Uploaded: Thursday, December 11, 2003, 2:25 p.m.

Cable Co-op awards nearly $4 million in local grants

Just in time for the holidays: Cable Co-op announced it has awarded 26 local groups with nearly $4 million in one-time community grants.

"In times of tight budgets for communities and cities, it's a huge step forward," Seth Fearey, the chairman of the Co-op board, said.

The funds were the remaining dollars left over from the Co-op's sale to AT&T in 2000. In September, the Co-op's board announced it was seeking grant proposals, and was promptly flooded with 220 requests asking for a total of $54 million.

The groups the board awarded grants to include:

• nine local libraries, to improve citizens' access to the internet;
• five local school districts, for video cameras and training;
• the Palo Alto Historical Association, to aid in digitizing thousands of artifacts;
• the Palo Alto Art Center Foundation, to expand the center's Art and Technology Studio;
• East Palo Alto's Digital Village, to improve churches' and nonprofits' Internet use; and
• Community Wireless Collaborative, to bring wireless Internet access to East Palo Alto.

"Access to the Internet is going to be substantially improved through this program, in several different ways," Fearey noted.

The complete list of grantees, and the exact dollar-amount each received, was not available by the time the Weekly went to press. The smallest grant was given to Palo Alto High School English teacher Kaye Paugh, to purchase 100 films to teach film history.

The Palo Alto Library Foundation got $30,000 to refurbish the Children's Library. The foundation is now only $70,000 away from its year-end goal of raising $2.3 million toward the library's renovation and expansion.

After the final decisions were made, board member Sue Lubais accused other board members of cronyism, for allegedly exploiting their conflicts of interest. Three board members voted on the grants, even though they also sit on the boards of groups that asked for funds, she said.

Fearey said the Co-op board "bent over backwards" to make sure board members with apparent conflicts, including himself, didn't "influence the outcomes." Fearey sits on the board of the Midpeninsula Community Media Center, which received a grant to broadcast council meetings on the Internet.

Board members sitting on applying groups' boards did not vote on their proposals, Fearey said. He also noted that the Media Center did not receive all the funds it requested.

"Is this sour grapes because my particular causes were not funded one red cent?" Lubais e-mailed. "You bet!"

But, Lubais added, she had originally advocated for the funds to be returned to the Co-op's members. That was an alternative the board considered, but rejected due to the difficulty in finding some of those members during an earlier reimbursement drive, Fearey said.
-- Bill D'Agostino