 There we go. All right. I'm going to call this meeting of the community television board of directors to order. It's 504 on April 26th. Secretary Loren call the roll. Chair Laudniac. I'm here. Director Maziarz. Here. Director Hall. Here. Director Mannheim. Here. Director O'Driscoll. Here. Director Shaw. Director Gudger. Here. Director gonados. Director Warren. All right. David, you're muted. There is. There's Christina. There's Christina. Okay, great. But we're all going to have to turn our heads sideways. There she is. Much better. Yeah. All right. Okay, so let's see oral communications. If anyone may address the board during oral communications. All communications may must be directed to an item, not on the, on today's consent or regular agenda and must be within the jurisdiction of the board. Any oral communications. Seeing none. We will move to the consent agenda. We have approved board meetings. Board minute meetings of March 22nd, 2021. And approve the financial committee recommendation to accept. March 21 financial reports. And the reports are included in your packet. As are the minutes. Any. Discussion or entertain a motion to. Well, I'll go ahead and make a motion to. Prove the consent agenda. All right. We have a motion. Second. Janice seconds. We have a motion by director. Hall and second by director O'Driscoll. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. We don't need a roll call for that. Okay. We move on to the regular agenda. We have a report from the education committee. On its April 13th, 2021 meeting. And I guess I'll call on the chair of that committee. And that's director Warren, I believe. Yeah. We had a lively discussion, basically. Focusing on. How we can best educate people in who are receiving like teachers and students. Who are receiving the. The teaching capabilities. To offer. Studio equipment and other equipment. And how we can find people in the community either who. Have that kind of teaching and instruction capabilities. Or other people that might serve as role models for. Students wanting to make their own media. really getting to know each other. And basically, let's see, we're looking at finding some tutorials for the podcast system online that we might put on the website so that students and faculty can get started learning it. And generally, seeing how we can attract youth to telling the stories that they are interested in and excited about. Great. Thank you. Any other committee members wish to comment? I just noticed on the, I read it through and Matilda, and I think your work is right, I found the Paro School District, now maybe in whatever state they're in now was probably the best one to work with in terms of getting somebody potentially interested of the county. And the other one would be the San Lorenzo Valley District, but those two seem to be more proactive in terms of trying something new. So I don't know who there would be, and it's kind of hard during the pandemic to find people, but I just wanted to say I thought it was a good report and thank you for your work. I agree. Keith or Christina, do you have any additions? No, I know that part of what we talked about, maybe that we want to share with the board, with the rest of the board, was strategies, were strategies to engage districts like PVUSD, who normally would be probably more receptive than they currently are. I think a lot of district administrators and teachers kind of are a little bit on a fire drill. So trying to think of different ways to engage with either parents or the teachers union, et cetera, so that we're able to still reach out, but not at a time when school districts are probably not the most receptive, but definitely looking forward to doing so once things settle down a little bit more. Great, yeah. That seems to make sense. I mean, the fire drill analogy is a good one. I mean, there's scrambling in so many ways right now to toss something else at him, even if it's a really good idea, it's just kind of almost not fair in a way. Keith, one thing, didn't we give a grant to the digital nest already? Yes. Wouldn't they be a potential one? You mentioned here to talking to them. Are they overwhelmed too, like so many other places? They're sort of in the different field in a way, I think. Really? Okay. Yeah, that's true. They're more computer-based than digital-based. We wanted to broaden our reach beyond just the nest in Watsonville. We think there's a lot of people that could benefit in Watsonville. And as you know, Watsonville High has a sports system set up for broadcasting their sports event. So there's clearly other ways that we can make an impact in Watsonville. All right. Well, thank you for that. And thank you for your work on that. And we'll just keep moving forward and looking for opportunities. I think the idea of finding, looking for tutorials and tools that we can help folks with is a good one too. So let's move on to my agenda here. Oh, the next item, this is something that Becca has talked about, discussion of rules and practices regarding relating to free speech and hate speech. And I'll let you speak to that, Becca. Okay. So I want to, I'll give you a little background. And I'm mostly going to read a lot of stuff because there's a lot of things about free speech that are important to know as just a background. So recently, even though Santa Cruz is a really tolerant town, I'm a little concerned that someone might upload some terribly racist content to our channel. And we do have a policy about that, which I'll talk to you about later. But I wanted to learn what other people in public access were thinking and how they were responding because this is an unusual time. And so I intended a couple of webinars. The Alliance for Community Media, which is our