1. United States
2. Conn.
3. Letter

I am writing as your constituent and a New Haven resident to ask for your help with a problem that affects a growing number of the people we both live among: our community access television is effectively unavailable to anyone who does not subscribe to cable. Citizens Television, Inc. (CTV) is the designated community access provider for New Haven, Hamden, and West Haven. Its three channels — 26 (education), 27 (public), and 96 (government) — are carried only on Comcast. I do not have cable. Neither do a large and growing share of my neighbors, many of them older residents, disabled residents, and people on fixed incomes who dropped cable precisely because they could not afford it. And many people have YouTube TV which does not include community access channels. I want to be precise about what I am and am not asking. I understand that the General Assembly cannot compel YouTube TV or any other streaming provider to carry a PEG channel; carriage is a matter of federal law and private agreement. That is not my request. My request is that the state make it financially possible for CTV to stream its own programming, free, the way other Connecticut community access providers already do. Nutmeg TV, for example, distributes its programming over its website, Facebook, and YouTube in addition to cable. The barrier in New Haven is not law. It is money. Specifically, I ask that you: 1. Introduce or co-sponsor legislation in the session convening in January to extend the per-subscriber community access fee to streaming video subscribers. This has been attempted three times — SB 176 (2020), SB 278 (2022), and HB 5446 (2024) — and has died each time while PEG revenues continue to fall. Connecticut’s PEG stations reported losing more than $1.27 million between 2017 and 2022 as cable subscriptions declined. The cord was never really cut; the customers simply moved to a delivery method the statute does not reach. 2. Condition state support on public availability. Community access providers receive funding set by PURA under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 16-331a and compete for PEGPETIA grants. I would ask that any provider receiving that support be required to make its programming available to residents online at no charge — both a live stream and a searchable archive — so that public money buys genuinely public access. 3. In the near term, ask your office to inquire with PURA whether CTV’s existing PEGPETIA eligibility can be directed toward streaming infrastructure, and to ask CTV directly what it would need to begin streaming. The New Haven Board of Alders already livestreams its meetings on YouTube, and it is a real public good. There is no principled reason the public and education channels should remain behind a cable paywall while the government channel does not. I would be glad to submit written testimony or testify before the Energy and Technology Committee if a bill is raised. Thank you for your time and for your service to New Haven.