An Open Letter To Mayor And Council Of The City Of Tucson, as delivered in chambers on 19 May 2015

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TUCSON, ARIZONA, 21 May 2015 (UFNPSI).

An Open Letter To Mayor And Council Of The City Of Tucson,
as delivered in chambers on 19 May 2015.

Mayor, Council, thank you. My name is Michael Oatman, and I live in Tucson.

I am here to talk to you about dinosaurs … and while you might think I am refering to Access Tucson, … no. To which I refer *is* the Mayor and Council.

You are trying to privatize Tucson 12 and Access Tucson, through the RFP process, when so many of us in the community bear the conviction that our community media should remain fully funded through the City of Tucson.

Now, I thought privatization was a Republican thing ….

The amount you set, $300,000, when the current budget for both is somewhere between $550,000 and $650,000, is clearly not enough for both Tucson 12 and Access, and it is setting a very low bar. These both cannot be funded this way without draconian cuts, or, charging for programming time, or advertising, or all of these.

What’s worse is that you are still keeping millions of dollars in franchise fees which are earmarked to fund both these channels.

Now if you do not have enough pie to go around, please expand the pie and invest in projects, like providing Gigabit Ethernet, which is massively revenue positive, using the Copenhagen or Chattanooga models, as very many US cities are now doing.

Why do we deal with uncertainty? We all know what Access and Tucson 12 are like now. Why risk throwing that all away? Who knows what we will get with private enterprise handling these? It would be that much better to keep them as they are.

Or, is it actually your goal for the RFP process to fail, so that you can sell the property for another giant student housing complex?

Now, if you continue to pursue the RFP process instead of using City Funding … *you* will be DINOs … that is, Democrats In Name Only. Yes, you too will go the way of the dinosaurs, and *your* asteroid will be *your* loss in *your* next election.

Thank you.

~ ~ ~

Michael Oatman
Host / Producer,
Illegal Knowledge TV
(520) 302-5465
mac@IllegalKnowledge.com
IllegalKnowledge.com