AN ORDINANCE related to cable television; authorizing the Mayor or the Mayor’s designee to enter into a renewed Cable Television Franchise Agreement with Comcast Cable Communications Management, LLC; and authorizing the Chief Technology Officer to enter into other agreements for the purpose of implementing or administering the renewed franchise.
The bill passes and the chair will sign it. Report to the full council. Please read item number one. The report at the full council agenda item number one Council 118 549 relating to cable television, authorizing the mayor or the mayor's designee to enter into a renewed cable television franchise agreement with Comcast Cable Communications Management LLC, and authorizing the Chief Technology Officer to enter into other agreements for the purpose of implementing or administering the renewed franchise held December seven, 2015. Thank you, Councilmember Harrell. Thank you very much. So by way of background, you may recall we held this legislation to have some more discussion. This is basically an ordinance which renews the ten year franchise agreement for Comcast. And I want to go into a little bit of detail about what we're able to get from Comcast for this franchise. And it's important to note that this is not an exclusive franchise. We have other franchises in the city with Wave and CenturyLink as well. I do want to say right at the beginning that I thank all of you for being here on even other issues. It's unfortunate that we don't have enough time for everyone to speak, but your presence here, we are honored by your presence and for you fighting for what you believe in. So do you apologize? We didn't have the opportunity to to hear from all of you. Anyway, let's get back to Comcast. So basically and again, I don't report that everyone sort of understands this. There are certain things the city can regulate and certain things they cannot. For example, the city cannot control Comcast prices. And that's something that always is people are concerned about. The city cannot control Internet service that's regulated by the federal government. And so in our franchise agreement, we're looking at one part of what they provide, which is the the cable piece in this particular agreement, what we were able to basically get in terms of our goal and you may recall that our goal is to improve competition, have strong customer service and consumer protections. So everything we do must be designed to protect the consumer. So we updated the cable code establishing new standards for all cable providers back in March. There you have discussions about our cable, our customer bill of Rights and response times and what a customer's rights are. If they're not being treated fairly by Comcast or others. In this particular agreement, we're able to make sure that Seattle joined Comcast's pilot program that they have for low income seniors. You're eligible for the Internet Essentials discounted Internet program. And so we're able to get that very recently because we observed and I should say we it's the executive of the Department of Information Technology and the City Council observed that similar traction was was occurred had occurred in Philadelphia. We're able to get that here. We're able to get the previously announced digital equity grant offer to Seattle from a one time $50000 to $100000 per year for five years. That's about $500,000 in additional benefits. We will partner with Comcast at the City of Seattle to help risk risk add youth, obtain devices such as laptop computers. We have $8 million in public educational and governmental access channel financial support for those those public services. We have a 30% discount on basic tier, low income subscribers, and we have 600 modems to nonprofit organizations that's valued at about $10 million. In short, we had our Department of Information Technology go toe to toe with Comcast to get as many community benefits and consumer protections as we could. I will sort of close by saying we've had lengthy discussions about Comcast role and obligation. Our community and the city takes those very, very seriously. We hear daily people complaining about Comcast wanting competition, wanting lower rates. And so we have done everything possible in the last several months trying to achieve that. Last, I will say that many of the benefits that we've gotten, because they were not directly cable related, came in this letter agreement that I think all of you now have either talked to legal counsel or have seen the letter. And so we do have opinions that this is about as binding as it can get, given the sort of the hand that we're dealt, the hand being some of these are non cable related through theories of the legal theories such as promissory estoppel or equal to stop and all these fancy terms that sort of describe what Comcast must do. We are comfortable that that letter, that December 7th letter's binding. So the committee recommends passage of this legislation. Thank you. Questions or comments? Please call the role on the passage of the bill. Guarded. By. Gonzalez. Harrell I Licata. O'Brien Hi. Rasmussen. So on President Burgess eight in favor and unopposed. The bill passes and the chair will sign it. Please read items two and three.