we are talking today with christopher mitchell christopher mitchell is the director of the community broadband networks initiative with the institute for local self reliance he is a leading national expert on community networks and speaks at conferences across the united states on telecommunications policy on a day to day basis he runs community networks dot org the comprehensive online clearinghouse of information about community broadband in tw released the community broadband map a comprehensive map of community or networks and in two thousand and twelve he published three in depth case studies of city wide publicly owned gigabit networks titled broadband at the speed of light christopher thank you very much for coming to spend time with us this morning thank you for having me so start out tell us a little bit about your organizations start with the institute for local self reliance absolutely we're about forty one years old a nonprofit organization that focuses on keeping economic and political power local we think the power should be at the local level and not vested in either federal government or large corporations in about ten years ago we were looking at internet access and recognizing that this was something that was becoming essential for the community and that local governments communities had no real power to influence it to make sure that there was certain levels of service delivered quality prices they really didn't have much power at all to make sure they're well served and we started looking at how they can solve that issue in our focus ever since has been on municipal networks and cooperative approaches and other locally rooted solutions that make sure the network serves the community rather than the community serving the network but we work in all kinds of areas as well small businesses encouraging main street over a national chain stores we work with  decentralized energy we work with encouraging composting and other useful ways of turning the what we often throw away into useful materials so there's a variety of programs but i run the one that focuses on the internet and how did you get involved with internet based issues well i was fortunate enough to be raised my dad had gone back to college when i was young and he got into computers and so i sort of grew up with computers becoming a thing you know in the right age where i was maybe you know at high school and people started learning at the same called the internet i started making web pages and this is back when it was really easy and i did some server administration i worked on as a programmer i did a number of things like that but i didn't really want to do a lot of programming in that sort of thing so i end up going back to school and i got a master's in public policy and about three or four days before i graduated a job posted to  work on this interesting nonprofit and you know sometimes i say that this is a an organization that was looking for someone that had a technical background was interested in this brand of locally focused politics and you know had a policy background as well and in the venn diagram i was the one person in sort of the maybe five state area that had the his qualifications so so i joined up with me years ago and i've loved it ever since so what brings you to seattle well for seattle it's i've been out here a number of times there's a lot of interest in a community network and upgrade seattle just launched this week which is an organization that's really working toward a municipal broadband network making sure that everyone has some great access in seattle and so we had an event last night at town hall i guess we had an event recently in town hall and then we  also had two luncheon learns where we had met with some people from city council and anyone that wanted to come down for one of them and the other one was at the impact up where a lot of more technical kinds of folks were and just talking about these things i usually give a short presentation and then a lot of q and a so so that's one reason and other reason is frankly i always love coming out to seattle and friends out here and it's always you know it's a wonderful place to visit all right so give us a idea about back with your organization how many municipalities how many cities in the u s are wrestling with the idea of publicly owned and controlled broadband you know i actually thought you were  lead somewhere else with that i was going to say every municipality is wrestling with how to get better internet access but many of them have not really considered publicly owned options yet i think in this time and age of lot of local governments are intimidated by that where they have some level of access to public library or schools or water department that sort of thing so this is not something that's totally rare but it's growing rapidly in terms of cities that are considering mixing it up with the existing cable and telephone companies to provide some level of competition and in the one of the faster growing areas is larger cities we're seeing obviously seattle is in many ways been studying this more often and in more in depth than most large cities new york city chicago san francisco boston and number of other cities are all looking at this and trying to figure out what targeted investments they can make there is there's these networks that are often chattanooga seen as the ringleader of of the cities that have built their own network and effectively i like to say they've sort of perfected the cable monopoly model they've built a network like comcast they offer services like comcast but they do it at a more affordable rate and with good customer service and they don't raise rates constantly they have much better reliably tip reliability typically so but there are or there they've