By Samantha Smith
The city of Kyle is expanding into a new medium for communicating with Kyle residents with a new Public, Educational, and Government (PEG) access channel.
The new channel is provided by Time Warner Cable, which provides cable in the Kyle area. The channel allows the city to broadcast content to more residents throughout Kyle.
According to Kyle Chief of Staff Jerry Hendrix, the PEG channel will be available to all Time Warner Cable subscribers and offer original content from the city as well as the recordings of city council meetings.
“One of our biggest challenges with working in Kyle is having direct access to the people,” Hendrix said.
According to the FCC, PEG channels “are not mandated by federal law.”
This means that the state offers funds to cable providers to set aside channels to be used for educational and governmental purposes.
In turn, the cable provider pays the city a ‘franchise fee’ that is deposited in a fund specifically for a PEG channel.
The PEG channel fund cannot be used for any purpose other than the purchase of equipment.
“In addition to putting our public meetings on the channel, it allows us to develop our own original content and we have been working with interns and our communication specialist to develop that,” Hendrix said.
Hendrix predicts using content from TCEQ to inform residents on water updates as well as a possible rotating community bulletin board for other information updates.
As of now, Kyle will operate the new PEG channel with the assistance of interns hired through Texas State as well as communication specialist Kim Hilsenbeck and Hendrix himself.
“One of the reasons we hired a communication specialist was to eventually operate the PEG channel,” Hendrix said.
Hendrix said that an increase in the city’s population might require additional staffing in the future.
Hendrix said the PEG channel equipment has already been ordered and he expects it to arrive in July.
“Hopefully the channel will be up and running by the end of the summer,” Hendrix said.
Even with current avenues of communication being utilized by the city, such as notices in utility bills and on the Internet, the PEG channel will expose more Kyle residents to the information they need, according to Hendrix.
“It (the PEG channel) gives us another tool in our tool kit to improve our communication capabilities,” Hendrix said.
