Monday, March 3, 2014

City of Racine to Ask Surrounding Communities to Help Pay for City's CAR25/BelleTV Public Access Station

From Racine Community Media:

"BREAKING NEWS: CITY OF RACINE TO ASK CALEDONIA, MT. PLEASANT, WIND POINT, AND OTHER SURROUNDING COMMUNITIES TO HELP PAY FOR CITY’S CAR25/BELLETV ACCESS STATION!!!!" 

"Racine- According to Racine Aldermen and Cable Commissioners, the surrounding communites have had access to the City Of Racine’s cable access tv station, for free, long enough. Despite The City Of Racine residents paying $160K a year for the under utilized channel, The City Of Racine will ask outlying communities to pay 3 percent for CAR25/BelleTV. It’s a very suprising move considering the 2012 budget was $80K a year and they currently have no sponsors, and currently have less than 6 community members producing programming. It’s mostly old 3 Stooges, Andy Griffith and Bonanza re-runs airing on the channel now days, and that’s when the channel is even functioning or on-air. In a move that was sold to the community and residents 10 months ago by Mayor John Dickert and others, outsourcing the community channel was to SAVE MONEY and be SELF SUFFICIENT. In less than one year, the budget has doubled and the City Of Racine will now ask outlying communites to contribute 3 percent. When asked what the surrounding communities would recieve in return, the answer from the Racine Cable Commission? NOTHING!!!!" 

Read more: http://racinecommunitymedia.tumblr.com/post/78436399224/breaking-news-city-of-racine-to-ask-caledonia

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't they have a tele-thon like Jerry Lewis?

The Mayor and members of the Common Council will be the hosts.

It would bring in hundreds of thousands of $$$ and fully fund the station.

Wasn't the concept of outsourcing Belle TV to Skies Fall Media? It was going to become self sufficient, bring in millions of $$$ and Tourists to Racine!

OrbsCorbs said...

Good idea. Why don't Dickert and his pals man up? There should be a telethon and other fund raising events to cover Dickert's upcoming legal bills, too.

kkdither said...

I heard that we will soon be billing the surrounding communities a user fee for transportation costs associated with the belle urban bus system, as they comprise 20+ percent of the ridership.

More and more, cost sharing will be attempted to suburban communities to cover services used by all, but funded primarily by city based taxes.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Belle TV could do a pay- per-view when some in city government are taken away in handcuffs.

Anonymous said...

This shit just disgusts me, all the crap they went through to gain control of that channel, the lies, the rigging of the contracts, it was painful to watch, and now, less than a year later they've destroyed the thing, and are now asking for even MORE MONEY!! I'm sure this will have something to do with the federal corruption lawsuit the city is about to deal with.

Anonymous said...

I see that according to the 2014 City of Racine budget that they expect to receive $790,000 in revenue from TWC for the "Telecable Franchise" fee.

Yet, according to the same budget, they have budgeted $108,949 for Belle TV operations.

So the City of Racine is still handsomely profiting from the revenue generated from the Telecable Franchise fee.

In addition, Belle TV was moved to a warehouse owned by Jerry Bloom, a friend and campaign contributor of John Dickert.

That's wrong, just like so many other things in Racine.

What's the viewership of Belle TV?

Perhaps it's time to pull the plug on Belle TV, because the City has too many other VITAL services that need funding.

Anonymous said...

Mary Jerger Osterman, Kimberly Kane, Ald. Ray DeHahn, Ald. Ron Hart, Ron Thomas all sit on the Racine Cable Commssion, that says it all right there.

Anonymous said...

Now they are asking other communities to pay for their corruption?

What they did with the CAR25 contract was extremely unethical blatantly and illegal, benefiting themselves and their friends to the detriment of others.

Everyone on the cable commission should be questioned in court, and they just keeping pushing new agendas without the proper process, approval or notice. How many illegal meetings have they had?

Just look at it today, even after they asked for more money and no guidelines, and got it. Now it is essentially defunct. It was all lies and corruption going to profit the Mayor's friends. There are NO NEW REVENUES, NO NEW SPONSORS, less shows, and they have pushed the community away. The only advertisers are the people on the commission getting FREE ADS FOR THEMSELVES while trying to charge others thousands of dollars for it.

It is time for them to ANSWER TO THE COMMUNITY AND THE LAW.

RWWackoStu said...

The city is doing this with everything recently. I know my community will say Hell No.