sort of followed a similar model of delivering that service they've built the network to have one seller on it which is what comcast as you can go on the comcast network you can only get services from comcast on the chattanooga fiber network that they built you can only get services from chattanooga and those other approaches that some communities have wrestled with that i think seattle might consider where actually tacoma's done this on the internet access side in mt vernon has done it with incredible success just north of seattle in skagit county where the city has built fiber and works with private companies or independent companies because or you could have a nonprofit or other kinds of and tities offering service but fundamentally the city focuses on doing the infrastructure and independent entities offer services there's a financial challenge with that model in there's a number of things that are still being worked out but i think if we think about the future and where we want to be in the next five or ten years i think we'd like to live in a world where we have a lot more choice and where we know that there can be a lot more choice where we're comcast can't just buy out the comp of the competition to reestablish its monopoly which i can i can put that on comcast but let me just say that it's this is the way the american system works it's not fair to somehow claim that comcast is an anomaly if brian roberts the c e o of comcast was not acting in the way he was he'd be replaced with someone who would be doing that so it's important to recognize sometimes that that these risk problems we deal with they have a much deeper cause than just saying it's a bad company we're dealing with but to answer your question i think a lot of cities are looking at this and we're seeing more that are looking at public options and  in seattle there's a recent survey as part of a study said that two out of three people in seattle want the local government to do something whether that's building an operating a network or enabling others to come in with a city own network that would be services delivered by the private sector but two out of three people in seattle apparently really want the local government to take action to make it better i could be wrong but i swear i saw on this morning on the internet that the the founder of comcast had died and the father yes father oh yeah so yeah brian roberts father whose name escapes me currently i was not aware of that but in honor of that comcast is going to be running at half speed some dark humor but i guess received speaking of dark humor dark fiber is something that seattle currently has a significant amount of can you talk about what seattle uniquely has that other municipalities don't have currently yes yes has been very smart in recent years and as i was thinking about it over the last few days if i had to guess seattle as a local government probably spends  has probably saved tens of millions of dollars over the years because it does not lease lines to connect the schools the fire stations all the public facilities all the public buildings that are scattered around town many of them are connected with fiber that the city put in as part of other projects often seattle city light which also needs a lot of fiber to connect it substations so over the years they built these fiber networks connecting these key locations in town they put in extra fiber and that makes sense because the cost of a project is significant to get fiber in the ground typically the cost of adding twice as much fiber as you might need is very low and so you always want to put in as much fiber as you can to make sure you never have to go back and add more fiber in a given route so seattle has had this extra fiber and so if you have a bunch of fiber and they say one hundred strands in a given route from point a to point b you might be using ten of them you might have another ten that are reserved for future use or for if something goes wrong with those first ten but then you'd have another eighty strands that were considered dark because they're not being used you light fiber when you put these lasers on each side that allows it to transmit information so when the fiber is not being used it's considered dark and it's terrific to lease to companies that have a need to use a high bandwidth capacity so data centers companies like microsoft and amazon are going to really want to use dark fiber connecting their large employment centers their data centers and things like that but also other carriers companies you might not be familiar with  like level three and cogent that want to get from one place in town to another may use that rather than putting their own in so when you have that dark fiber you can enable more investment and you have the ability i would say to think about how in the future the city might be offering services itself you know you might it might itself decide to use some of that fiber to deliver better access in many ways the dark fiber that exists is kind of like an interstate and if you want to make it useful to  people and residents in businesses in the areas that they live or and small businesses that are in neighborhoods you would need to build sort of the state roads and the driveways and all those sorts of things to make it useful to people and honestly that's a significant expense is really a larger expense but having that backbone in place is a terrific start that many other cities don't have currently all right so just i believe last week the city of seattle came out with a report based on a study of the potential for putting in a community broadband network can you talk about the report and what results you think are significant from yes this was  the most recent report of a number that have been done over the years