The Big Story: Budget cuts
February 13, 2008 at 9:37 am by Wayne GarciaThe other shoe might drop today as Mayor Pam Iorio has advertised that she’s holding “an informal budget meeting with key staff and members of Tampa City Council” this morning. I’ll be there, fortified by a large cup of decaf.
It raises the question, however, that if she is going to discuss deeper cuts in city budgets and services, what should those be?
My first suggestion would be the millions that are poured into city propaganda on the Government Access Channel. Take everything except coverage of the City Council and other important boards off the air. I realize that much of the funding for these feel-good municipal shows comes from cable franchise fees (translated: taxes on cable television consumers) that are limited in terms of what they can be spent on, but it would make an excellent statement about redefining city priorities. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties and St. Petersburg could follow suit, saving cable taxpayers millions.
Government access television is a $6 million enterprise at the five largest local governments, or at least it was in 2004 when I first wrote about this propaganda machine and its endless supply of cash.
UPDATE at 11:30 a.m.: Trusted CL intern Jason Kushner went along with me and he will have a blog post upcoming about the news from City Hall, which was, overall, not earthshaking as Pam Iorio said things are bad but not bad enough to lay off city workers en masse or cut deeply into services in next year’s budget.
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February 13th, 2008 at 11:45 am
I think from that from now on, politicians should be given their own section of the newspaper where they can say whatever they want and edit it however they want, without input from an unbiased party.
That is roughly equivalent to what these shows allow the government to do. The televised meetings are an important and useful public service, but the expensive, stylized shows that receive so much airtime are just an outlet for local government to control public perception without a check on the bias or honesty of the content.