Cable

A Baltimore County police officer has appealed his conviction for stealing about $1,700 worth of cable television service over two years, his lawyer said yesterday. In March, county police charged Officer Michael Joseph Stephens Jr. of the 3500 block of Dunhaven Road in Dundalk with tapping Comcast Cablevision lines. District Judge G. Darrell Russell found Stephens guilty last week of obtaining cable television service by fraud. He ordered Stephens to pay $1,776 in fees and imposed a six-month jail term, with all but two days suspended.

William C. Fairley, a retired cable inspector for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., died of cancer Saturday at Chesapeake Hospice House in Linthicum. The Arnold resident was 77. Born in Baltimore and raised on Lakewood Avenue, he attended city public schools. During World War II, he served in the Army. He then joined BGE as a truck driver, and retired in 1990 as a cable-laying inspector. He was a 33rd-degree Mason and member of the Highland Masonic lodge. He enjoyed crabbing, fishing and gardening.

A power failure at the 189-unit Chase House left dozens of elderly residents without air conditioning, fans or elevators for hours yesterday. Before noon, a contractor hit an underground cable near the Cathedral Street building, causing a power shut-down in the area, said Linda Foy, a Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. spokeswoman. The city recently installed a backup generator for the 17-story Chase House, but workers found yesterday that the switch used to turn it on was faulty, said Melvin Edwards, a city housing spokesman.

The Annapolis City Council will hold a public hearing tonight on the proposed renewal of its franchise agreement with TCI Cablevision of Annapolis.Under the terms of the proposed contract, the city would receive 5 percent of the cable company's gross revenues. Currently, the city receives 5 percent of only the subscription receipts.The new contract also would place the city in charge of the public access channel. TCI would give the city $250,000 during the next two years to build and equip a studio, but the city would be responsible for maintaining and staffing it.The agreement also would give the city three additional cable channels.

Parts of West Baltimore and a swath of suburbs running from Co- lumbia to Cockeysville will be the first Baltimore-area neighborhoods to receive advanced video services over Bell Atlantic lines, the company announced today.The Philadelphia-based regional telephone company released details of its plans to offer cable television service and on-demand video over its phone lines in a construction-permit filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The services will compete with video rental stores and existing cable television franchises.

The County Council voted unanimously and without debate Monday to give Mid-Atlantic Cable Co. another 18 months to finish the 30 miles ofconstruction in the western and central areas of the county that thecompany was supposed to have completed a year ago.Even with the extension, the company will increase rates by about $5 a month in September because apart from subscriber fees, "there is no other source"of construction money, said John C. Norcutt, Mid-Atlantic's...

The Georgia-based cable television company that serves Carroll County and seven of its municipalities announced Friday that it will soon offer new services to subscribers.Prestige Cable TV's expanded basic service will include eight new channels by early March. The subscription rate for the service will increase by 50 cents to $21.95 a month, company officials said.The addition of these channels is part of a rebuilding project that has been in the works for several months. The revamped system uses fiber-optic cables and is designed to be flexible to meet future telecommunications needs, said Mark Krider, Prestige Cable TV manager.

The future home of Carroll Community Television - public access Channel 19 - will hang in the balance for another month, as the cable committee gathers more information about the space it is leasing as temporary quarters. For three months, the station has been leasing a building at 265 E. Main St. in Westminster, with hopes of spending between $100,000 and $150,000 to build a studio there. The committee intended to use the space for three to five years while the station's current location at Carroll Community College is remodeled.

A day after a California company withdrew plans to bury more than 300 miles of fiber-optic cable under the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, Gov. Parris N. Glendening effectively quashed any approval of the plan during the remainder of his term. In a pointed letter to state and federal regulators yesterday, Glendening said the plan would set an "unacceptable precedent" and told officials of the Maryland Department of the Environment and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that ClearStream Communications Inc. of Sacramento should consider other options.

There was no contest last night in television coverage of the off-year elections. Cable swamped the competition.Just as in coverage of the 1988 national conventions, the combination of CNN and C-SPAN was far and away superior to anything CBS, NBC or ABC could offer.The television landscape, for example, looked like this at 9:10 last night (and it was representative of most of the prime-time coverage):WJZ (Channel 13) was carrying ABC's "Roseanne.' " WMAR (Channel 2) was carrying "In The Heat of The Night."