Limited availability of DTV coupons frustrates Valley residents

McALLEN — Television broadcasters in the United States are slated to switch to an exclusively digital signal on Feb. 17, eliminating the current analog system.

Cable and satellite service will not be affected, but older televisions will need a digital TV, or DTV, converter device to capture the signals.

President-elect Barack Obama and some consumer groups have urged Congress to push back the transition date over concerns about the availability of converter boxes and the distribution of $40 coupons to purchase the devices.

The government launched a program to make the coupons available to each household in an effort to ease the financial burden of making the switch, but that program ran out of money in early January. Thousands of consumers who requested the coupons — including some Rio Grande Valley residents — are still waiting to receive them.

“(Pushing back the transition date) would be much fairer and less of a burden on those people who are not as equipped to deal with it financially — I don’t see where a little more time would hurt us,” said Larry Safir, executive vice president for Entravision Communications, the parent company of the Valley’s Univision and Fox affiliates, KNVO Channel 48 and XRIO Channel 6.

“This was something that was mandated by the government, and their administrating of it has been very poor,” he said.

Related: Spanish-language media urges FCC to support delaying digital transition

When television stations tested the Valley’s readiness on Dec. 17 by twice broadcasting in digital exclusively for five minutes, nearly 1,800 people called a toll-free number with problems. Of those, some 1,650 had concerns about coupons. More than half of the more than 360,000 coupons requested by Valley residents have actually been distributed, according to local station executives.

Mission resident Donna Poye sent away for the coupon in late September, but more than three months later it still hasn’t arrived.

When the 80-year-old contacted the U.S. Department of Commerce, the agency charged with managing the transition, she received a letter saying there was nothing it could do because her coupon was already mailed out. The letter urged her to find someone who didn’t need one, she recalled.

“I ordered them again through a guy who said he didn’t need any,” Poye said.

Poye’s boyfriend, 73-year-old Dick Lambert, was so frustrated after he was told he couldn’t request another coupon — despite not receiving one in the first place — that he canvassed the Wintergreen Estates mobile home park at 500 Bryan Road in Mission for other people having problems and found eight others in a similar predicament.

“You know when you call back, they won’t even (work with) you,” he said of the feds. “They claim they mailed it.”
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Sean Gaffney covers business, the economy and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.