[Vision2020] "Sesame Street" May Save Idaho Public Television

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (January 28, 2010) Spokesman-Review.

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Idaho lawmakers hope to ease public TV cuts
Betsy Z. Russell, The Spokesman-Review

BOISE – Idaho lawmakers aren’t too keen to pull the plug on “Sesame Street.”

Members of a key budget-setting committee Wednesday expressed doubts about
Gov. Butch Otter’s proposal to phase out state funding for Idaho Public
Television over the next four years.

“I just don’t see this committee doing that,” said state Sen. Dean
Cameron, R-Rupert, the co-chairman of the Joint Finance-Appropriations
Committee. “We’re not going to fund based on what we think is going to
happen the next year or the year after that. 
 They’re going to be subject
to the same level of reduction as everyone else.”

State Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, the panel’s co-chairwoman, said, “It’s
my personal feeling that they’re part of the education system.” Without
state funding, she said, the system couldn’t serve all of Idaho’s rural
areas.

Idaho Public Television General Manager Peter Morrill made his budget
presentation to the joint committee on Wednesday and went over what the
governor’s proposal would mean – pulling back from a statewide, “public
service” model for the public TV network to a “market-driven” model that
would focus on the state’s biggest population areas, source of the vast
majority of its donations.

IPTV gets just a quarter of its funding from the state. The rest comes
from donations and federal grants; 82 percent of the donations come from
the Boise area, the state’s largest population center.

Committee members said they’ve been deluged with calls and e-mails asking
them not to cut funding for Idaho Public Television. “Nobody wants us to
eliminate funding for public television,” said state Sen. Joyce
Broadsword, R-Sagle.

State Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, said her constituents have been
asking her “not to cut it – to find someplace else to cut.” Said Sen. Jim
Hammond, R-Post Falls, “The only e-mails I’m getting from my constituents
are in support of public TV.”

Lawmakers are miffed at taking the heat over the proposal at a time when
they’re all up for election. “It’s pretty hard to go home and tell someone
that your grandbaby isn’t going to be able to watch ‘Sesame Street’ any
more – maybe if you move to Boise,” said state Rep. Wendy Jaquet,
D-Ketchum. “I don’t think the committee will have the stomach to do that.”

Keough said she’d like to see IPTV officials try more fundraising in rural
areas and not just give up on them. She noted that Sandpoint residents
raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help area residents who were
ill, and the community came together to save the local Panida Theater.

“I’d like to see a little more aggressive effort before they wrote rural
Idaho off,” she said.

Bell said she hopes Morrill and his team get together with Otter and talk
about “business plans,” as state Parks Director Nancy Merrill did,
prompting Otter to drop his “conceptual” proposal to eliminate the state
Parks Department.

“I have a little ray of hope that they’re working with the governor’s
office to try and find a business plan that may be more to his liking,”
she said.

But Morrill said he’s not yet identified a “Statue of Liberty play” to
make up for the network’s $1.66 million in annual state funding.

The governor’s proposed budget for IPTV for next year is $1.1 million in
state general funds, a reduction of $550,700 or 33 percent.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"It's not easy being green."

- Kermit the Frog