Yesterday, Oct. 11, Asheville City Council unanimously voted to not authorize a community media contract with web development company Ponderwell. Xpress had also entered a proposal for the grant and was a finalist in the assessment made by a panel of city, county and business representatives. This post features video of Council’s deliberations on the measure.
At its meeting tonight, Asheville City Council directed city staff to find a temporary location for the Occupy Asheville demonstrators to camp in, with Council to consider approval. Council also unanimously rejected awarding a community-media contract to Web development company Ponderwell.
Tonight, a possible community media contract and a request by the Occupy Asheville demonstrators for a curfew exemption are before Asheville City Council.
As we reported last week, Mountain Xpress and Ponderwell presented their proposals to an evaluation panel for the Community Media Development Initiatives grant. We have now received the final scoring spreadsheet for both the proposal and presentation portions of the process, showing that Ponderwell’s proposal earned the panel’s high score.
Last month, the City of Asheville issued a request for proposals for Community Media Development Initiatives, with the winning project(s) receiving $120,000 over a three-year period. Xpress was one of nine groups to participate in this process, and was selected earlier this week as one of the two finalists. Here is the complete text of our proposal submission.
The city of Asheville has named two finalists for its request for proposals for community media: Web development-and-design firm Ponderwell and media outlet Mountain Xpress. Here’s all the submitted proposals, including those two.
In these plans, six local organizations, including finalists Ponderwell and Xpress, present their ideas for providing community media services in response to the city of Asheville’s Request for Proposal.
Tonight, Asheville City Council will consider issuing a call for proposals, partnering with Buncombe County, for an outside group to provide “community media development” following the collapse of the WNC Community Media Center. However, the proposal does not specify that a public access television channel to replace the defunct URTV must be part of the deal, and the funding the governments would provide expires after three years.
Asheville CIty Council tackles two potentially tough issues at its June 28 meeting tonight: the future of the now-defunct public-access channel and a proposal to rezone property at Sunny Point Cafe from a residential to a business classification.
The Mountain Area Information Network’s board of directors plans to meet this afternoon to talk about the controversy regarding the recent dismissal of a volunteer at MAIN’s low-power radio station WPVM (103.5 FM).
