The District has scrapped plans to build a high-definition television studio that it could rent to commercial production companies, but not before spending more than $4 million to design and equip the state-of-the-art space.

Rather than constructing a high-definition facility and offering it to the private sector for a fee, D.C. will instead use its $3.65 million worth of HD equipment to train high school students and create “the best municipal cable programming and services possible,” said Eric Richardson, director of the Office of Cable Television. The agency, Richardson said, is not in the business of making a profit.

“We just don’t want to move in that direction,” he said.

The cable television office has agreed to pay a Springfield company $705,000 to install the HD equipment in a wing of McKinley Technical High School in Northeast — home to the D.C. Public Schools’ television studio. The OCT plans to move its entire operation to McKinley, Richardson said, abandoning its rented space on Tilden Street Northwest.

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“I always thought they were like men who had to have their toys,” D.C. watchdog Dorothy Brizill said of TV higher-ups. “And then they had to come up with the justification to have them.”

The idea to go high-definition was “inherited” from the administration of former Mayor Anthony Williams, Richardson said, as was the partnership with D.C.-based Mason Production Services to design and market the studio. Richardson quietly cut ties with Mason Production, and Todd Mason, its president, last October.

The District, at that point, had already paid Mason nearly $600,000 for design and consulting services.

The proposed high-definition studio was panned by outsiders as a waste when it was first announced in 2006. But that view was shortsighted, Mason said this week. “Why would you build everything in standard definition when the standard for the future is high-definition?” he said.

“We aren’t bitter about it,” Mason said. “I just think it’s a shame.”

Mason said he ended the contract with the city out of frustration with the city’s excruciatingly slow procurement system. As a District resident, Mason said, it’s particularly painful to watch the government get so little out of the millions it spent.

“It’s disappointing that the facility will never be used in a way that it was originally procured to do,” Mason said.

The OCT’s $7.2 million budget is funded primarily through franchise fees and a 5 percent toll on Comcast and RCN cable bills.

mneibauer@dcexaminer.com