trade organization, has been looking into this and did a couple webinars and I went to them. And I heard a lot of different views from different people that they brought in to talk about free speech, which I want to share with you. But first, I want to just give you a little background on television and free speech. So there are two groups that regulate what can and cannot appear on broadcast TV. And that is the FCC and the Supreme Court. And the FCC on their website says, and this has not been an issue for, well, I guess it was an issue once, but hasn't been in a long time, that broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. And the reason for that is that they feel that it's reasonable to think that children would not be in the audience at that time. And they call that the safe harbor. And it's enforced by the FCC. And so from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., that's where we put things that are profane or have bad language or nudity. That's where those things go. Now, the Supreme Court about free speech, the Supreme Court says, your constitutional guarantee of free speech only applies to the government. The government cannot abridge your right to free speech. But private outlets can. The Supreme Court has ruled that unless a media outlet is state owned, then it's not a public forum. And people who have a private operation can, they call them media publishers, can restrict in good faith, they say, content that it feels it's objectionable. And this is the ruling that allowed Twitter to delete the former president's account. Now, I want it, those are the rules as we know them. And most of those rules don't apply to us. We're not governed by the FCC because we are on cable and not broadcast and we don't use the public's, the people's airways, but we think those are called, they're good rules. So we go by them. Now, the CEO of the Alliance for Community Media is Mike Wasserman. And he spoke on a couple of the webinars and the things that he said were interesting. I thought he said, it's community needs that drive the cable act and is the basis for public access, not a need for free speech. And he also said, you are not free to be racist and abusive in a public access program. And there was a lawsuit between the Manhattan neighborhood network and some, some producers that they had banned for that kind of activity. And they won the Manhattan network one that lawsuit. And then there's another really interesting guy named Anthony Riddle. He is the former public access executive director in Atlanta for many, many years. And he said, it's better to hear everyone's views. He had an experience where a member, there was a very famous and noted, and I can't recall his name, white supremacists for many years in the South. And he used to produce a big show that was on a lot of, a lot of networks. It was a national show. And at one point, a local member of his group came to Mr. Riddle and asked if he could produce a local show. And Mr. Riddle allowed him to produce the show and told him that he would have to take classes to become certified. He'd have to work on the shows of others. And he would have to get others from the community, the public access community to work with him. And he did that. He worked with a very diverse group of people in Atlanta in order to create his show. And through that, he witnessed the tolerance that other people had for him expressing his point of view. And eventually he did stop the show. And Mr. Riddle asked him why, and he said that his plan had been to get publicity for his group by claiming that he was being discriminated against. And when he was able to do his show and no one tried to keep it off the air, that didn't happen. So there was no point in it. And Mr. Riddle summed it up this way. For his message of intolerance to gain traction, he had to go where his message was not tolerated. And he went on to say, this gave us an opportunity to live up to our principles. Public television is not TV at all. It's a civics lesson. And he says community TV is a vehicle that he feels where we can show our communities by example, how we can all work everything out and live together successfully. And he says, we deal with tolerance and make a place for everyone, whether we like them or not. Now, all good webinars have opposing views. So also on one of the webinars was Carmen Scorato. And she is a senior policy counsel for the Free Press policy team. And Free Press is, they want to change media. They have on their website, they seek to change the media to transform democracy, to realize a just society. And they work on a lot of internet and language and tolerance. And they try to find ways to disrupt hate and misinformation on the internet, particularly. And one of the things we often hear in community media when we talk about this kind of thing is that more speech results in better speech. And Carmen says no. She says hate speech is meant to intimidate and silence. It leads to an imbalance. Currently, hate speech predominates on the internet. And she says, if you don't moderate your platform, you are responsible for the result. So now you've heard some divergent views and some interesting views from different people, from a trade organization, from an actual EV on the ground, and from a policy maker. So what's our policy? So our policy has always been that any resident of Santa Cruz County may upload a program for telecast on our channel, and we'll play it once. We don't judge the quality of the programming submitted and we play everybody's program one time. If it has adult language or nudity, we play it in the safe harbor time. And we have adopted this practice, you know, even though that rule does not apply to us because we're not licensed by the