SANTA PAULA : City Protests Cable Blackout of KEYT

The Santa Paula City Council has sent a letter of complaint to Ventura County Cablevision objecting to the partial blackout of KEYT, the ABC network affiliate located in Santa Barbara.

In the letter, Mayor Alfonso Urias asked the company to “take appropriate action to continue local programming for the citizens of Ventura County.”

A cable spokesman said the company is following federal regulations in honoring a request by KABC, the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, to block out duplicate programs aired by both KEYT and KABC, two rival affiliates.

Johnnie D. Giles, the director of government affairs, also said the cable company has fixed the scheduling mistakes that occasionally resulted in KEYT’s local news being blacked out.

With the council’s decision this week, Santa Paula became the second city to authorize action in protest of the blackout. The Thousand Oaks City Council voted last month to seek an exemption from regulations covering non-duplication of services, but is still researching the issue, a city official said Tuesday.

At issue is the Federal Communication Commission’s rules that allow a television station within 35 miles of a cable station to demand a blackout of network programming carried by a “lower priority” station.

Because Thousand Oaks, the primary operation center for Ventura County Cablevision, is within 35 miles of Los Angeles, KABC officials requested in January, 1990, that the KEYT network programming be blocked.

Until August, the company was inserting KABC duplicate programming onto KEYT’s Channel 3. But then the company began using Channel 3 during duplicate show times to promote its own pay-per-view programming, and that’s when residents began to complain about the loss of local programming.

The blackout of some local programs, especially the occasional absence of local news carried by KEYT, angered some viewers.

Some areas within the Ventura County Cablevision service area--Santa Paula, Camarillo, Fillmore and Moorpark--are located midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. But the cable signal for those communities is generated from Thousand Oaks and therefore falls within the blackout zone, Giles said.