and i think i'd like to preface this by saying this is not unusual chattanooga which is i think one of the best places in the united states to get internet access today started studying this in the ninety's and they did feasibility studies and they ended up starting with an incremental approach in the early two thousand and then they thought about doing a larger fiber network to the whole town and they didn't really like the numbers yet so it's not unusual for a city to be studying this over a long period of time this study came back and there's a number of people including in the mayor's office that seemed enthusiastic about making this work when this is this would be a citywide type approach that would involve borrowing on the order of four hundred fifty to six hundred million dollars you know basically give or take half a billion dollars to build a fiber optic network basically out to everyone that would offer level of service at a price point that's pretty common around the country for that which is where you can often get it from google or cities that are doing this about seventy eighty bucks a month this is an option that i think of as a high risk high reward type approach where everyone gets service and the feasibility study came back and basically said that would be a high level of risk on the order you would need on the order of forty percent of people that could take service from the network to take it which is something that is  but takes many years i mean six or seven years often for i would estimate for a community like this with a tremendous marketing campaign and in the face comcast in time comcast and century link here lowering prices because one of the first things that happens when faced with competition is these companies basically say we're just lower rates temporarily to drive competition out of town so let's imagine a c l built a network you want to cancel your service with comcast to go to the seattle network you call comcast and say hey i'm done with you and they say hey how about if we offer you the service at half the price you're paying before which is lower than the city could do or any competitor really could do because comcast already built their network the cost for them to offer services dramatically lower than any new entrant so they have a tremendous ability to basically lower their prices to levels that no new network can compete with and even though the service won't be as good americans are often going to take that price savings rather than going with that new network so basically when you analyze the report from last week you find that that approach is just a little bit too risky for the mayor and i think that's a reasonable conclusion but from our point of view at the institute for local self reliance and i think upgrade seattle shares this is in some ways it actually opened better windows then it closed because if the city built the network in that way for the next five years it would be focused on cash flowing the network it would be focused on how to make sure the network was paying for itself they be focused on the people that can pay seventy dollars a month for the gig and there's i think a lot of people who would like to have that will service they'd like to keep their money in the community they like to you know support a locally owned option but it wouldn't be getting at the people that can afford a high priced service you know and i say high priced in the sense that it's just you know for a number of people there was going to take that forty or fifty dollars a month or and then there's still a number of people that could only afford five ten dollars a month you know so it's it's very challenging to figure out how do we serve those folks in seattle has an opportunity now to say all right we know that it's going to be too challenging currently where the federal government refuses to restrain the power of the big cable monopolies so we're going to focus on on a few areas and we're going to go on an incremental basis year by year and we're going to figure out how to make sure that we're providing a high level of service that can be accessible to everyone and that doesn't mean that only i think low income folks would have access also have people that you know his neighborhood you have a mix of people but the goal would be to say we're going to provide this service to people who are being left out currently from the existing system and we're going to expand it over time we want everyone to have a service but we're going to figure out how to make this work and that may involve using some public funds to help build the network i think the goal of any of these networks is that the operating cost be totally paid for by the network that there's no need for a subsidy of operating costs but you may subsidize the capital cost the one time cost to build the network that's something that the city might try to do there might be other programs available and you might have a foundation or two foundations or more that were willing to help chip him to say something like do something like i think of it as extending the school to the home so that a kid that is has these tools and school you know an i pad or whatever when they go home they're able to still be connected into still do their homework and that sort of thing it's in some ways it's kind of like giving an encyclopedia to every last person that's in the school system you know if you think back to fifty years ago that was kind of a big deal to have that at home so are there any downsides to approaching in on putting in citizen broadband networks on a smaller scale a modular type level let's say just if we if seattle were to just focus on one neighborhood any downside to that well there's there are significant challenges when you're starting with with one