FCC, but we just think it's a good rule. If we get complaints about a program, we review it and we respond to the viewer. And we do get complaints and have reviewed a number of programs and they have all had reprehensible content, but they did not cross the line into what the government would call unprotected speech, which is basically a call to violence or criminal action. So we have let those things air once and then we remove them. We always offer the viewer who wrote in an opportunity to counter that view by coming on television and saying and giving their opinion or making a program or series. Most of them don't do that, but but we always make the offer. And as Ms. Storato said, if we don't moderate our platform, which in our case is a television station, but we do stream online, we're responsible for the results. And in that spirit, we have removed a program that contained inaccurate information about the pandemic. And we think it's very important that the community gets accurate and timely information about COVID-19. And we continue to deliver that information, but I don't believe we should amplify untruths or conspiracy theories that muddy the water and make it hard for people to make informed decisions about their health. We did allow the program to air once, but that was it. So if you have any questions about free speech or PB, I'm happy to answer them. I'm just curious, has anybody come on and done a counterpoint? No, no one ever has. I mean, not to my knowledge. They haven't said I'm going to do that and done it. Perhaps people did upload things that worked counterpoints, but they didn't make that assertion or assertion. Sorry. Victoria. So, and then just to clarify, the review process is completely complaint-driven, right? That we don't have the staff or the resources to review every single program that's submitted ahead of time, right? So it's only if a viewer objects, then we do a review. Yeah. Or if one of us sees it, sometimes I see a program or Victor sees one. But yeah, mostly we can't review everything and no station can. It's just, you know, it's why it's sort of like Facebook and Twitter, they can't really look at everything everybody puts up. So they can't control it that way. We kind of depend on people flagging it for us. I suppose going forward, there may be some sort of AI technology that could detect graphic or, you know, content based on actual pixels or something, but we're not, we're not there yet, right? Not yet. And then even if that happened, we'd still want to review it because, you know, it could be wrong. Yeah, automated systems often are. Yeah, it would be great if they would, if we could get some sort of a filtering mechanism and then we could review fewer programs. But at this point, we, we aren't able to as much as we'd like to. We'd like the public to let us know if they see something and we'll always review anything that anyone cites. Thank you for your time, Martin. Tom. Yeah. Yeah. So I was curious right now, what are we doing if we're not monitoring stuff? How do we make sure that that the existing content that ought to be in that 11 to five in the morning or whatever it is, that it gets in there versus at other times? Well, when you submit a program, you have to sign a document that's online saying that it is, it doesn't have to go into safe harbor or telling us that it does. So we depend on people to be honest. If we find that they are going around the rules, we can stop them from uploading ever. So self-regulating on that. Yeah. And we haven't really had an incident where someone tried to slip something by us that I'm aware of. And the other thing I was wondering about in hearing from other media organizations, other access organizations around the country, are any of them? I mean, I'm thinking about hate speech. If somebody wants to do a program with hate speech, but not necessarily profanity or nudity or other things that would put, automatically put it into the safe harbor, are they, how are they handling that? Well, the ones that I've heard for are letting it and letting it be. They think it's part of free speech. And that's what the Supreme Court says that that hate speech is free speech. It's protected. We don't have to honor that. We are not bound by those rules because we're a private. We're not a public forum. So we could take those off if we wanted to. Our policy up till now has been to let them play once. And we don't... Sorry. What about, what time do we allow those to air at any time if there's no profanity or other things that would normally put it into the... Yeah. Yeah. Now, and we could... If you guys want to talk about a different policy for that kind of thing, we could do that. If you don't know what's coming on, how do you have a different policy? Because you couldn't intervene. And it's kind of a pickle. I'm glad you brought it up. I don't have any great brainstorms without somebody looking at everything for somewhat in the same boat as some of the internet platforms in a way. And not because we don't have standards, but we just don't have the people to monitor everything. I don't know what you do. The only thing I thought about when we were talking, do we have anything that goes on air once in a while that talks about what our policy is so the general public knows? I don't know if it's worth it. I mean, you don't even want to mention it, but... Inspire some challenges. Give anybody ideas. Yeah. I don't know. What we do have is a disclaimer. And if we always... There's a disclaimer before, I think just about every show that says, these are not the views of CTV. These are the views of... I've seen that. And the producers. So we have our disclaimer that airs all the time. So people generally, if they watch in between the