A controversial move by state regulators to cancel existing contracts with nonprofit providers of public, educational and government access television services in each county and invite competing proposals to potential providers of similar services has been sidetracked indefinitely after the two largest existing access providers filed formal protests last week.

Keali’i Lopez, executive director of ‘Olelo Community Television, Honolulu’s access provider, and Jay April, president and CEO of Akaku: Maui Community Television confirmed their organizations both submitted protests to the State Procurement Office. The protests argue some provisions of the 89-page request for proposals (RFP) are inconsistent with state law, exceed the authority given state regulators by statute and contain provisions that may be unenforceable.

Akaku attorney Lance Collins said the protests automatically stop the procurement process, at least temporarily. The State Procurement Office has already announced the cancellation of scheduled open houses at each of the existing public access facilities, where interested parties would have been given an inside look at current operations.

Although the state hoped to have new contracts and potentially new access providers in place by the beginning of 2008, it now appears that deadline will be impossible to meet.

Collins said the chief procurement officer must decide whether to uphold any of the claims made in the protests. ‘If our protest is denied, the Akaku board has authorized me to appeal,’ Collins said.

An adverse decision could be further appealed to state court, Collins said.

The State Procurement Office did not respond to a request for comment last week.

In its protest, Akaku said the state’s blueprint for services is tailored to favor state bureaucracies like the Department of Education (DOE) instead of the general public and the full range of community organizations and interests that access television is supposed to serve. The RFP has ‘a very narrow reading of what educational access content should be’ and limits educational channels to use by the DOE and University of Hawai’i, Collins said.

Others involved in education, such as private schools, charter schools, home schooling or organizations sponsoring activities that don’t necessarily lead to a degree are excluded, a step which exceeds the authority of cable television officials and the director of the Dept. of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Collins said.

‘That’s the bottom line,’ April said in a telephone interview. ‘We’re about electronic democracy where anyone can have a voice, and there are very powerful interests that want only the state’s approved point of view to be broadcast.’

Akaku has also filed three related lawsuits in Maui’s Second Circuit Court challenging separate issues stemming from applying the state’s procurement process to the public access contracts.

Although the protests and lawsuits raise complex legal issues, the underlying policy issue is simple, according to April. ‘Think about television programming as a city, and each channel is a building, with most of them now owned by the same handful of global corporations,’ April said. ‘Then there’s a little green space, a public park, and that’s where we go and talk to each other. That’s public access.

‘Now the cable companies and governments want to pave over the park, and the bulldozers are lining up on all sides,’ April said.

Public, education and government programming, known as PEG, was authorized by federal law and is funded by fees paid by cable operators. In Hawai’i, Oceanic-Time Warner Cable is now the monopoly supplier of cable services on all islands, while PEG access has been managed by independent nonprofit groups in each county established specifically to serve their local communities.

In April 2006, the Cable Television Division of the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs requested an exemption from the state procurement code based on its determination, following a series of statewide public hearings, that competitive procurement ‘is either not practicable or advantageous to the state, or both.’

‘The PEG contracts are fundamentally different from other government contracts, in that they involve a unique service: facilitating the exercise of citizens’ free speech rights,’ cable division staff stated in their exemption request.

‘Government contractors do not typically exercise such wide-ranging discretion, nor do they address issues so fundamental to our citizenship,’ they argued.

In a curt four-paragraph response dated June 16, 2006, the procurement office rejected the exemption request and ordered DCCA to move forward immediately with the RFP process.

For more reports from Ian Lind, visit [www.iLind.net].

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