CITY GRANTED MORE POWER OVER TCI IN PROPOSED PACT

The city would have whistle-blowing power to keep TCI Cablevision from straying from stipulations of a 10-year franchise agreement settled upon between the city and TCI.

And TCI general manager Roger Harms, who was seeking a 15-year-pact, has the peace of mind he was looking for after completing two years of negotiations with the city.

That makes both sides happy with a situation that has been in limbo since 1991, when federal law required the city to enter into a new franchise agreement with TCI.

The agreement must still be approved by the City Council.

The Cape Girardeau Cable Committee became involved in discussions about how the city should approach negotiations. When that was finalized in 1993, the city embarked on talks that lingered longer than both the city and TCI had anticipated.

The reason the negotiations took so long is because there were numerous changes in TCI personnel and uncertainty about how future regulations would affect the final agreement.

"The new agreement provides a mechanism to measure the performance of the franchisee," said cable committee member Michael Maguire. "That is something the committee wanted from the very start."

City Attorney Warren Wells said that prior to the agreement the only power the city had as a regulator was to terminate the contract if the company failed to live up to the franchise.

The city has never been able to regulate cost or program content. However, the new agreement would provide specific measures that allow the city to serve as a watchdog over TCI.

"In the past, if there was a minor violation, we wouldn't want to terminate the contract just to solve the problem," Wells said. "But that is all we had to work with. Everything else was so vague and general that neither side was able to get together on exactly what was necessary and what was not.

"The way it stands now, we have some ability to deal with the company if the consumer is having problems."

If there is any violation of the agreement, the city is allowed to serve notice and enforce financial penalties if the notices go unanswered or the problem is not corrected.

Harms said he is more certain of the future of TCI now that negotiations are over. "We had a substantial amount of money to invest in a fiber optic system over the next several years," Harms said. "We wanted to assure the bank that we would be around long enough to justify the loan."

TCI has invested $5 million to $6 million in the new system. The city would give TCI 30 months to convert to the new system.

During the upgrading period, the city and TCI would conduct a survey to determine what additional programing subscribers would want. After getting results of the survey, TCI would present to the city a report indicating its ability to offer such programming and the costs associated with adding it.

The pact calls for a nonexclusive franchise with TCI that allows for other cable companies to come into the city. Although the city always offered outside cable companies the opportunity to compete with TCI, new technology makes that possible now more than it did when the matter was discussed in 1991.

"Before, there was no economic incentive for a company to come into a city that already had customers hooked up to its system," Maguire said. "Now, with direct broadcast satellites, you can come in and compete."

Maguire said the painstaking process involving the city, Cape Cable Committee and TCI was a learning tool that will help all parties when future problems arise. "To TCI's credit, they have been more responsive to consumer complaints since the renewal system began," Maguire said.