shows, they'll know that these are not our views. And these are the views of the people in the public. And if someone complains, we immediately take it off the air. We take it off the air immediately. Then we review it. And if we think it's okay, we put it back. But we would put it at that point, we would put it in the safe harbor because it's up to us to make that in good faith. Do we think this is objectionable? We could even decide not to put it on anymore. Christina? Would it be possible to maybe not table a conversation, but I know... I want to... I think this is important enough that I want to think about it a little bit and kind of have a more informed opinion. So I feel like it... I would appreciate sort of being able to think about this a little more before we have a discussion about it because I do think it's worth discussing. I've heard both sides of this argument in law school. It's been a long time, but I recall... I understand the merits of each, but I also understand that society is evolving quite a bit. And our climate is a very specific climate right now that I think is... I'm sick of using the word and hearing the word unprecedented, but I think that very much applies. So in light of that, I have a different reaction now to hate speech as sort of an allowable... not allowable, but a sort of protective speech. Now, if we were in a public forum, I understand why a state should not be able or in my view should not... the Supreme Court's view should not be able to monitor that. But as a public entity that is supposed to be, I think, reflecting the values of the community or hopes to, especially in one where... I mean, I don't know because we haven't had a lot of hate speech here, thank God, but I know that a lot of hate speech is oftentimes and has been recently from positions of power directed at some of the very folks that are part of this community. So I just want to think more about... it doesn't make sense to create a policy which we can't carry out, right? Like if we don't have this manpower or the person power to sit there and review everything, it doesn't make sense to create a policy around that. But maybe there's a way that we could require, if we decided that that was something that we needed to do, a way for while people are self-reporting, whether something is falling into us, some categories hate speech could be one of those that would allow us to... that people could self-flag. I don't know how we would do that, but so that we could put it potentially in a safe harbor space, I don't know. I just know that the reaction I'm having is one where I just kind of want to think about it a little bit more. It's not so clear to me. There is another... there's hate speech and there's hateful speech. And hateful speech was what Mr. Riddle was about. He said you don't... he said there's no description of it. He said I don't know what it is, but I know it when I feel it. And that is kind of the visceral thing about it when you experience it. And I agree with you. It would be great. I really wish we could review it all and have it be flagged and channel it somewhere special because once you hear it, you can't unhear it. And it's just... it just feels awful. So yes. So I want to follow up one thing on Joe said and then one thing on Christina said. Becca, I thought your description of this whole issue was extremely clear and concise. If we could excerpt it from this meeting and post it on the website or as Joe suggested, maybe even show it occasionally on the channels, I think that would be really nice because like I said, I thought it was a really clear, concise description of this situation. And in terms of a policy for CTV, if at some point this board thinks that we should look into it, I believe that goes to the governance committee. The governance committee can review different ideas and then come report back to the board. So that would be the proper way to deal with that. Okay. Well, I think it's important and we can certainly revisit this and it's brought up right now. It's kind of because it's in the air, so to speak, and it's worth talking about and thinking about. And I agree with Christina. It's not like we're deciding anything now and we should think about it and sort of think, you know, where do we stand and how do we want to portray ourselves regarding this. So thank you for that. I'm not quite sure how to, Matram. I just had one, sorry, my co-workers in a conversation behind me, but I had just one other comment, question. And I certainly agree with Director Granados that, you know, this is something that we could definitely come back to. And it's definitely, there's a lot to this topic. But kind of a question, comment in terms of the COVID-19 misinformation program is that, you know, I mean, I don't, you don't have to necessarily go into specifics back about, with all these things, I think it becomes a, the danger is like, where do you draw the line, right? In terms of, I mean, are we qualified? I mean, who made the determination that this was false information? Was it just like blatantly false? I mean, do we have public health experts on staff who can determine what's false information? What, what isn't false information? Did we submit it to somebody at the county to review to see if it was false? So I think, you know, once we start putting ourselves in that position, I think it's, you know, it can be dangerous. Please. It was not an opinion. It was a fact and facts generally hold up. This woman said that there was, that the COVID-19 was a hoax. And that's true. That's not true. So it was pretty easy to flag. If it had been an opinion about, it's not that bad, that would have been different. But she said it was not real. And it is real. And we know that. Okay. For