KCET HIKES BUDGET 21% AFTER A YEAR IN BLACK

After finishing the last fiscal year $500,000 in the black with record audiences and viewer support, KCET Channel 28 has adopted a new budget that projects a 21% increase in revenues.

The public television station’s board of directors on Thursday approved an operating budget of $23.7 million for the year that began July 1. For the year that just ended, KCET had a $19.5 million budget. The budget in 1983 had been $16.2 million.

William Kobin, president of the non-commercial, nonprofit station, said the new budget is far short of what he would like for Channel 28, but he added that it reflects a steady growth pattern since he took over in January, 1983.

“I’m impatient,” Kobin said in an interview, “but it’s going in the right direction. In this economy, and in this telecommunications environment, I think we’re growing at a good pace.”

The budget isn’t the only thing growing at KCET, Kobin noted. More viewers are watching the station than ever before, he said, pointing out that ratings for the first five months of 1985 were 43% higher than for the same period in 1984. In addition, he said, the station’s subscriber rolls climbed to a record 265,000--up from 245,000 a year ago.

While KCET’s budget for the last fiscal year had projected a surplus of $300,000, the station was able to exceed that by $200,000. Kobin attributed the better-than-anticipated performance to viewer contributions and to “very careful financial management.”

The surplus--KCET’s third in a row--will be used to help reduce the station’s long-term bank debt, Kobin said. Channel 28, which was $5.5 million in the red a few years ago, currently owes $860,000 and plans to lower the figure to $290,000 by next June 30. KCET is scheduled to pay it off by the end of 1986.

Kobin said that he was not yet prepared to discuss specific programming plans for the new fiscal year, other than to say that there will be continued installments of “KCET Journal,” the umbrella title for Channel 28’s local documentary series.

However, in a programming-related move, Kobin announced that he had created a new educational enterprises department to concentrate specifically on the acquisition, development and production of educational and instructional series.

Kobin said that having a specialized department will make KCET better equipped to go after the specific sources of money that exist for educational programming, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the U.S. Department of Education and the CPB/Annenberg program to develop college-credit telecourses.

“Education is again becoming a top priority, and public television has got an obvious role to play there,” he said.

In addition, many public TV stations have found that educational programming can produce extra income for them when they also create materials that are sold as a supplement to the TV series, such as books, study guides and audio cassettes.

The first project to which the educational enterprises division will address itself is “The American Ticket,” a proposed 26-part series aimed at teaching English language skills and cultural concepts to the nation’s growing population of functional illiterates. The project recently received a $500,000 grant from the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation of Newport Beach to cover the cost of research and producing a pilot episode.