or two neighborhoods you don't get the economies of scale so you're going to be paying more for equipment it's more expensive to monitor the network to make sure it works on a twenty four by seven basis you know a lot of the costs for fiber optic network are similar whether you're serving one hundred people or one hundred thousand people there's the fixed cost and so you want to spread  across as many people as possible so when you start off with a small area particularly if the city's going in alone then there's a higher cost to get started then there would be when you're spreading it more across a larger base so that's a challenge i think there is in some ways there's a challenge of figuring out how to build these networks in a way that will be affordable to people without basically breaking the bank particularly when you're starting small there's a you know there's a sense of where is that money going to come from and that's a that's a hurdle i think there's a sense of there's a concern at the town hall we're talking about this in terms of potentially pitting one neighborhood against another because you know i think of it as if you draw a line on the map someone's going to live just on the other side of that line and they're going to be upset and i think that's legitimate you know certainly but at a certain point i think if you can't serve everyone you've got to start somewhere so that's a challenge and i think it will be curious to see how comcast and century link react to this i don't want to leave wave out there certainly a player and a part of the town but you know these are companies that really don't like the idea of any new competition coming in let alone a competitor that acts differently from them cities when they build networks don't act like the cable company in many cases even when they use a similar model as i said with chattanooga they still have a different sense in chattanooga builds its network it's not thinking you know how can we get the most money out of our customers they're thinking how can we improve quality of life so people want to live here so we can raise our property values and they're thinking what can we do to attract job creators and to attack attract firms that are going to want to build and locate in our community so they just operate in a different mindset and that results in i think a level of competition that comcast is not using used to competing with they've come to us like to get was century link where you know you're going to get bad customer service no matter which company you go if you know they don't want to compete where they're trying to do it different kind of entity and they're going to do everything they can they'll be lobbying the city council to make sure that if there's a phase one there's never a phase two they're going to be trying to kill this in the crib and that's where i think we need people to really engage with city council and say we can't just sit back and do nothing and i have candid talks with with elected officials in cities i talk about this is a damned if you do damned if you don't approach if seattle city council and the mayor if they don't do anything then your basic going to be the middle of the pack comcast is not going to let you fall off the end of the bus  come cast is going to keep investing century link has invested more in seattle than in most of its metro areas so people who can afford over one hundred dollars per month connection you know for high quality connection will be available to a significant number of them over time i'm but but no one's really going to we're not really going to solve the issue of how to make sure kids get a great education you know in terms of going to the schools and having access in their home to do their homework and things like that it's not going to happen at the city doesn't take action the city does take action then you'll see more investment from the incumbent providers and they're going to be engaged in everything they can to try and kill it off and of course they're not going to give the city credit for the fact that they're lowering people's bills  they're investing more they're always going to claim oh we're always going to do that even in the face in the face of not having competition which you know we've seen what happens when there's not a lot of competition it's basically a very frustrating market to try and get high quality services and so if the city does nothing you don't really have good outcomes if the city does something it still has a very hard fight in which i think things are better for everyone but frankly the elected officials may not get the credit for that improvement in investment lower prices and that sort of thing so this is something where we need elected officials to have spine and to basically invest in something for the the fact that it's going to be win for the community over the long term rather than because there'd be a photo with a nice ribbon cutting and that sort of thing and the interesting thing is most of them have been unsuccessful so you know it's not a matter of comcast saying we think we're going to win by filing this suit and this is true off the top of my head i can't think of anyone  century link has done but in broad strokes the large cable and telephone companies have done this in many cases where they've filed lawsuits often that they knew they were going to lose one in minnesota basically argued that revenue bonds could not be used in this technical manner that if the court had agreed with that argument basically would have made revenue bonds unusable for almost any project swimming pools or anything it was a crazy argument and it took a year for the court to throw it out because you have the district court that says this is we're going to dismiss this case you know the first