instance, I have a family member who's spending two hours a day researching things online. And, you know, I'm all about keeping an open mind, right? Even though I try to live in the real world. But, you know, there's a lot, I mean, but anyway, probably shouldn't go there. That's a whole separate discussion. But I mean, there are many different sources of information. And oftentimes, the mainstream sources can have their own biases, right? So I think it's important to, you know, to maintain an open mind and to, you know, as much as possible without, you know, putting people at risk, you know, maintain a somewhat open forum. It was on TV. Right. We just didn't let it air anymore. Sure. So we met our obligation. Well, I just want to thank Becca for bringing us up because I think it's better we're talking and thinking about it rather than reacting to some kind of crisis. My thought is that we put it on the agenda one more time before we have any government's committee look at it simply. So we can all hear what everybody has to say and have a little better sense of what the board thoughts are on it. Because there is no answer to this, this right or wrong. It's a very complicated field. But I still think we need to probably have have a more recent discussion of it than what because I've been on a long time. And I remember is I know about the periods, but I don't remember us ever talking about it, because I never thought there was a need to do it. So I'm thankful that you're bringing it up and we're thinking about it ahead of a crisis, which is always the worst time to deal with something like this. And you're up. There you go. Yeah. The only other thing I wanted to just raise and Becca, maybe this is something you could look into a little bit, but I'm aware of the fact that as an organization, we follow the Brown Act. So and we get our we are funded primarily by funds from the county. And so I just want to make sure that the government's government speaking issue isn't raised for us as an organization. In other words, controlling speech as a government entity. I understand public sector clear line can't do it. But I don't know if there's anything that you've heard from others. So it just might be something to just look into for the next discussion. Yeah, I do have some information on it, but I'll look into it more. I only have I have one source, but the Mr. Wasserman, who is the he's the CEO of our trade organization. And since we are, we are a private nonprofit 501 C three, we aren't the public. We're not the government. We get funds from the government, but we aren't the government. So I think that's but I can get more info. And that does make sense to me. I've just always been kind of a little surprised that we're expected to follow the Brown Act. Apparently, all organizations that get funds from a government entity are I thought too. Yeah, just Keith Keith brought that up once. And I think here I found the section in the state law that says that. So most don't, but it's an AG ruling, AG ruling. Okay. Okay. I'm director Warren. Yeah, as a new new board member, why I certainly would like to continue the discussion and feel it's important to really be informed about this, especially as an at large representative. Okay, well, thanks everybody. Let's do this. Let's add Joe's suggestion. We will put it on the agenda again next month. We're discussing in the interim. We can all kind of think about it and, you know, see where we stand and see how we want to move forward if it's a actual policy or if it's just sort of some informational information we want to information information information that we want to post and take some of Becca's comments and post those will we can decide. All right. Thanks everybody. Becca, you have a floor again with your director's report. Wow, it's just all about me. I got my report here for March and I'll give you a couple of fun updates about April. In the financial zone, Santa Cruz, the county of Santa Cruz, we have submitted our 21-22 budget and work plan to the board of supervisors for approval and they are scheduled to vote on it tomorrow. So I think that'll go well. We have an application and have had for a long time into the California relief grant. We're being considered again in round six. They did ask for an updated 990 which we provided and so we have our fingers crossed that we'll get a grant for $15,000. On the EIDL, our status is still funding. We did this month get a message where they asked us for more documents but it was very cryptic and we couldn't tell which documents they were. So I sent off an email asking for more clarification and that is in process and they are also waiting for confirmation of our 2019 990 from the IRS. Once you give them your copy, they ask the IRS to send them a copy that I guess then they look at the two of them and corroborate but they say that will be an eight week process and we're about four weeks in. In co-working, our break-even number is $8,300 just about that and in March we earned $10,643. It's not as rosy as it sounds, someone paid early and so about a thousand of that is not new money. It's somebody paying in advance but still we're on budget which is great. Actually, we're ahead of budget which is really good. Underpaid services, we completed 20 government meetings in March and produced 11 webinars and for organizations like Cal Fire and the health department. Under facilities and equipment, we had the roof repaired. I think I told you last time that it was leaking and it's now been repaired. We had an unusual amount of vandalism in March so we met with our security company regarding adding additional cameras on the front of the building. Nothing happens in the back. We've got that all figured out but in the front