It has been quite a story, unfolding over the years in installments, like a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens.
At its heart is an orphan, little La Plata County, pleading to a heartless federal bureaucracy – like Oliver Twist in the workhouse – holding an upturned satellite dish in outstretched hands with the temerity to ask not just for more, but for a complete change in the menu.
Repeatedly jeered and shouted down by unsympathetic fellows from New Mexico, still the orphan county persists in a quest to enjoy Denver-based news, weather and sports television.
True to the Dickens model, our story has a happy ending at last.
With the help of powerful relatives in Washington, and tireless work on the part of our county commissioners, the orphan’s petition, backed by hundreds of letters, has been granted. A happy, prosperous future has been foretold.
The moral of the story is persistence, as the people of La Plata County, who comprise the first group in the country to request a market modification from the Federal Communications Commission, refused to accept the FCC’s stubborn insistence that for television purposes, we are part of northern New Mexico and the Albuquerque market.
As in a good Dickens story, the stars all aligned: The stars in this case being county Commissioners Julie Westendorff, Gwen Lachelt and Brad Blake, and crucially, Sen. Michael Bennet and Sen. Cory Gardner, who with help from Rep. Scott Tipton, finally made the FCC realize that only one end to this saga was acceptable.
In a demonstration of how government is supposed to work, it was that lever of congressional influence that moved the FCC to accept petitions from counties like ours for access to other television markets. Our commissioners submitted the key petition in October.
True, we are not quite there yet. But with the FCC ruling, the two satellite providers that serve La Plata County have permission to make the necessary arrangements to bring network affiliate coverage from Denver for local broadcast.
That poor orphan, now part of a family, is all smiles heading home, thinking about the Broncos coverage to come.
