Left in the dark on local TV news

SIMLA - If the 700 residents of this town an hour northeast of Colorado Springs want to know if a blizzard has closed U.S. Highway 24, or a tornado is bearing down on them, it's going to take an act of Congress.

The trouble is that since Nov. 30 Simla has been in the dark when it comes to local news. That's when the town's cable provider shut down, forcing everyone to switch to satellite TV. And because of esoteric federal regulations, that meant switching from the Colorado Springs TV stations to the Denver stations. It was a hard blow for many in Simla.

"We're just kind of lost without our local stations out of Colorado Springs," said Cliff McQueen, who has lived in Simla for 20 years. "A few people have tried antennas, but all they got was fuzz and snow."

The satellite companies, Dish Network and DirecTV, could give Simla those stations simply by flipping a switch. But getting them to do so may literally require that act of Congress.

"What's crazy is Congress doesn't decide if I survive on a closed highway in a blizzard," said Jim Sharp, a Simla resident. "It's just plumb dangerous not to be able to get Colorado Springs stations."

Take the case of JoAnn Curtiss, a Simla city councilwoman. Recently, she planned to visit her mother in Colorado Springs. Don't bother, her mom called to say, the highway's closed because of snow. That fact, essential in this town that is linked to the wider world via Highway 24, was not reported on Denver television.

"We're not Denver, we have nothing to do with Denver," Curtiss said.

Curtiss has a long list of road closures, school closures, fires and weather that have affected Simla just in the last month, since the cable system was shut down. The Denver TV stations, she said, covered none of them.

"They're not covering our public safety issues," she said. "I'm really worried about when the tornadoes start."

It's no idle worry: Nearby Limon was devastated by a 1990 tornado. But it goes beyond emergencies.

"There's so much news that's of interest to us that comes out of the Springs that's not going to come out of Denver," said Jerry Allen, Simla's mayor. "I'm a great Air Force Academy fan, and I'm not going to get that out of Denver."

The problem started with the federal government, with a bill called the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act of 2004. Congress wanted satellite subscribers to get TV stations from their own region, instead of relying on national feeds from New York or Los Angeles.

So it allowed the satellite companies to carry those local channels and deliver them to the local television markets. There's the rub: Simla is a mile across the Elbert County line, and so gets lumped into the Denver television market, as determined by the ratings company Nielsen Media Research.

Don't blame Nielsen, says Todd Stecker, an information services specialist for the television ratings company. Nielsen determines TV markets by county, and since most of Elbert County is closer to Denver than Colorado Springs, that's where it ended up, Stecker said.

"We have problems like this all over the country," he said. "A lot of people who are in certain counties were left out."
The satellite companies say their hands are tied.

"By law, Dish Network cannot transmit local signals outside of a customer's DMA (Designated Market Area)," said Robin Zimmerman, a Dish Network spokeswoman.

That rule does have some wiggle room: The FCC has a list of "significantly viewed stations" that can be added to those local stations - and the Colorado Springs stations are on the list for Elbert County. The roadblock here is bandwidth, said Robert Mercer, a DirecTV spokesman.

"We thoroughly understand consumers' need to receive those signals," he said. "Unfortunately, we do have capacity limitations that prevent us from delivering them. You can either get one or the other because of the capacity limitations."

The Denver stations could grant waivers to Simla to switch to Colorado Springs television, except that TV stations essentially never grant waivers.

"The standard answer to that is, ‘No,'" said Mark Cornetta, the general manager at Denver's KUSA/Channel 9. "We don't want them watching someone else's programming that's part of our license to distribute."

There's a similar problem in Durango, Cornetta said, where viewers are part of the Albuquerque TV market, even though they'd rather have Denver stations.

The FCC, which oversees all of this stuff, is reviewing the rules governing local television retransmission - but it's been reviewing the rules for a year already. Officials with the FCC did not return phone calls.

Shannon Dunham, a former cable company attorney who is a St. Louis-based lawyer for the Denver firm Sherman and Howard LLC, looked into Simla's plight and said the town's options are few.

"It sounds as though the Denver stations have refused to allow the carriage of the Colorado Springs stations," Dunham wrote in an e-mail. "Stations fear that importation of out-of-market television stations by satellite operators would reduce local stations' ratings, thus jeopardizing local stations' ability to continue providing local programming to all viewers."

The town's best bet, she said, would be to find another company to take over its cable system, which the old owner, FairPoint Communications, said would be too expensive to upgrade for digital television service. So far, there are no takers for the system.
Simla's last hope may be Arkansas Razorbacks football.

An Arkansas congressman, Rep. Mike Ross, wants to make sure his constituents can watch their beloved Hogs instead of their southern rivals, the Louisiana State University Tigers. Trouble is, much of southern Arkansas is part of the Shreveport, La., television market.

In 2007, Ross sponsored the Television Freedom Act to give viewers in these cross-border markets flexibility on which TV signals they get. Colorado 3rd District Rep. John Salazar was a co-sponsor of the measure.

That bill died in committee, but Ross plans to raise the issue again next year when the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act is due to be extended and reauthorized.

Whether anything will come of that, and whether Ross' state-line bill provides relief for Simla's county-line problem, only time will tell.

In the meantime, residents on the west side of the hill in Simla can get the Colorado Springs stations with an antenna.

Of course, almost the whole town is on the east side of the hill. Another option, as a few Simla residents have discovered, is to skirt the rules by telling the satellite company that they live across the county line in Ramah. It's illegal, however.

"It's like you're hitting your head against a stone wall here," Simla's McQueen said.

So, Simla is left to wait for an act of Congress.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0275 or awineke@gazette.com