Meet a Morro Bay Man Who’s on a Mission From God to Bring Government Meetings to the Masses

Steve Mathieu leans forward when he walks, like a man heading into the wind. Momentum is with him. He never stops moving. Never wants to stop. Perhaps, remembering when he couldn’t move at all. When he was wrapped head to toe in plaster of paris. Bound, body and soul, for a year. A claustrophobic year. But that was nearly two decades ago. Another life completely.

Tonight one of his shooters is late, so Mathieu is doing double duty. He’s jacked up on nicotine, which he draws from unfiltered Camels, and caffeine, which he sips from a metal mug. He is kinetic energy, dodging between Camera 1 and his mobile control room–a red plywood box on casters he built to hold his field switcher and four VHS recorders.

The way he bobs and weaves you’d think he was covering the Super Bowl. To him, it’s more important: the bimonthly meeting of the San Luis Obispo County Health Commission.

Before the meeting gets started, Chairman Nancy Barta tells the other commissioners to speak into their microphones.

"I’ve gotten phone calls from people watching at home that sometimes they can’t hear us that well," she says. "But at least they’re listening."

And thanks to Mathieu–watching. His AGP Video (All Government Productions) has become the C-SPAN of the Central Coast, shooting and airing everything from the weekly San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors meetings to the Morro Bay City Council and Planning Commission sessions. Through local cable access channels like that provided by Charter Communications, he and longtime partner and significant other Nancy Castle point a camera into the formerly darkened chambers of endless talk while hitting the light switch to see who scurries.

"With television you can see them," he says. "You can watch their eyes and their body language."

San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Mike Ryan was against the cameras at first.

"But I kept running into people constantly telling me how great it was to be able watch what was going on during our meetings. I told them, ‘Your cable service must not be offering much if you’re sitting at home watching that,’" Ryan says with a laugh. He and two other supervisors are up for re-election this year. He believes that AGP’s TV exposure will have an impact on all the races.

"They see you in action, the way you do business on the floor. Not everything is just a soundbite; there’s context. Things are more complicated than they previously believed."

Unfortunately, at this time there’s no way to actually measure how many are watching, but according to Ed Merrill, general manager of Charter Communications, phone calls and letters to the company indicate plenty of viewer interest.

"It’s one of these ‘Field of Dreams’ concepts. We were all confident that if we aired this kind of programming, people would watch."

And even if it has ratings smaller than the WB, AGP could still bring more people into the democratic process than before the meetings were being aired. Even in contentious Morro Bay, meetings rarely draw more than a few dozen spectators. On Channel 6, tens of thousands of cable subscribers can watch the local sausage being made.

Mathieu is a master of reading the fine print, of sticking around into the wee hours when everyone else has gotten tired and gone home, a political guerrilla whose friends and foes alike concede will come at you a hundred different ways until you finally say yes.

"There are times you can go right down the middle, but sometimes you gotta dance with them," he says.

At 50, he is a self-described "old hippie." Metal round-rim glasses covering gray-blue eyes, he looks a bit like John Denver. Strands of silver are beginning to thread through his hair. Two small ruby studs gleam from his left ear. Some have made the mistake of underestimating him. His tenacity. His mechanical flair. His capacity for information and his willingness to use it.

Even before he started covering political meetings, Mathieu attended them. Nearly all of them. He has not missed a Morro Bay City Council meeting since 1993, a feat that speaks volumes about his nearly myopic passion for local government and his Ironman capacity to push past the wall of the often boring and banal to find not just meaning, but also fulfillment.

Back at the County Health Commission meeting, Mathieu is still a blur of motion. Around his belt he wears a variety of pocket tools, a cell phone, and a two-way radio. With all that weight and constant movement, it’s a wonder his black jeans haven’t fallen down around his ankles. But then he stops for a second. He hears the distant rumble of a Harley.

"That’s my shooter," he says. Two minutes later "Jazz" walks in and takes his place behind Camera 1.

The house Steve Mathieu and Nancy Castle share in Morro Bay is the house Castle grew up in. She’s a local girl. They met in the ’70s in San Francisco where he made glow-in-the-dark jewelry under the name Cosmic Creations and she tended bar. They’ve been together for 17 years and have a 13-year-old son named Roscoe, whom they home school.

"I’ve been able to avoid the deepest pit in hell," Roscoe says of junior high.