motion that was filed basically that takes a number of months and then they get thirty days to appeal so on the twenty ninth day there's an appeal and then the circuit court looks at it and says this is somewhat ridiculous we're not going to we're going to affirm the district court's decision to throw it out and then and then there's an appeal you know usually at the twenty ninth day of the thirty day cycle  that they have to delay and so in minnesota it literally took i think three hundred sixty three days for the courts to toss out a rather ridiculous lawsuit that delayed a city that city incurred millions of dollars in legal fees and  due to the delay of not being able to build even though they are very confident they would win you just can't start building on the basis that you might lose legal authority if there's a one percent chance and in the meantime the company that was sued in the city and had previously said our d s l is great nobody does anything more than our d s l they use that year to significantly build up their network and offer better services to commercial clients give them three year exclusive contracts where they lock them away in the city in that case monticello minnesota never really recovered and the lawsuit was a big part of that the network has not been able to run in the black and that's something that is rather rare say less than ten percent of m l networks struggle financially in that way it does happen sometimes but in this case it was you can trace a lot of it back to the lawsuit and then after that came predatory pricing from the cable company so these these companies they do a lot  our our anti monopoly apparatus ever since the late seventies and early eighties has not dealt adequately with the way large companies are able to pressure small companies in a variety of markets but especially in telecom it's something that i think people in the tea party and on the right often talk about a war against small business a war against entrepreneurship and i disagree with some of their analysis and how they might see that but i think in some ways they're right in the way that the federal government basically lets these large corporations take the gloves off to use their massive power to hurt any other small company or municipalities which are often the size of small companies to engage in competition all right so just about out of time if you were leading seattle's efforts towards bringing broadband here what would you recommend i think it's time to really focus on equity i mean seattle's been a national leader on this in so i think you pick and neighborhood or a couple in the in the report last week that the city had commissioned there's three pilot projects that are outlined i don't like to say pilot i like to think i'm as the first phase because  we know the technology works the question is one of of basically ironing out a few issues in figuring out how one might move forward but it would be an issue of the city should be figuring out what way it wants to move forward with using its fiber assets in these neighborhoods maybe the city would find a way of providing service directly the new leader of seattle city light should be someone who is incredibly enthusiastic about using the utility to further kind video in this way and so they could be a tremendous partner and in many ways they need to be a partner to make this more feasible the city could evaluate partnerships in a number of ways and i think there's there's pitfalls there but we're go see more cities engaging in that sort of thing i mean partnerships in a sense that a real partnership not a not a fake partnership with a city takes on the risk and that partner gets all the benefits but a real partnership where there's shared risk and shared benefits  because a partner can bring some of that operating cost down that we talked about when you first are building a network on a small scale if you have a partner that's already doing this they can operate it more efficiently so there's  great opportunity to expand fiber and conduit to more areas of the city to basically over time make sure that everyone is close to an open fiber point where you can enable different business models some of them might be wireless some of them might involve just a few neighborhoods that want to build their own network or a condo association that wants to have its own connection you know and get fiber nearby you start to enable more options which is something we've seen out of stockholm which is a real leader in this space internationally with fiber everywhere that's owned by the city so those are the things a city needs to be doing to move forward and there's a lot of opportunities to do that all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming to spend time with us today thank you i'm just thrilled that there's so much interest in this and there's a lot of things that seattle can be doing as a as a leader in these issues hi everybody welcome to the westin hotel i'm joey cohn on the general manager of cahill you i've been a cable you for twenty eight years in a variety of different capacities i was the music director program director is to put on fun drives and for the last year and a half i've been the general manager great to see everybody turn out today for those that are listening on line we have about two hundred people in the room here and another thirty nine people on line at the front of the room is steven tan he is the chair of cable user community advisory board or committee and  martinez is our director of content so the purpose of this meeting just to let you know the council meets on a quarterly basis so we've had this meeting on the calendar for some time  the agenda changed though recently for obvious reasons the purpose of the council is to provide kill you