Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Prescott Video Tells Council About Adding Channels

Nine new channels will be added to Prescott's local cable station when upgrades to the system are done.

Jim Dickerson, supervisor with Prescott Video, told the Prescott City Council, during its regular monthly meeting, the coaxial work is 99 percent completed.

Once the coax work is done, he said, the next step will be to install the fiberoptic cable. When this is done everything will be spliced together and activated.

Dickerson said the rebuilding of this system has been going on since July 1999, and because of unforseen delays, it won't be completed until around June, 2000.

Part of the problem is a hurricane hit the plant furnishing the fiberoptic cable, slowing production down and backing orders up.

According to Dickerson, the cable company won't be able to get the fiberoptic cable in until the end of March.

However, he said, when the upgrade is complete, there should be no further problem with "sparkles" on KARK Channel 4.

What is being done, in essence, Dickerson told the council, is the Hope and Prescott cable systems are being combined to make a single larger one.

By doing this, it gives the company a larger customer base and makes it easier to justify adding more services in the future, such as web-TV. By combining the two, he said, both can get services neither could have gotten before.

He said Prescott and Hope will now be getting exactly the same cable channels and paying the same rates.

One problem Prescott has had for years is the loss of electricity. This, Dickerson said, is because there were outages when the city was with Entergy.

To solve this, he continued, the system in Prescott will be tied to Hope and run through Hope Water and Light. HW&L has a generator which will provide electricity to the cable system in case of other problems.

In this manner, Dickerson said, customers should be able to get all the stations all the time.

Some of the new stations Prescott customers will be getting include Lifetime, the Outdoor Channel, ESPN2 and the TV Guide Channel

They will also be getting the Shreveport, La. UPN and Fox stations, because, Dickerson

said, the Federal Communications Commission has deemed Prescott to be in the Shreveport market.

This, he said, means the cable company must carry these stations, but can also carry NBC, ABC and CBS out of Little Rock.

The company, he added, is working to try and get the FCC to allow it to carry the WB station out of El Dorado.

Additionally, Showtime and The Movie Channel will be available as premium channels along with HBO and Cinemax.

Dickerson said there should be no duplicate networks.

"The system will be built by the end of March," he said, "but we won't have the channels to the customers switched by then."

The switching will be done when the fiberoptics have been activated, then all customers will get the new programming at the same time.

In other business, the council accepted bids on a flatbed truck, two 3/4 ton pickups and a new pole truck.

The flatbed will be purchased from Diamond Spec International for $49,750.

The council approved the bid for two Chevrolet pickups from John Hays for $20,920 each, with the pole truck to be bought from Combatch for $117,710.

The money for these purchases will not be coming from the city's general operating fund, but from the utility department's depreciation funds.

Prescott Police Chief Sam Reeder told the council his findings about trying to solve the city's dog problem.

Reeder contacted city officials in Hope and Gurdon to see how they had handled their animal control trouble.

Hope has a full-time animal control officer, while Gurdon had to hire someone to do the job on a part-time basis. Gurdon also passed a half-cent city sales tax to help fund its animal control department.

However, neither of these cities would take Prescott's dogs, he said. Hope's shelter is full, while Gurdon takes its dogs to Arkadelphia.

Arkadelphia, he said, charges a daily rate to house the animals until they are either adopted or euthanized.

Jon Chadwell, director of the Prescott-Nevada County Economic Development Office said everything went well at a recent retail merchant's meeting.

The results of a recent consumer survey (see related story) were presented at this meeting, he said, with residents voicing their opinions on what type of businesses the area needs.

Chadwell said the EDO is looking to have a scavenger hunt wherein people will be given a list of items hard to find in Prescott. This, he added, will help raise people's awareness of what is offered by local merchants.

Work to get a spec building built is still going on. This is important, he said, because most industries looking to relocate want an existing building. "We may not get looked at if we don't have one.

Chadwell said since its inception six years ago the EDO has helped the area obtain $19.6 million in grants, while $190,000 has been invested in the EDO office. "This is a good return on your investment," he said.