Editor’s Note: Later this year, the Moapa Valley Television Maintenance District (MVTVD) will begin its 60th year. Throughout that time, the MVTVD has made over-the-air (OTA) broadcast signals from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City available to the residents of Moapa Valley. The district is now re-broadcasting signals from 33 different primary broadcasters, in digital format, to any local residents equipped to receive an OTA signal. The following is the third article in a series this summer which explores impending challenges being faced by the MVTVD and other rural translators across the country.
By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
There is an old political anecdote, that circulates among the old timers up in the remote rural communities of north/central Nevada. It tells about the early days of television airwave transmission in those communities.
The earliest television stations available to rural residents of these wide open areas were actually out of Salt Lake City. The state of Utah had made some significant investments in infrastructure for television signal transmission into its more rural areas. This made it feasible, and relatively inexpensive, for residents of rural Nevada to pick up those signals and relay them further out into the ranching, farming and mining areas of Nevada. They usually did this by pooling community resources and using a good measure of “small-town ingenuity” to paste together the necessary equipment.
Because of this, for more than a decade, many of the small communities dotting the vast empty spaces of Nevada received only Salt Lake City programming.
In the late 1960s, then-Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer came from Carson City all the way to Ely to attend the graduation ceremonies at White Pine High School. The local folks were tremendously excited that the Governor himself would be speaking at their commencement exercises in their little rural school.
As legend tells it, when it came time for him to speak, Sawyer was actually introduced to the crowd as Governor Calvin Rampton who was then the Governor of Utah. Because their main source of media information had been coming from Salt Lake City, folks up in White Pine were actually more familiar with the elected officials in Utah than they were with those in Nevada.
Sawyer reportedly returned back to Carson City with a determination to find funding that would build necessary infrastructure and bring the signals for Reno TV stations to those far-flung rural areas.
Regardless of how historically accurate this tale may or may not be, a whole network of television transmission infrastructure was in fact built in the years following; infrastructure which connected the small ‘cow-county’ Nevada communities to the urban centers of their home state and beyond.
Television towers were eventually erected across the state which relayed signals from hilltop to hilltop and brought programming from Reno and Las Vegas into isolated towns like Battle Mountain, Elko, Eureka, Ely and others throughout the state.
Small television districts which had been established in each of these communities worked together in cooperation to get those signals out to as many people as it was possible, given the limitations of the technology and the terrain.
“It has been quite a bit of work over the years to get it all put together,” said Eureka Television District board member Dave Pastorino in an interview with the Progress. “Our Salt Lake channels take two or three hops from Salt Lake to get it to Ely and then to here. And we send the Reno and Las Vegas channels that we receive here on to Ely. We are all interdependent on each other.”
Through this cooperative effort, the string of districts across Nevada has been able to provide low cost entertainment and information to a vast swath of rural areas that would be otherwise have been left without, Pastorino said.
Of course, this effort has not been without its challenges. And some of the biggest challenges are still to come.
Perhaps the longest ongoing challenge over the years has been funding. In the early days, the efforts began as groups of neighbors voluntarily pooled their own resources, purchasing equipment and installing it themselves on the hilltops. That worked for a while, but the signals were not always reliable. And keeping up with the newest technology became more and more expensive.
Eventually, to survive, most of the districts had to find a more substantial and stable source of revenue. Today, the remaining districts have begun charging a mandatory assessment of their property owners through the property tax rolls. For example, TV districts in Elko and Eureka make an assessment based on a very small percentage of each property’s assessed value. Humboldt County and Lander County districts, on the other hand, make a flat rate annual assessment on the tax roll, similar to the $24 per year that is currently being assessed by the Moapa Valley Television District.
As subscription TV services like cable and satellite have come along, many residents of the districts made the move away from the free over the air signals in favor of the greater variety and reliability of those subscription services. Along the way, the idea of community pooling of resources through the assessments has made less sense to people who don’t use the signals.
But district officials throughout the rurals echo that the over-the-air signals are still a worth-while community resource.
Bob Pierce of the Lander County TV District, which services Battle Mountain and its surrounding communities, pointed out that a satellite TV subscription in his area normally costs $100-$150 per month. That is simply out of range for many of the local residents, he said.