management with feedback about our programme in our policies and our service to the community and this really is they are meeting and i know that we have a lot of people from the community here but just to let you know they are here to conduct business that's that's the real purpose of this meeting we're required by the  corporation for public broadcasting to have a council and to hold meetings on a regular basis and my role is to listen because the council is here to give me advice and then i in turn will share that advice with pacific lutheran university before i hand the meeting over to stephen we do have to do a quick roll call and i know that we have four members on the line peggy ackerman lloyd milton car rattlin and joan turn now but let me just do this really fast just say here if you are here scott all smith michael armstrong  and nicholas ok thank you and here's stephen ok thank you joey is going mention this is a business meeting for us we're not accustomed to having any guests so to have a couple people hundred people show up as well not surprising given the circumstances i want to thank everyone from the public for coming and i know why you're here this is a station we all love and care about and those of us on the on the council are here to represent you so i want to read it reiterate what joey said about the purpose of the council a it is a corporation for public broadcasting requirement that we exist but i'll read them the requirement is that the purpose of our board is to provide a vehicle for effective community input to the stations governing body about station program programming community service and impact on the community from the stations major policy decisions that is our mission  are here to talk about the proposed sale of k u n k p l u to the university of washington this is our first meeting since that sale was announced but i've spoken with an communicated with enough members of the council to have a pretty strong sense of what our general consensus is a note for the record that the council was not consulted either before or during negotiations with the university we were not advised before the sale was announced to the advisory only so it's understandable on one level that there was no obligation to consult with us on the other hand at least my opinion personally is that it would have been a good idea to do that they might have understood the magnitude of the decision that they're making our purpose here today is to decide whether to take some kind of action as a counsel on behalf of the station to serve the interests of you th listening community it's important to remember that all that's happened to this point is that pacific lutheran university and the university of washington have signed a letter of intent this deal is not finalized they have until december eighteenth to sign a deal and then sign a contract essentially and then the f c c has the opportunity to evaluate that sale as i said i have a strong sense about what the council's consensus of opinion is on this and the concerns that we have but i don't want to take that for granted so the bulk of the meeting is going to be to hear from council members individually about their support for opposition to this transaction and what their concerns are i'm going to then steer the conversation to what action we can take as a body what i have in mind a written appeal to president thomas crisis at pacific lutheran university and to the border regions asking them to reconsider as i said this is our first opportunity to meet and this is a very unusual format i'm used to seeing members of the council when we speak and i can't do that we will have some time for public comment again thank you all for coming please have faith that we are looking out for your interests i'm going to carve off as much time as i can to allow for some public comment but we cannot allow that to consume all our time there is business for us to conduct  propose that we allow each member of the council and have joey read the role to in no more than sixty seconds state their opinion on two subjects one whether they are in favor of or opposed to this proposed sale of k p l u to the university of washington and to what the primary reasons are for that support or that opposition because we're limited on time like i said i want to limit day that to a minute because i think the value of the discussion is going to be just that a discussion i have started drafting a letter already but i want to get the council's input and to a certain extent the public's input as well into what the comments in that letter what the position asserted in that letter should or should not be i wanted to be as credible as possible as forceful as possible and i want to be taken seriously the council members if you could please just state your name before your comments thanks my name is d c isaacs and i apologize for my tardiness hopefully i got two things personal to comment on  i am not in support of the acquisition excuse me by k or w and the other time is for our rationale is that correct and i feel concerned that there was not sufficient public due diligence for this and they came about quite suddenly for us as advisory council members board i oppose the sale of the license to kill you all w k p o u s been a valued part of our community with world renowned jobs jazz and blues programming support local artists support of local jazz and students in the schools have distinguished local news and special programming and are a very strong part of our community and i oppose the transfer of the license to k you a w because i fear that those things may be lost rosalie elgin i'm here on behalf of my husband dave i think it's kind of difficult for me to that's for us to express our our anger or nar outrage or disappointment at the