Cable access channel returns to lineup

CAT7 TV is back.

The community access channel serving Cloquet, Carlton, Scanlon and Esko residents had not been operating since March 5, when the Cloquet City Council voted unanimously to terminate the station's only remaining employee, coordinator Eric Lipponen.

After meeting with members of the Cable Commission, the city hired contractor Martin Dean to get the station up and running again, which took only a couple hours, according to city administrator Tim Peterson.

CAT7 is Cloquet's only local television channel. All of the broadcast television stations are based in Duluth and cover the region. Cities outside of Duluth rarely get coverage outside of big crime or accident news. And

while Duluth has its own

public-access TV channel, it doesn't cover Cloquet.

Peterson said viewers can now watch the most recent Cloquet City Council meetings as well as the COVID-19 press conference held in Council Chambers on March 30, which featured hospital and public health officials, police and fire chief updates and Cloquet mayor Roger Maki, reporting information on the pandemic and the local response. There are a couple of church service recordings airing, along with an informative presentation developed by city staff, mostly centering on changes to city operations and other information related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peterson said library staff are working to get some storytime videos posted, and the city has reached out to the Harry's Gang and Dragon Lady's show hosts, to see if they want to produce new shows to air outside of City Hall, since it's currently closed to the public.

"If they can produce it elsewhere, then we can get it up on the channel," Peterson said in an interview with the Pine Knot News Wednesday.

Residents are welcome to submit their own shows, Peterson said, by putting them in the CAT7 dropbox outside on the left side of the entrance doors on the parking lot side of the building at 112 14th Street (not to be confused with the prescription drug dropbox on the right side of the door). He suggested an MP4 format is easiest for city staff to work with for now.

Talks to contract with Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College to run the station are going well, the city administrator said. The college has multimedia production studios where students and staff have developed projects ranging from documenting campus happenings, making a weekly campus news show and supporting community activities.

"We have together a draft agreement that both parties are reviewing," Peterson said, stressing that the suggestion to work with FDLTCC came from members of the cable commission originally.

"We would just be contracting with them to provide the service based on the expectations that we had," he said. "They have some of their own staff, they might be interested in hiring more, that would be up to them. Just to meet the contract that we would have with them."

CAT7 is entirely funded by Mediacom franchise fees, which bring in approximately $103,000 a year. A 15-year franchise agreement with Mediacom gives the city a franchise fee equal to 5 percent of Mediacom's annual gross revenues locally until 2030.

Peterson said the city of Cloquet would still take a portion of the cable funds to pay for the ongoing recordings of city meetings, which are livestreamed on the city's website and later posted to CAT7. In 2019, the city budgeted $28,700 to come out of the franchise fees. The city has always taken a portion of the cable TV fund to pay for its services, finance director Nancy Klassen previously explained to the Pine Knot News. The 2019 budgeted payment to the city was approximately 28 percent of the estimated revenues for the community access channel.