Skip to main contentTo the estimated 30 "Reality TV" shows either on the air or in production, you can add one more: board meetings of Portland Cable Access TV, soon to be broadcast live.
Sound boring? Then you haven't attended recent meetings, which have featured yelling, chair-tossing and allegations involving missing computer hard drives.
In a cramped meeting room last Wednesday, for example, board member Rod Pitman and staffer Laura Ferguson engaged in this verbal volley:
Pitman: "Maybe you need to tell us what's really going on."
Ferguson: "Maybe you'd better talk about the meeting Friday where you tried to take me out and fire me. Let's get it on!"
Pitman (pointing at board chairman Kohel Haver): "You tried to set me up.... Unbelievable!"
The chaos is bad news for First Amendment advocates, activists, charities and communities not served by commercial TV. Portland Cable Access is a nonprofit station overseen by the city, funded by cable viewers through the city's franchise to the tune of about $1.3 million a year.
It has an 11-member board that oversees a paid staff of 15. That helps scores of volunteers air more than 400 hours of programming each month on channels 11, 22 and 23. In addition, PCA operates Channel 30, which airs Portland City Council meetings and other municipal programming.
Anyone willing to go through a training course can get a show--just head over to the PCA offices on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Current topics range from fishing to parenting, Portland police practices to pot-smoking, Eritrea to Ethiopia. Various religious groups host shows, as do followers of Louis Farrakhan and Lyndon LaRouche.
On the national scene, PCA is enjoying unprecedented acclaim, having won two national Telly awards, the advertising industry's equivalent of Oscars, for its public service announcements.
Yet locally, PCA appears to be in a tailspin. The executive director has given notice of his intent to quit, two board members recently resigned in apparent disgust, and others are thinking of following suit.
"From the outside looking in, we look like something on the Jerry Springer show," says board member Michelle Neal. "Just the most dysfunctional group of people. There's no trust, and that's unfortunate."
Much of the current static surrounds PCA's executive director, Robert Skelton, who gave notice of his intent to leave following a stormy meeting on Aug. 7.
The former cable TV advertising executive came to Portland in 1996, after heading a Hawaii cable access station. In Hawaii, critics complained that Skelton tried to turn the station into a PR outlet for his friends on nonprofit boards, leaving citizen-producers out in the cold. One activist even put together a report on Skelton called "Taking the Public out of Public Access."
In Portland, some producers and board members, like Pitman, claim the same thing is going on in terms of Skelton's lack of commitment to the general public's right to air shows. "He's not terribly concerned about the public...he's a bit of an elitist," says one PCA employee.
Skelton's critics blame him for cutting the number of staff that serves citizen-producers, as well as shifting to a new digital technology that makes citizen-producers' pursuits more costly.
In typical PCA dysfunction, however, this alleged loss of public focus apparently has never been discussed by the board. "I've never heard that," board chairman Haver told WW.
And yet, unnerved by what they say was Skelton's difficulty in answering their questions about the nonprofit's operations, board members did commence an "investigation" of Skelton's job performance in June, hiring an attorney and an auditing firm to sort things out. (Skelton declined to comment when contacted by WW.)
Now, with Skelton out on administrative leave, some board members have gotten personally involved.
Two weeks ago, Pitman and fellow board member Jim Wrathall entered the PCA offices and removed the hard drive from Skelton's computer. Vice-chair Celeste Carey promptly sent out two emails suggesting that the move was unauthorized and part of Pitman's "personal investigation" of Skelton.
"These actions are all counter (to) the process outlined in the bylaws," wrote Carey. "This is illegal activity that may bring unpleasant consequences."
Pitman, however, says Haver approved their actions.
The whole thing has concerned members of the Mount Hood Cable Regulatory Commission, which takes in the cable money and uses it to fund PCA.
"We don't want to sit on our hands when a meltdown seems to be occurring on a variety of fronts," says MHCRC director David Olson, who also heads the city's cable office. "But we want to proceed prudently and carefully in conjunction with PCA to get things back together."
Some PCA employees feel Skelton has been victimized by a "witch hunt." They contend that some members of the board seem out of control, while others are out of touch. Some believe the whole board needs to be replaced, and all staffers fired and made to reapply for their old jobs.
At last Wednesday's meeting, however, board members did not seem ready for anything quite so drastic. When the fireworks died down, they agreed to charge the staff with keeping the station running while they look for Skelton's interim replacement.
For a job description, interested applicants may want to watch reruns of Survivor.
Here's a sampling of Portland Cable Access'i current offerings:
Cannabis Common Sense
8:30 pm Fridays on Channel 11
Eritrean Thing
8:30 pm Saturdays on Channel 23
Farrakhan: Torchlight for America
5 pm Fridays on
Channel 11
Flying Focus Video Bus
9:30 pm Fridays on Channel 11
The Hot Tamale Outdoor Show
9 pm every other Monday on
Channel 11
WWeek 2015