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The action was taken Monday at the direction of Clearlake City Administrator Dale Neiman. The station's studio is located in Clearlake City Hall.
TV8 also is known as the PEG Channel, which stands for “Public, Education and Government.”
Based on decisions made at a meeting last month, supporters of TV8 are alleging that officials are trying to censor station programming, while PEG Board members respond that they're exercising their discretion in what programming to offer and that they've not banned anything.
The PEG Board, which oversees the channel's operations, is scheduled to meet at 7 a.m. Wednesday at the Best Western El Grande Inn on Lakeshore Drive in Clearlake. At that time they'll be discussing some of the policies that have led to the dispute.
An informational picket is scheduled to take place from 6:40 a.m. to 7:20 a.m. in front of the hotel, according to station volunteer Dante DeAmicis.
Neiman said no one can be allowed into the station's room in City Hall without his approval.
“The purpose for temporarily shutting down the station is to evaluate whether changes should be made to the operation and management of the station,” he told Lake County News.
Neiman said they would try to run the bulletin board and broadcast the Clearlake City Council and Board of Supervisors meetings. On Tuesday, the station offered its normal live broadcast of the Board of Supervisors.
The station's volunteer interim operations manager, Allen Markowski, said he found the locks changed on the PEG office when he arrived shortly after 1 p.m. Monday.
He was allowed to work during the afternoon, but as officials prepared to close City Hall at 5:30 p.m. he was told to get his own personal camera out of the room as city Finance Director Michael Vivrette and city staffer Julie Burrow looked on.
Markowski said he was told that PEG volunteers no longer will be allowed to use Clearlake City Hall's conference room or meet in the lobby – a public place – and that the police department was put on notice about their presence.
For the time being, the station is running automatically, Markowski said.
This wasn't the first time Markowski has been locked out. Neiman had Markowski suspended from the station in July 2008 after Markowski had added live broadcasts – including Clearlake City Council meetings, which the council approved doing – to the station lineup without the approval of the PEG Board, as Lake County News has reported.
Although Markowski is a volunteer – there has been no paid station manager for at least two years – he's still considered a city employee, which has allowed Neiman to take the action, according to Clearlake City Council member Joyce Overton, who also is a PEG Board member.
December meeting produces disputed policies
At a meeting on Dec. 9, the PEG Board decided to implement a temporary policy limiting the prime time hours of 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. to locally produced programming, with imported or submitted videos not being allowed during that time, according to the meeting's minutes.
At the same time, imported programs will be scheduled to run only twice, even if more than one person submitted them for broadcast. Station policy has been to allow any individual to submit two programs a month, each of which may be replayed twice.
Some of that meeting's discussion revolved around concerns over the station playing a significant amount of “conspiracy theory” programming. PEG Board Member Ed Robey told the board that he had received complaints from community members due the he programming being played so often.
Supervisor Jeff Smith, who also sits on the PEG Board, said the Board of Supervisors has concerns about supporting the station if the programming is too “far out,” and that the conspiracy theory program is predominating.
Markowski told the PEG Board at the Dec. 9 meeting that the people who submit those videos are among the station's biggest supporters, according to the meeting minutes.
He told Lake County News on Tuesday that, based on the station's manual, a process must be followed for complaints that includes writing a letter to the station manager, who can then make a decision, which can be appealed to PEG Board or a PEG Committee. He said the PEG Committee no longer actively meets.
Markowski said the board isn't following that complaint policy.
The proposed policies that came out of the Dec. 9 meeting were to be tried out for a month. Overton said Tuesday that the policy is set to be discussed at the Wednesday morning meeting.
Overton said she's received complaints about videos produced and submitted by local residents not being aired.
She maintained that the PEG Board hasn't banned anything. She said the board told volunteers that if they wanted the videos to run more often, they should create a program devoted to showing them. “We never stopped them from doing it.”
However, station volunteers like Markowski and DeAmicis consider the policies that came out of the Dec. 9 meeting to be censorship.
DeAmicis said no local officials have been willing to talk to him about the legal issues that he believes are involved with limiting content, and that the station's users and supporters are being treated like peasants.
“They've violated our basic, court-defined First Amendment rights,” he said.
He said he and fellow volunteers would like to see the PEG Board – which he said was invented about a year and a half ago – be dissolved and have local government back off of attempts to control content.
But Overton said that the PEG Board is perfectly within its rights.
“That station belongs to the city of Clearlake and we can do whatever we want with it,” she said.
Overton added, “It doesn't have to be a public access channel,” although that's what she wants it to be, not just a bulletin board.
In recent weeks Markowski, DeAmicis and other station volunteers have gone on the air and devoted time to talking about the policy changes and their opposition to them.
They also reported that the grand jury was investigating the station, although they didn't know why.
During one December broadcast they exhibited a table stacked with videos that they accused the PEG Board of banning. They also had a skeleton sitting in one corner of the room with a sign that said “Robey” on its chest.
But the final straw leading to station's lockdown appeared to come in the form of a scroller that appeared at the bottom of the screen on TV8 over the weekend.
The bright red scroller announced that the PEG Board was censoring content, and urged viewers to contact PEG Board members.
The contact information for Robey, Overton and Candyce Hagler were their private e-mails, said Overton. Smith's e-mail was for his Board of Supervisors account.
Overton said she received a call Sunday night from a grand juror alerting her to the scroller, and saying something needed to be done.
She said the decision was then made to have the station run as a bulletin board until the PEG Board can sit down and discuss the issues. Neiman took the action when he returned to the office Monday.
“We're all getting calls,” she said. “It's just gotten out of hand.”
She added, “We need somebody who can manage that place that's objective.”
DeAmicis countered, “We have done everything that's legal.”
Faced with no answers to his questions and what he perceives as a very real threat to the station's future, DeAmicis said he was thinking about heading down to City Hall on Tuesday – not to try to access the station, but to take out papers to run for one of the two Clearlake City Council seats up for election this year.
He said that may be the only way to make sure the station continues.
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