propose we're not in favor of the sale i'd be glad to express that outrage to you but i understand we have limited time like so many  that the station has just been a huge part of our lives since dave and i moved here twenty five years ago it's been an outstanding vehicle for local news coverage local programming excellent jazz and blues programming the news and the music staff have proven to be intelligent articulate and inspiring to their listeners all of those staff would be sorely missed the relatively new very successful program sound effects on saturday morning i think is just one important example bottom line a valued substantial award winning news operation including music already in place will be destroyed and we feel the competition of two stations is healthy just as having two newspapers in seattle was healthy is no longer an inspiring newsworthy news or the option we never turn to it for news coverage and we would hate to see that same dilution factor happen to road radio programming in seattle hello my name is john as you know i am really choosing to talk about some things that i am concerned about with this transition should it happen first of all as far as things i'm very proud of with k p l u k b o u has a very broad geographic base and the nature of its program aying is not limited to a seattle mindset i live in gig harbor washington i work in bremerton washington it is very value to me that the station covers those areas with the same focus that they do seattle i'm also really proud of the original programming that says that offers a john kessler all blues programming can while a lot of jazz sound effect as was spitzer and the the phenomenal job they did of creating a program that came to such quality from scratch i'm worried about the health of those kinds of original programs the school of jazz programming that we do in the community involving high schools and the guest student d j is important as well and married in a way is to be immensely congratulated on the kind of intimate and personal fundraising of all things that can be intimate and personal on a radio station and our pledge drive was what less than three days this last time around because because members of k p oh you don't mind paying for the service and my concern is that that intimacy will be lost my other concerns are just geographic coverage is the signal going to reach me if i don't get  news what am i going to do about that i make it blues and jazz but i don't get maybe the news an organ reduce focus on seattle news loss of excellence in programming news programming and news staff and the loss of the opportunity for that original programming the ideas these are the things that i'm most concerned about of future musicians to school of jazz and contemporary musicians to the studio program my fear is that if it loses n p r it loses that funding base and programs like that go away are the asleep people listen to n p r and k p l u that's why all the money comes in that time those times are a lot of the money comes in we we want to i think that  might have some assurance that the jazz programming would remain as is but when it stops penciling out i think it well it will diminish and become less than the vital organization that it is that makes seattle an exceptional jan city you i'm shannon richardson i don't have a prepared statement but just kind of off the cuff it's been a member of you going to since i moved out here about sixteen years ago and i've got a husband right now who's at santa clara law school so a been mr kessler and what not don't realize they have dinner with me almost every night but don't tell my husband i am opposed to this i think for a fact that we're supposed to be a requirement that we were basically ignored and blown off doesn't really make a lot of  sense i think the fact that neither group has been able to come out articulate to the community at large why this is a good idea is a little scary now maybe they've got some ideas and they're just not telling us but i think at this point they owe us some explanation of what's going on we have one of the best thank you we have one of the blasts that i best blues jazz and news stations in the country these are some fantastic people and it's the people i'm worried about  again i spend a lot of my day listening with these folks and i want them to be around and i want them to be around for a long time thank good afternoon my name is scott all smith and i've been a member of this committee since its inception and i've always enjoyed the passion that my fellow committee members had for this and i to oppose this sale i think we have we have worked very hard in lyster supported radio and i have to say just looking out at all of you this is really gratifying our committee has just grown enormously by your presence here so thank you for your interest and your support and your passion for this two things i travel for business almost every week i stream k p all you were ever am because it allows me to stay in touch with home and it also gives me variety so  depending on what time zone i end i could do you know wake up to jazz twenty four is part of the stream or i could wake up to you know to any of the other programs you know that i listen to but i always feel like it's a part of seattle with me and as you all know seattle is a very diverse you know community and there's a little bit of something for everybody and here i would hate to lose that by going to an all new spore mad and then having an all jazz format someplace else something we'll will lose in that transaction so that for that reason i oppose it i encourage all of you to stay active the other thing i want to do is to mention is that in working with joey and his team fund raising has never come easy but for this group this radio station