He is frighteningly articulate, wrote a 50-page screenplay when he was 6, and now publishes his own monthly magazine, Rocket Takeoff. He is an easy reflection of the smarts and energy that surround him.

When they’re not shooting or directing, Mathieu and Castle work out of their house. Local politicos speak from monitors around the living room, there’s tape stock everywhere, and the whir of VCRs threading cassettes make the place sound like a garment factory.

The house has become Mathieu’s refuge and workshop. He arrived there in 1983 driving a ’56 Chevy school bus and with nothing to his name but two Crescent wrenches, a jean jacket, and what medical experts call an S1 spinal dysfunction.

Those who know him only a little wonder why he remains in constant motion, might think he’s running from the demons of his past. But that’s too cliché. His demons caught up with him a long time ago. After crushing both ankles and breaking his back, he doesn’t run from anything anymore.

It was San Francisco, 1982. Mathieu was trying to open a jammed window–from the outside. An afternoon of beer drinking didn’t help his balance. He fell two stories to the concrete below. Like a cat, he landed on his feet, upright. He lost an inch and a half in height, was paralyzed for a month, and spent the next year immobilized. To this day, he still can’t feel the backs of his legs and suffers constant pain.

Unable to work he declared bankruptcy and moved to Morro Bay to live with Castle. A person loses more than time when he spends a year in a cast. Mathieu went looking for it with a drink in his hand. And Castle went looking for him, with a drink in hers. With a baby in the house, they knew they had to stop. Castle went clean and sober in ’88. Mathieu followed a year later.

Now together they do the thankless donkey work of government access television production: countless hours and endless days of shooting people talking about property values and public easements, the nuts and bolts of community politics.

Then there’s the editing and dubbing, fixing equipment, writing proposals, navigating the mind-numbing Byzantine process of municipal contract work. It’s an equal partnership, say those who know them, based more on idealism than business.

"Both he and Nancy have hearts of gold. They both just want to do good," says Janice Peters.

Back at the Health Commission meeting, it’s now the time when the process is opened up to citizens in the audience. There are only a handful, but nearly every one of them takes a turn at the microphone.

"Whoa, you’re hot," Mathieu calls into his radio. "Find her, Jazz, go to the podium. Jimmy, go to the chair."

Mathieu pushes a blue "auto take" button on his switcher to cut between the shots, instantly combining the ideals of Jeffersonian participatory democracy with the hard-wire realities of the television age–making sure every commissioner, every citizen gets his or her fair share of face time.

While figuring out what to do with his new life, Mathieu got active in the Morro Bay political scene. Then he became immersed in it.

"I always felt driven to do something," he says. "Now it was time."

By the mid-’90s he got appointed to the Morro Bay Planning Commission, a tumultuous period of struggle between growth and no-growth factions.

"On the Planning Commission, Steve was considered a maverick," says Peters, who served with him on the commission at that time. "Nobody ever knew what he was going to do, but whatever it was, you knew it was going to be researched thoroughly."

In 1996 he ran for City Council on a platform of reducing what he called then a bloated police budget. He got beat in a squeaker. He says a whisper campaign contributed to his defeat. But he is grateful for the loss.

"Every day I wake up and thank God I wasn’t elected, because I have far more impact countywide with what I’m doing now."

Despite his defeat, Mathieu kept coming to City Council meetings. And in 1996, when the council was about to shelve a proposal to televise their meetings because of the costs, Mathieu raised his hand.

"‘This isn’t about making art,’ I told them, ‘it’s about information.’"

Initial research put the annual costs of televising the City Council meetings at a quarter-million dollars. Mathieu volunteered to use his own personal camcorder to shoot the them instead. He says his first attempt was hard to watch. A failure.

"Grover Beach was doing a one-camera shoot of its City Council meetings at the time," Mathieu says. "The camera was on a wide shot from the back of the room the entire time. I vowed never to do that because people wouldn’t watch that kind of thing. It was too excruciating."

He tried again in March 1996. This time he borrowed a second camcorder from a friend. And like a real-life MacGyver, he wired the two cameras into a modified Nintendo Gameboy and used the handheld toy to switch between the two, producing a thousand hours of local political programming a year for less than $60,000. A budget that would make ordinary television producers break down and weep like babies. A TV news magazine show spends more on a single story than AGP spend all year.

