Washington’s City Council, during its meeting Monday, is scheduled to consider awarding a contract for purchasing equipment and providing software upgrades to City NINE, Washington’s PEG channel on the local Suddenlink cable TV line-up.

Encore Broadcast Solutions submitted the low bid of $49,858.50 to provide the new equipment and software. Onyx Technical Services submitted a $61,241.45 bid. Although asked to submit a bid, Sound Advice of Eastern NC did not do so, according to a city document included in the council’s tentative agenda for Monday’s meeting.

The current PEG equipment and software are past their life expectancy, according to David Carraway, the city’s information technology director and the PEG channel’s programmer. The current equipment was installed in 2006, and Microsoft ended its support of the software in 2016, according to a memorandum from Carraway to the mayor and council members.

PEG is an acronym that represents a public, educational and government TV channel.

While City NINE provides programming related to area events — City Council meetings, festival coverage, education programs and informational programs — it also provides entertainment in the form of classic TV shows, most of them in black-and-white format. City NINE also shows movies. The old TV shows, cartoons and movies are in the public domain, meaning the public may use them.

This week, City NINE began showing episodes of “The Rat Patrol,” a 1960s TV show about desert warfare in northern Africa during World War II.

The tentative agenda also calls for the council to meet in closed session to protect the attorney-client privilege, discuss economic-development and personnel matters and talk about acquiring property. The council is seeking a suitable site for a new police station.

During the past year or so, the council has looked at three sites, including a site bounded by U.S. Highway 17 Business and West Second, West Third and Van Norden streets. It once housed a Dr Pepper bottling plant and manufactured gas plant, which left coal-tar deposits — polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene and toluene — at the site. 1n 2007, Progress Energy and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources worked together on a project to remove those deposits from the site.

The city made a “fair” offer to the owner of the former Dr Pepper plant site, but the owner came back with a counter-offer that’s too high, Mayor Mac Hodges said at the council’s retreat in February. The mayor said then the site-selection process “shouldn’t be as hard as it’s been.”

In June 2016, the former Family Dollar site at the intersection of North Market and Third streets (where Tumble B Gym is located) and the city-owned land at the northeast corner of the intersection of East Fifth and North Bonner streets were identified as possible sites, too.