The villages represented by the Great Neck/ North Shore Cable Commission have been thrown under the bus in the proposed franchise agreement with Verizon. The Great Neck /North Shore Cable Commission represents nine Great Neck villages and six other North Shore villages. The Commission was formed 20 years ago in order to manage franchise agreements with entities wishing to have right-of-way through our villages for the purpose of providing TV service. For the past two years the Commission has been negotiating with Verizon over a franchise agreement to allow Verizon to deliver its FIOS TV service as an alternative to Cablevision. On Thursday evening, Dec. 20, 2007, a public meeting was held at Great Neck Middle School to unveil the long awaited agreement. Mayors and/or representatives from each of the 15 member villages attended as well as legal representation for Verizon and Cablevision. In order for the Commission to grant the franchise, there must be unanimous agreement among the villages over the terms of the franchise. The salient features of the agreement are:

a) Verizon pays a franchise fee of 3 percent of gross revenues (presumably to be distributed pro rata to the villages based on the number of subscribers.)

b) Verizon pays Public Access TV a total of $450,000 within a year of the franchise approval.

c) Verizon pays PATV 1 percent commission on gross revenue.

d) Verizon will pay the Commission $5,000 to cover administrative costs and here's the kicker:

e) Verizon will pay an average of $2.50 per month per subscriber for the next 10 years to PATV.

The commission has supposedly been negotiating on behalf of the nearly 14,000 households and 80,000 residents that reside in the 15 villages represented by the commission. Let's take a closer look at this agreement and see how well the village residents have been represented. The law allows franchise fees of up to 5 percent of gross revenues to be charged. Why did the commission negotiate only 3 percent on our behalf? It did so in order to be able to impose those other fee requirements on Verizon in direct support of PATV. The law also allows Verizon to pass along to the subscriber the monthly fees that were negotiated on behalf of PATV. You will not see those fees listed, but they will be part of your monthly Verizon bill. The Commission will say that it is required to impose these fees on Verizon in order to maintain a "level playing field" between competing franchisees. What that tells us is that Cablevision has for years been required to make comparable payments in support of PATV, and in the same way, those extra fees are being passed along to you as part of your cable bill. Of the 15 commissioners sitting on the Great Neck/ North Shore Cable Commission it is no coincidence that 13 of them also sit on the Board of Directors of PATV. The Great Neck/ North Shore Cable Commission clearly represents PATV. Somewhere along the line the village residents have been cut out of the loop. Remember that 3 percent franchise fee that was negotiated on our behalf? It will be eaten up by the subscriber fee that will be tacked on to your monthly bill, every month, for the next 10 years.

The village governments cannot deny responsibility for letting this situation develop. This chicanery has been going on for years under the Cablevision franchise. For two years, the Commission's practices have denied village residents the freedom of being able to choose between competing TV service providers. Beyond that, the Commission has masqueraded as an agent for the villages and is in truth a tool of the PATV Corporation. The village governments have looked the other way as the Commission has manipulated the system in order to take the lion's share of franchise proceeds for funding PATV. If this happened in Washington there would be Senate hearings.

At this time the future of this agreement is still unclear. Only the Commission knows the outcome of the village responses as they were tallied last Wednesday.

But even right up to the end of that meeting, Verizon representatives were being blind-sided by Commission members with additional new requirements which could further delay or prevent any franchise agreement from being reached.

It is not too late for our village governments to stand up to the Cable Commission and demand fair distribution of franchise proceeds and for a timely resolution to this unnecessarily protracted negotiation. If that fails, there is nothing to prevent our villages from entering direct negotiations with Verizon. In fact, many villages in Long Island have already completed independent franchise agreements with Verizon. These agreements have been reached in Cedarhurst, Laurel Hollow, Mineola, Hempstead and Oyster Bay, to name a few. The Cable Commission disparages these independent franchise agreements as being inferior "boiler-plate" agreements. The real reason the Commission disparages them is because villages could retain the PATV royalties and use them as they were originally meant to be used, i.e. to offset village expenses.

It's time for our local village representatives to do what they have been elected to do and to act in the best interests of their residents. We have a right to be able to choose between competing service providers and our villages have the right to be properly compensated by those providers under the terms of a fair and equitable franchise agreement.

John J. Finn

Munsey Park