seems to have found the secret formula to that and all of you have voted with your dollars i think you too can vote with your dollars for this transaction to fail  linda quit sun and first of all i want to say how moving it is to see this kind of turnout in the middle of a monday afternoon i am opposed to that of the sale of k p l u to the university of washington over the past forty nine years k p l u listeners have made it one of the most fiscally sound public radio stations in the united states through their generous financial support the programs created by the talent staff so passionately supported by its listeners would be a deep and irreplaceable loss to the listening community here and around the globe i also see danger in losing another independent news resource for the pacific northwest should this transaction local news one being the loss of the local programming and sound effect primarily the local jazz activities school of jazz jim wilkie ken wiley the studio sessions are going to be probably gone because from  will sound preprogrammed losing the context that's provided by a local host then i set down but the wrote down what i thought could be gamed by the sale and found that those could be listed or counted on the fingers of one foot and how do you follow that my name is linda farmer i am very much opposed to this sale when i first heard about the news i cried i'm heartbroken it's like losing a trusted friend i've been listening to  over twenty years in fact i used to work at pacific lutheran university and sat through the fund drives i answered the phones i've been a sustaining member for years i'm also a husky and i do listen to you and i'd rate them a little higher than that but i'm a sustaining member of k p l u for a reason and as a former reporter my main concern is the loss of a top notch news organization that is the seattle thanks let's hear it i'm extremely disappointed that this happened without any public input absolutely blew me away i am again heartbroken for the employees and how this came down i really want to thank you for showing up today and for your passion those of us on the board are certainly passionate i know the employers are impassionate as well thank you this is joey cohen again before i hand the mike back over to us stephen a i just want to just take a quick moment to just thank the council and just to let you know our the show sound effect i mean earned him a c work with the council and so many great ideas came out of what they told us they wanted out of that show extremely valuable to us also soon we'll have some chance research findings we did a big jazz research study the council was instrumental no pun intended instrumental on helping us to frame and discover what we wanted to find out from the jazz listener and third they've been extremely generous with us in fund raising they've had a couple of big challenges that they have collectively put together for fund raising so so please thank the council with  me before we move on i wanted to read some more comments from c s c members who are on the phone and have sent their comments through chat actor men is against the sale we need the greatest number of news outlets in the community and as we can get and this will and this move will cut one of the best in the region jim long i'm opposed to the generally opposed to the sale i believe the current combination of news local state national international and jazz programming is in the best interests of the pacific northwest community lloyd milton says opposed to the sale loss of when i had my own personal comments thank you everyone for sharing your opinions i'm not going to try going to trying not to duplicate what other people have said i think maybe the value here would be to express my concern over some of the justifications for this that have been offered one that we will get stronger programming both for news and jazz i don't think that anyone believes that that will actually be true i think that position ignores the benefit of having alternative news outlets and it ignores the fact that i think showing his team that built the best public radio news network i also want to address the suggestion that in some way keep you know you were struggling that is untrue just had the best year that we've had in terms of fund raising except for years in which there's been a capital campaign there has never been stronger financial support for the station listenership is also at an all time high you know combined are listenership has reached four hundred thousand weekly that's up from three hundred sixty thousand just three years ago  t martinez just updated those numbers today and so are total audience just as last week and last week on line combined with the latest radians four hundred thirty thousand i've also heard suggestions that in some ways the station is a financial liability to the university when you consider what the actual cash contribution from the university to the station is that cannot be taken seriously and then donating one point five million dollars a year that's to the value of the space that it leases to the station in tacoma i think that argument ignores the fact that that building was built through the support of members of this finally i want to express personally and i think on behalf of the council we have had the privilege to work with this team it is as committed team of professionals as you will find what they are able to do with the budget that they have and their commitment to quality is something that we should all be very concerned about losing so i want to commend joey and the members of staff here and who weren't able to attend and building a station that really is unique and we know that just from this region but i can say say so that's true that it's true nationally as well