“We have a lot of people in town who are on a fixed income,” Pierce said. “Those folks can’t afford to go to another system with those kinds of fees. If they had to do that, they would lose TV service altogether.”
Pierce added that there is also a small trend in recent years that has pulled people back from the subscription TV service because of the cost for the level of service they receive.
“There are a lot people who have gotten fed up, dropped their satellite and installed an antenna on their roof to get our free service,” Pierce said. “They can save some money and it is a better option for them.”
Paul Gardner of the Elko Television District board said that he has noticed a similar trend in his area. He told about an informal study that his district had conducted recently to ask people what service they were using for television. Of those responding to the survey, 26 percent of the people were using only the district’s over-the-air signal. That is in an area comprising a total of about 30,000 people, Gardner said.
“Frankly, we were astounded by how many people said that they actually use the service,” Gardner said. “The results has led a lot of people here to feel that their little bit of tax dollars that are invested in this might still be well spent.”
Another more recent challenge to these districts has been the federal-mandate for all primary broadcasters to convert to a digital signal by the year 2009. Since most of the rurals districts were running old analog equipment, this transition required a major overhaul for them. And in most cases it was very expensive.
According to Pastorino, the Eureka district began its digital conversion back in 2005. They ended up installing a microwave link to bring the primary signals to their receiving sites. They had to install new towers, buildings and equipment that was specifically tuned to new digital frequencies. The cost: around $3.5 million. The district used grants and several years’ advance on their assessment revenues from the county to pay for the updates.
“We could justify the expense because of the big mines at the north end of the county,” Pastorino said. “Our signals provided low cost entertainment to a lot of those people.”
Furthermore, since the early 1960s, the area has been included in the Salt Lake City TV viewing area. That means that subscription TV service providers only offer Salt Lake channels in their local programming packages, not Reno or Las Vegas stations.
“Because of that, we have a lot of people who are not happy with satellite TV providers,” Pastorino said. “Our signals are the only way that they can get the Reno and Las Vegas stations.”
Unfortunately, all of that public investment in the digital conversion may now be put in jeopardy. That’s because of the newest challenge that is looming on the horizon.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing to free up bandwidth on the television transmission spectrum in order to feed the current high demand for wireless broadband service. The proposal would clear all TV programming off of a large swath of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum to make way for a huge auction, as early as next year. In the auction, those newly vacated channels of spectrum would be sold to the highest bidders: presumably big wireless corporations.
This would force rural TV districts to vacate channels they have been using for decades. What’s more, it would require them to redo much of the infrastructure that was put into place just a few years ago. Pastorino said that, in the case of his district, it would mean yet another major overhaul.
“If we have to move all of these stations to a new part of the spectrum, we will be required to change out all of our transmitting equipment: just about all of our channels,” Pastorino said.
With the cost of equipment to change one transmitter at about $12,000, and with around 30 new transmitters needed, Pastorino estimates the cost would be around $360,000.
“And of course, there is no compensation or assistance from the FCC to do all of that,” Pastorino said. “And all of this assumes that we are able to go back to the FCC and get new licenses for our stations that we have to vacate.”
Though few are in such a difficult spot as Eureka, most of the TV districts around the state are reporting that they will have a few of their stations affected by the repack.
Gardner said that in Elko there might be as many as two.
Lander County has just one station of its own that would be affected, according to Bob Pierce. But it also receives those two stations from Elko that might be affected by the repack.
Humboldt County TV District technician Paul Burkholder said that the biggest problem is that it is yet unclear what the final impact will be.
“That is really the frustrating part of it all,” Burkholder said. “We really don’t know how many channels we have to move until the FCC takes the next step.”
Burkholder sees a pessimistic outlook for the future of free-to-air TV signals. He views the repack as more than just a demand for more spectrum by big wireless providers. Rather he sees it as a move by those companies to clear the field of all of its free-to-air competitors.
“I think that the big companies: the AT&T and Verizon; within their circle, they want us to go away,” Burkholder said. “They want to become THE deliverer of information out there. And they are doing whatever they can to make it difficult for the free over-the-air translators. They will win both ways and it won’t stop here. Those of us who survive will just live to be edged out again.”