"Some of our contracts are so marginal that covering a meeting may actually cost us money. Or sometimes we’ll walk out making 15 bucks. At the end of the day, if I have enough money for a pack of Camels and gas for my truck I’m happy," he laughs.

Television pros call the kind of stuff Mathieu produces "talking heads." It’s the cheapest kind of TV to make and can also be the most stultifyingly dull.

"But also the most fascinating because it’s real," says Peters, now a Morro Bay councilmember. "These are real people doing real things, not actors."

And in a county where issues like the Duke Power Plant expansion and SLO’s Chinatown Project put civic passions on the front burner, Mathieu wants to make sure that the "real people doing real things" can’t do them without somebody watching.

He says it was this concern that turned him into a civic entrepreneur. Turned him into a "Citizen Pain," who pushed and pulled reluctant politicians into the full disclosure of unblinking, uncut gavel-to-gavel televised coverage of local government.

An ardent proponent of the Brown Act, the California law that mandated that almost all government meetings be opened to the public, Mathieu made it his mission to yank back the curtains on the process, to demystify it. To everyone’s surprise, but his own, it worked.

"He’s never had any formal TV training; he doesn’t know what he can’t do," Castle says. "He’s continually putting equipment together in creative ways that it was never intended, but making it all work."

While his productions became more sophisticated, Mathieu says a majority of the City Council wanted to pull the plug.

"Steve kind of ran with it–he sweated blood tears and paid his own money to keep it running in the face of council opposition," says Peters.

Mathieu kept shooting the meetings every week, while at the same time looking for a way to get them aired. He studied Morro Bay’s franchise agreement with Sonic Cable. Armed with that information he pushed Sonic to bump C-Span II and dedicate Channel 54 exclusively to Morro Bay political programming.

He followed that up by getting Sonic to agree to build a control room in the Morro Bay Veterans Hall, which would allow him to air the City Council meetings live, in progress. But after buying out Sonic, it was Charter Communications who saw it through.

Still, Mathieu says, the council at the time remained opposed to his efforts. And he and Castle spent two years shooting the meetings for free, burying themselves nearly $40,000 in debt.

"We maxed out our credit cards to buy equipment," Castle says. "But it was a gamble that finally paid off."

Finally in 1998 the Morro Bay City Council gave Mathieu a contract for $10,000 for the year. Barely enough for tape stock. A year later they upped it to $48,000.

"The awareness factor has had a major impact on recent elections," says Peters. "People were watching, thanks to Steve."

"The reason we’re doing what we’re doing today," Mathieu says, "is because I achieved a critical mass of viewership faster than they [the council] could do something about it. I didn’t believe the lie they were telling me. That people weren’t paying attention."

In a cynical age, where many people get involved in local politics only out of last resort, in selfish reaction to threats against their own personal interests, Mathieu knows from empirical data that an informed public, whatever its motivations, is a better one.

"There’s no place in Morro Bay more than four minutes away from the microphone during a City Council meeting," he says, noting it’s not uncommon for someone to be watching from home and a little while later address the council in person. "They’ll say, ‘I was watching you at home and you got the facts all wrong.’ When I see that on the floor I just sit back in the control room and grin."

He has helped make them conscious, aware, and connected–using a medium that is often accused of assisting in just the opposite.

"We radically changed the face of politics in this county for the duration," he says. "With television came a metamorphosis in the way everyone treated each other. With the cameras on, it became more civilized."

It’s 8 p.m. on a Monday night and the Health Commission meeting is finally over. Jazz and Jim are pulling cables while Mathieu snaps shut the plywood doors on his mobile control booth and rolls it out to his Bondo-gray 1980 GMC Gypsy Van. On the side, it sports the slogan: "Better Government Through Public Awareness."

He is a man who knows the power of the airwaves. He is a man who sailed through life’s hurdles, only to land on his feet–shorter and wiser, unwilling to stop. Æ

A former NBC and ABC News producer and current Cal Poly instructor, Kevin Sites covers media for New Times.

County Supervisors Broadcast Schedule

The Board of Supervisors telecasts are shown on:

Charter Communications (channel 6)

Tuesdays at 6 p.m.

Wednesdays at 8:30 a.m.

Sundays at 5 p.m.

Falcon Cable Systems (channel 6)

Wednesdays at 7 p.m.

Fridays at 7 p.m.

San Simeon Community Cable (channel 25)

Saturdays at noon. Æ