of the building now we've had someone start a fire. We had someone pry the lid off of our cable, our fiber box and someone attacked our, we have a big water thing in the front that the fire department would use. Someone attacked that. Someone turned off the water door building. We just had a whole bunch of things happen so we think that we need to do something about the front of our building is where all those things have happened. Under staff, we reviewed our health insurance plan this year. We do it every year but this year we've changed carriers because we need to provide better and easier access to local doctors and a more useful dental and vision plan. Our staff is young and healthy but in the last six months they have tried to use their insurance and it hasn't been easy so I talked to our our agent and we came up with something that worked better for them. Under the youth grant this is so exciting. We did our first round of beta testing for our new youth grant. We have four students receive their equipment in mid-March and in my report it says we'll have feedback from them next month but I have the feedback now which is very encouraging. I have a detailed survey from the teacher about who experienced what what age groups did it work better for who couldn't do what and we got some suggestions about how we can do better and so I'll present you a complete report next month but it basically it worked out really well. The kids had a good time they enjoyed it they uploaded their videos and they were excited and engaged throughout the program so we're happy about that. On Save Our Shores is also still working for teachers looking for teachers to help us on the science end to see if kids would like to do use the padcasters in a science environment and Director Granados has been really helpful in getting us in touch with the Parks and Rec Division of in Watsonville and so I'm now talking to them I have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday this week and we should find out if we can we will find out if we can do some work with them and also our teacher on our first pod is referring us to a number of homeschooling organizations in the county and we might be able to work with them as well so our youth grant is taken off. Are you asking a question of me Joe? I was for Guy to call on me to ask you a question. And I think I saw Keith raise his hand. Minus two seconds have you gotten any questions from the county about the budget this year? I'm just curious. No and they didn't ask me to attend the meeting either so I guess it's okay. Keith did you have something? Nope okay okay okay I have one more one more thing and I'll let you all go we are I just want to give you a preview sort of a heads up we have our telecast equipment is very old it's from 2013 and we have found that it just doesn't do some of the things that we need to do anymore and is pretty old and needs to be replaced so we're currently working with a consulting engineer and his staff to put together a new system that will allow Victor to do Victor is our media services person he's the one that does all the work with the county and getting our shows on TV and it'll allow him to work more efficiently right now if we want to do something with the equipment he actually has to drive to the county building and get an escort from in the county usually we bother Matreya and they have to be with him while he's at the equipment working and then if he has to leave and check something and come back they have to hang around and it takes him a lot of time and is sort of annoying for the county so we hope to we hope this new equipment will allow him to work remotely and it'll be much more robust it can help us build a continuity package which is when you watch tv and things come up in the in between programs to say you're watching pbs or whatever you're watching and or coming up next or psa's all that stuff can be built in and branded so that we have a nice solid look on television and it also makes a really beautiful community calendar with hardly any work at all so that'll be that'll be nice for Keith and then it also will allow us to have like in the morning and evening the weather and traffic on on at the bottom of the screen which is nice for us because the local stations don't really cover highway 17 and things like that very much and I always when I used to work in San Francisco I could never find out beforehand watching the local news so we'll be able to provide that which I think is a nice value added for the community so that's that's my report all right great thank you very much next is report of the board chair that would be me and I've got nothing to report um specifically so we'll pass on that um board member request for specific items to be on a future uh gender or next agenda anyone seeing none any announcements Keith yeah I I didn't have a volunteer advisory committee report but I did want to mention that we're having a studio supervisors meeting on Thursday to look at what we do if we reopen the studio I'm hearing we might go into yellow tomorrow night so if we do that was the trigger that Becca had said for reopening the studio so we had a document that we created back in July because we thought we might open then before people got silly on July 4th and that didn't happen and Becca has been reviewing it very carefully and it's got a number of great suggestions and we're going to bring that up to the CEO supervisors and see if we can open the studio great excellent thank you um any other announcements anybody all right well I will entertain a motion to adjourn then thank you all for being here I so moved all right Tom and Keith seconds all in favor say aye bye all right thank you all bye everybody thanks take care