The District’s cable television office squandered nearly $5 million designing and equipping a high-definition television studio that was ill-conceived and never built, a new audit finds.
The Office of Cable Television partnered with Mason Production Services in early 2006 to design and build an HD studio at the agency’s headquarters in Northwest.
The studio, officials said at the time, was necessary to “satisfy the digital television broadcast mandates that have been imposed upon [OCT] and other broadcasters by the Federal Communications Commission.” And it could be rented out, they said, to private production companies for a fee.
But the deal with Mason was quietly canceled after 15 months. Most of the equipment remains in its original boxes. The deal “was not clearly in the interest of the District government, its agencies, and more importantly, the citizens of the District of Columbia,” the D.C. inspector general concludes in an audit released this week. “Specifically, important District dollars were wasted on a project that was never completed.”
The sole-source agreement with Mason Productions, the brainchild of former OCT Director James Brown, was struck “without adequate justification,” auditors found. The FCC mandate to broadcast in digital, for example, made no requirement for high definition — an interpretation officials now acknowledge was “mistakenly made by the agency.”
» Old HD studio design: $1.39 million
» HD equipment: $3.5 million
» New HD studio: $8.7 million
Mason was paid $1.39 million and the city’s cable television office spent another $3.5 million on equipment, according to the IG, to “derive the benefit of a higher resolution television broadcast picture of mayoral, D.C. Council and educational events.” Renting the studio for commercial use, auditors noted, is “strictly prohibited” by office policy.
“Do I think it was a good deal? Absolutely not,” Eric Richardson, current OCT director, told The Examiner. “I am a firm believer that the government should not be competing with private production facilities, so we are not moving that direction.”
“We inherited this and we’re making the best out of it,” he added. Todd Mason, former president of Mason Production, said in August 2008 that it was a “shame” the facility “will never be used in a way that it was originally procured to do.”
Mason disagreed with the IG report, he said in a written response to the audit, because it “implied things that are completely unsubstantiated and blatantly false.” His company, he said, “more than delivered on all of the services it was contracted to complete.”
Attempts to reach Mason were unsuccessful. OCT plans to open an HD studio at McKinley Technical High School, to be constructed by the D.C. school modernization office, for educational use and to produce some government HD programming. The cost estimate for the new space is $8.7 million.
