Changing Channel 15: Who's Got the Remote?

Not only is the saga of Channel 15 a soap opera, now it's a cliff-hanger, too. As of this writing, the Austin Music Network will cease to exist at midnight on Thursday, Sept. 30. However, earlier that day, the City Council is slated to consider, and may actually approve, a long-discussed contract with Austin Music Partners, a private for-profit venture led by broadcast-biz veteran Connie Wodlinger, to operate Channel 15 as a regional music and entertainment channel in AMN's stead. However, since AMP will clearly not be ready to actually go live with its new programming on Channel 15 for some time, City Hall is also poised to craft a new agreement with Austin Community Television to operate the channel for between three and six months, in the process absorbing the current AMN operation.

However, the ACTV board is currently under attack from several of its producers, who have threatened legal action if the AMN deal moves forward without certain desired safeguards, and who have challenged the board's authority to hire AMN general manager Louis Meyers as ACTV's new "creative director," which it did earlier this month. And it's unclear exactly how ACTV is going to pay for the continued operation of AMN, since the funds to support AMN's transition are supposed to come from AMP, under the terms of the still-not-approved deal. "If I understand right, we're moving to ACTV to continue broadcasting on Channel 15," Meyers told the Chronicle on Monday. "But we weren't even allowed to start discussing the logistics until the (City Council) Telecom Subcommittee gave us the green light on Friday morning. It's all been speculation at this point, and there's still a lot of discussion that has to happen internally at ACTV."

At this point, managing the actual physical move of AMN is a tough enough challenge for Meyers, who points out that "everybody is looking to me for answers, but I'm pretty far down the totem pole here." The organizational challenge has been just as arduous for ACTV, which all summer has been dealing with an eruption of outrage from access-TV producers. While that dispute has played out in a variety of venues – including the Telecom Subcommittee, the Music and Telecommunications commissions, and the courthouse – at this point neither AMN nor City Hall is directly in that line of fire.

Rather, the producers' ire, accompanied by several different threats of legal action, is with the ACTV board itself, which the producers say has acted ham-handedly and without regard for the nonprofit's mission or bylaws. "Our objective as the Producers Advisory Committee is to make the Board follow its own rules," Stefan Wray, leader of that committee, wrote Monday in a letter to Meyers – informing the AMN head that, in the producers' view, his hiring by the board (rather than by ACTV Executive Director John Villarreal) was illegal. "It's not about you. It's about our Board." (Meyers – who, rumor has it, had been entertained, with or without his knowledge, as a replacement for Villarreal, hence the board's hands-on involvement – says he'll "gladly step back and see what happens next.")

Wray and other producers – who had a scheduled court date Wednesday to seek permission to depose current and former ACTV board members and staff – have also said they'd seek an injunction against any ACTV/AMN deal that didn't designate Channel 15 as an access channel (a "public, educational, and government" or PEG channel, in telecomspeak) for the duration of the contract. Channel 15 specifically isn't an access channel under the terms of the city's franchise agreements with Time Warner and Grande Communications, and the producers argue that ACTV's own articles of incorporation and bylaws prohibit it from operating anything other than a PEG channel. (Similar concerns were raised by the Music and Telecommunications commissions when they jointly considered the whole Channel 15 situation last week.)

Though the producers' activism has already had repercussions within ACTV – leading to board-member resignations, personnel changes, and both sides lawyering up – it seems to have had little effect on City Hall. City Manager Toby Futrell was given authority by the City Council this summer to pursue whatever deal she deemed appropriate to keep Channel 15 on the air until its assumption, if that should happen, by AMP. "Truly, it's the city's responsibility to make sure there's still programming on Channel 15," she says. "We have a tentative agreement with ACTV and AMN to help us do that. But even if they end up not doing anything, we have a plan to go forward, and the channel won't go dark. Regardless of what happens on Thursday" – when the council considers the AMP deal – "that's what happens on Friday."

And for its part, the council is continuing its hands-way-off stance on ACTV, focusing on AMP's end of the dial. "I hope ACTV can work out something reasonable, but the two issues need to be kept separate," says Council Member Betty Dunkerley, who sits on the Telecom Subcommittee with Jackie Goodman and Raul Alvarez. "The first step is to get the AMP contract and then determine how AMN will be handled in the interim."

The Telecom Subcommittee spent nearly six hours last Thursday working over the latest – and in Dunkerley's assessment now "very close" to final – version of an AMP contract; "now the council as a whole needs to take a look at it." Despite the exceedingly tight timeline, Dunkerley acknowledges it's possible, though unpalatable, that this deal won't be approved Thursday before AMN's official expiration. "But it's critical for Connie [Wodlinger] to move forward," Dunkerley says, "because she needs to get her backers and investors together to make a significant investment in the network, and that's going to take at least 90 days, and she needs a contract in hand to do that."

All of which leaves Meyers, officially, for now, where he and AMN have been for months. "I did the job I was hired to do," he says, "and that job ends Thursday at midnight." He adds that even if the legality of his ACTV hiring is affirmed, he may decide "it's time to gracefully bow out. This may be about as much fun as I can handle."