"How Cable Came To Arlington" (Continued from above.)

Of course, most of the Arlington viewing public was interested in cable TV's arrival as a longed-for improvement in signal quality.  In East Arlington, where the land is relatively flat, TV reception was decent, but in the Heights, with its hilly terrain, the snowy, ghosty reception picked up with standard antennas left residents highly motivated for something better.

The town engaged a Cable Advisory Committee (CAC) that evaluated six cable companies and made their recommendation to the Board of Selectmen.  When it came to local programming, Arlington was asking for better than second-class treatment for the public access side of the equation.  American Cable Systems emerged the winner with its single-studio concept.  Employing three staffers, they hoped to make a showcase of Arlington's operation in order to enhance their appeal to other local markets.  Now, with local origination and public access production combined in one studio, the ACS staff trained volunteers on the coveted ¾-inch color video equipment.  The original staffers were: Studio Manager/IT Specialist, Ed Fiddler; Program Director, Nancy Bicknell; and Production Coordinator, Rika Welsh.  And so it began-cable TV in Arlington.

So, by 1981, Arlington's first cable company, American Cablesystems, became fully operational.  An antenna tower at the building at 81 Mystic street, along with satellite dishes mounted on the out buildings in the back, brought not only a clearer signal but new channels.

Along with this came the new studio, with volunteers starting to produce programs about Arlington for cablecast.  However, by this time, Koenig, excited about the promise of local programming, had saved even more of his money and obtained a new portable video recorder, which recorded on 3/4 inch U-Matic cassettes.  This was the same tape format being used in the new cable studio, which allowed him to record on his own, yet edit and cablecast at the studio.  So, in addition to personal and 'art' video recordings, Koenig began to produce a few 'news magazine' pieces for cablecast.

One of the programs produced in the studio was town election returns.  Originally, the studio staff mounted a big production and attempted to switch back and forth from the action in the Town Clerk's office to interviews in the studio.  Only town wide races were covered.  However, in 1986, the election had few contested town wide races. So Production Coordinator Rika Welsh asked Koenig if he would produce coverage from just the Clerk's office that year.  Koenig agreed, so with one camera, one modulator, and one microphone, he and a crew of two others began the tradition of live coverage exclusively from the Clerk's office.  For the first time, a phone number was given out over the air so that viewers could call in and have results read that had been missed.  Having been a Town Meeting member himself, since 1979, he began reporting the results of Town Meeting races on the program for the first time and they have become part of the program ever since.

In 1985, American Cable Systems was awarded the license in Cambridge.  Cambridge opted for the two-studio system, but with a difference. This time the public access studio was managed and operated by a community-based non-profit organization, or "access corporation" known as Cambridge Community TV (CCTV), with funding provided by ACS revenues.  However, next-door neighbor Arlington did not adopt this arrangement when its license was extended for 5 years (from 1990 to 1995), and again for another 10 to 2005.

In the late 1980s, American was bought by Continental Cablevision, thus beginning a string of ownership and name changes.  After winning a fresh 10-year license in Arlington (1995-2005), Continental sold to Media One, who sold to AT&T Broadband, who sold to Comcast.

The single-studio concept remained in place then as it does today but, under the new license (1995), the Town of Arlington was to provide space for the studio for the first time.  But deciding where to house it proved difficult.  In 1998, AT&T Broadband closed the studio at 81 Mystic Street, packed much of the equipment into storage, and told volunteers to "go to Cambridge" to produce programming.  Few did, of course, so for two years, very little was produced for our local channels.

Finally, the Town and AT&T agreed to use the former Dallin branch library, at 85 Park Avenue, in Arlington Heights.  By 1999, AT&T began renovations to the building.  The work proved difficult and expensive as the building had been empty for over 10 years by then, needed to have its historic exterior preserved, while at the same time had to be made compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  After a reported $300,000 investment in renovations a new studio finally opened there on January 1st, 2000.

Meanwhile RCN had come to town, licensed as an OVS (Open Video System) provider, which required no studio, but merely a pass-through of the AT&T Broadband signal.AT&T, however, was not required to share its local origination programming with RCN, so RCN customers were denied local programming, even if they volunteered to help produce it!

Back in 1980, when the very first license was signed with American, a small non-profit organization was created, known as Arlington Cable Access, Inc. (ACA). The ACA was given a modest budget, funded by the cable company, with which it could purchase supplies and a bit of equipment, but it had no power beyond that of recommendation.

