slovakia's experience with democracy is scant, having been part of Hungary or the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 800 years, until the formation of Czechoslovakia after World War I. It has been an independent country only twice in history -- during World War II after the Nazis dismembered Czechoslovakia, and since 1993, two years after the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist government. Czechoslovakia had democratically elected governments between the world wars and from the end of World War II until a Communist coup in 1948.

Slovakia has roughly the same population as Missouri in less than one-third of the area. Its national government has many of the functions of our federal and state governments and more. For example, it controls curriculum in local schools and runs the police force that arrests people accused of serious crimes. A locally-run police force enforces only the equivalent of municipal ordinances.

Donald Gould, a retired foreign-service officer from the United States Information Agency, escorts them on their trip through the states. He took them to Northampton, Amherst and Greenville, Mass., Cape Girardeau and Paris, Ill.

The USIA, which is helping with the tour, wants to show them cities with different kinds of government, Gould said. In Northampton, a city of 29,000, the full-time elected mayor has greater powers than the mayor of Cape Girardeau, where the city manager runs the city from day-to-day and the part-time mayor has little more power than a city council member.

They came to Cape Girardeau upon the suggestion of a television producer for the USIA whose sister, Adele Kupchella, lives here.

They've been struck by many of the similarities in the way Senica and Cape Girardeau's governments run. For example, Senica has a board similar to Cape Girardeau's Planning and Zoning Commission. However, unlike Cape Girardeau, where nearly every meeting has some group of neighbors airing their opinions about a proposed zoning change, few people ever show up in Senica.

"In the previous (Communist) regime, people had those rights, but the people did not know that they could use them," Chomova said after conferring with her colleagues, Stanislav Prokes and Ivan Prikopa. "Maybe they were scared."

Asked what they noticed the most about the United States, they all said, "The big traffic."

They were shocked to find out that Cape Girardeau did not have a bus system. "In our town, in small towns and big towns, we have means of transportation, buses and trains," Chomova said.

Prikopa and Prokes own a television channel that broadcasts the only local programming on Senica's 25-channel cable television system.

Prokes, a cultural employee of the state department under the Communist regime, started making amateur films on his own time 15 years ago. His films won awards at some international competitions and he built his own business.

Prikopa and Prokes have worked together for five years running a video production studio, saved up and three years ago won a license for their television station.

"After the revolution, there was a chance to become entrepreneurs," Prokes said.

They want to show how citizens here participate in our government to inspire the citizens there to be more active. "We'd like to wake up those people so they use their rights."