KOCE Group Wins Right to Buy

Coast Community College District trustees voted Wednesday to negotiate the sale of KOCE-TV Channel 50 with a group of Orange County civic leaders who have pledged to keep it a public broadcasting affiliate, all but completing the sale of the station.

“I feel like somebody feels at the start of a great journey,” said Joel Slutzky, spokesman for the KOCE-TV Foundation, following the 4-1 vote. “There’s lots of anticipation about what we can accomplish.”

The foundation has offered $32 million, which includes $8 million down and the rest to be secured by a note.

The trustees will meet Dec. 10 to vote on the final deal.

A two-trustee screening committee had called the foundation bid “the highest responsible offer.”

After saying for weeks that money was not the issue and that they would not increase their bid, foundation officials decided that was exactly what they had to do to secure the license for Orange County’s public TV channel. The foundation raised its bid from the original $10 million, with $1 million down, and the rest to be paid over five years.

Foundation officials have declined to identify the source of its funds, but the proposal has won the support of many of Orange County’s leading educators, politicians and business executives.

One poll by Cal State Fullerton and the Orange County Business Council found that 76% of county residents supported selling the station to a group that would preserve KOCE as a PBS outlet.

Community college trustees said selling the station was necessary to prop up their ailing budget. Some people also said the station, with its $8-million budget, was losing money the district couldn’t afford.

The foundation’s offer was not without its ups and downs. The group started the bidding process by itself, then went into partnership with KCET Channel 28, the Los Angeles PBS station. Late last month, that duo broke up, barely more than two weeks before the community college district was expected to decide.

Both sides said the decision was amicable and that they expect to work together if the foundation takes over. Al Jerome, KCET president and chief executive, said his station, with its 50-member board, couldn’t work out details of the deal in time.

Even before then, the bidding was thrown into turmoil when a representative of Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest religious broadcaster, seemingly told trustees that TBN was throwing its support behind the foundation bid, despite its own $25-million offer.

More than a month later, a TBN spokesman explained that the organization hoped the foundation would win the station, but if the trustees decided to sell to the highest bidder, it wanted the station for itself.

TBN later dropped out of the bidding, as did LeSEA Broadcasting Corp. of Indiana, which had offered $10 million cash, $15 million in payments and 20% of annual profits.

At the end, the bidders were Daystar Television Network of Dallas, the second-largest religious broadcaster in the country, Almavision Hispanic Network and Pappas Telecasting.

Foundation officials had argued even before their final offer became public that theirs was the highest “net” bid. They said that if a Christian broadcaster bought the station, the district would incur costs of at least $12 million, including the return of subscriber pledges, repayment of funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and employee severance.