ACA, as much as it desired to represent Arlington residents' access, had so little power to do so that its member base dwindled.  In 1998, just after the studio at 81 Mystic Street had been closed, Koenig joined the Board of Directors of ACA to work on a solution to the problems the town had been experiencing with the company run studio.  Longtime volunteer and community activist, Kathy Colwell was already on the board and soon John Leone and others got involved for much the same reasons.  They saw clearly the need for a community access corporation with the power and funding to truly represent community interests on the cable.  As the millennium came to a close, they began planning for and establishing Arlington Community Media, Inc. (ACMI), the non-profit, community-based organization that now manages and operates Public, Educational, and Governmental (PEG) access programming for the town of Arlington under contract by the Arlington Board of Selectmen.

Meetings to decide how to go about creating ACMI were held in Kathy Colwell's kitchen, and later moved to other spaces available in town.  By late 2002, the issue of acceptance by the town still lingered.  Some wanted the Board of Selectmen to approve of the idea of an access corporation before moving forward.  Others felt that the corporation should be created first, then approval sought.  Koenig felt strongly that creating the corporation first was crucial to acceptance by the Board of Selectmen.  So he decided to hold a public meeting at the Robbins Library in February 2003 and enlisted fellow ACMI founding member, Julie Kuhn, to help.  At the meeting, he gave a presentation detailing how little time was actually left before the license was due for renewal in 2005.  He stressed how action was needed immediately to push forward if ACMI was to be ready to assume management of the studio by then.  Enough public officials and members of the public who attended the meeting agreed, so work focused on creating a corporation.

In April of 2003, ACMI was officially incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation and later obtained tax exempt 501(c)[3] status.  Koenig was the first president, with Arlington attorney John D. Leone as vice president, Kathy Colwell as treasurer, and Julie Kuhn and Paul Berg as directors.  Berg resigned in 2004 to become part of the Cable Advisory Committee (CAC) which hired outside Counsel, William Solomon, to negotiate the new (October 2005) license with Comcast.  Solomon and the CAC did well by the Town and set up the license to support an access corporation to manage and operate cable access programming for Arlington residents.

Negotiations with Comcast extended beyond the end of the previous license, but by the end of the summer of 2006, it was a done deal.  Comcast relinquished control of the studio, the ACMI Board of Directors signed a contract with the town to operate the studio for the next ten years (and likely beyond), and moved ahead to search for and hire an executive director.  They found Norman McLeod who occupied the same position in a cable access system in the southern Berkshires.

It had been almost eight years and countless hours of meetings since the first serious discussions about forming an access corporation were had by ACA Board members, meeting in the basement of the Fox branch library back in 1998.

Right at this time, Glenn Koenig, ACMI's founding president, made what for many was an unexpected choice at that critical juncture in the organization's history.  He decided in June 2006 to resign as president of ACMI just as it cleared its ultimate hurdle and won the hoped-for contract.  By his own assessment, Koenig had completed his mission and was not the right person for what was needed next, e.g. the financial management of the corporation and its production studio.  So John Leone stepped up to assume the presidency while Kathy Colwell continued to hold the financial reins as treasurer.

Was Koenig like Moses, who arrived within sight of the Promised Land, but was never to actually set foot upon it?  No.  He says he is pleased and delighted by how things have proceeded since his departure and feels he made the right decision.  Moreover, he became free to take on a new assignment, for which he was uniquely qualified, of overseeing the conversion of the Town's old coaxial cable institutional network, or I-Net, to a newer digital fiber optic network.  In the process, 85 Park Avenue has now been made the hub of the upgraded network. (Arlington High School's basement provided that function for the coaxial network until the end of February 2007.)  Those who've been watching closely the past couple of weeks will surely have noticed the difference in resolution and clarity on Comcast channels 8 and 9, and on RCN channels 3 and 13.  But wait, there's still more!

Days ago, on Tuesday March 13^th to be precise, ACMI's Arlington Studio commenced cablecasting on a third channel for each network.  On that day Comcast channel 10 and RCN channel 15 began carrying the Town of Arlington's Governmental programming-The 'G' in PEG-for the first time ever.  Now, for the first time, all local programming related to town, state, and national government will have its very own home on these channels.  As we tune in over time to increased cable coverage of municipal meetings and events, our thoughts may return to a committed nucleus of thoughtful town folk that passionately believed back in 1981 that a connected and informed citizenry is a good thing.

Glenn Koenig is grateful for the opportunity to be part of bringing to his favorite town greater public and institutional access to its new cable network.  He acknowledged many times during this interview that this was a team effort; none of this would have been possible without the diligent and dedicated efforts of many others who he wishes time and space here allowed him to thank individually. Since it does not, he says in closing, simply:  "Welcome to a new day in Arlington community media."