THE COMCAST SETTLEMENT currently before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is the product of small thinking. The city gets a few bucks, and Comcast goes on with business as usual for four more years. Instead, we should be pushing Comcast to create the best interactive cable system in the world, one that links neighborhoods and that allows kids, seniors, artists, musicians, poets, and all residents to put quality programming on the air.

Under the proposed settlement, Comcast would give the city $3.5 million, plus a few million dollars more for equipment (out of the nearly $100 million a year collected by Comcast from its 180,000 San Francisco subscribers, who pay about $46 a month for basic cable). In exchange, the city would agree to settle all outstanding claims against Comcast for shortchanging customers and not performing what was asked of it under the last agreement.

More important, the city would extend Comcast's near-monopoly for four more years. The franchise agreement between San Francisco and Comcast is set to expire at the end of this year, a deadline we should be leveraging for an innovative, world-class system. Remember, the possibility of municipalization is a stick that carries great weight.

So what should we be asking for? Of course our cable system should be an educational tool. Doctors and heath care professionals should be able to routinely broadcast interactive classes on everything from SARS to flu pandemics to AIDS, functioning as a kind of emergency broadcast system when needed. And of course it should be an outlet for great music and art.

But this educational role is routine compared to what we could achieve. The system should allow viewers to participate in debates. The system should be accessible from every recreation center, every library, every public meeting space, so that people can talk to each other in real time. After the fact, viewers should be allowed to add commentary as easily as sending an e-mail.

Every community center and library could be a point of participation thanks to a cable-supported Institutional Network, or I-Net. This same I-Net could also build bridges between our often disconnected neighborhoods by allowing groups to connect virtually at different sites for meetings on citywide issues like medical marijuana regulation. Activist groups could also use the I-Net to strengthen ties.

An I-Net is not a futuristic fantasy – Sup. Tom Ammiano has proposed a city-owned broadband network that is essentially an I-Net. Comcast should pay for it.

Once such a network is created, schools and young people should be given priority so that the voices of the young can be heard, so that the frustrations that are the cause of so much youth violence have a creative outlet. Imagine the poetry and creativity of our youth being spilled out on the screen instead of the streets. Our seniors and differently abled community members should also be able to quickly and easily produce and distribute their stories. We should take advantage of San Francisco City College's and San Francisco State University's already prestigious degree programs in broadcast journalism and film to encourage young people to use the system and get psyched about going to college. Internship programs could be set up for young people so they could get networked into the movie production companies that visit San Francisco year-round and that offer very-high-paying jobs. There is no end to what we could accomplish.

The joint efforts of all these people – which could be the TV equivalent of blogs – could play a huge role in making sure important stories ignored by the mainstream media are brought forward.

Instead, the current deal lets Comcast off the hook for a relatively small chunk of change that will get swallowed in the city's $5.3 billion budget. It's time we think big. We need to tell Comcast what we want.

Gerardo Sandoval represents District 11 on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.