Station’s ‘on the Air’--but Just Barely : Minority-Owned KPOO-FM Feels State, Federal Budget Pinch
Poor Peoples Radio Inc. has always operated on a bag lady’s income.
“When the money comes in, people get paid,” says Joe Rudolph, general manager of the nonprofit corporation’s public station here, KPOO-FM. “When it doesn’t, they still come in and do the work.”
Including the volunteer programmers, deejays and 3 1/2 “paid” employee slots, KPOO has about 30 staff members. The program director for the jazz-reggae-public affairs station “gets a couple hundred bucks every few weeks or so,” according to Rudolph.
The chief engineer, who holds a full-time job at a San Francisco television station during the evenings, earned $800 from KPOO in 1984.
Earned Maybe $8,000
And Rudolph himself is one of the “paid” employees, he said with a caustic, streetwise chuckle. He earned, maybe, $5,000 to $8,000 in 1984, though some of that went back into the station.
He lives in a subsidized $40-a-month apartment with a friend who pays most of his personal bills. She frees Rudolph to spend most of his time running his shoestring station, located in the middle of a San Francisco redevelopment area that is slowly gentrifying from black slum to a desegregated middle-class neighborhood.
Last month, gentrification caught up with KPOO and the station moved up the block from its ramshackle quarters on Divisadero Street to new studios in a redeveloped condominium project. There is almost no equipment in the new studios, but the roof doesn’t leak and the heating works.
KPOO isn’t exactly prosperous, but it is managing to survive.
Budget of $97,000
“We make it by selling tacos in the summer and watermelon in the winter,” Rudolph said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Seriously, he said KPOO’s $97,000 annual operating budget does actually come from an odd assortment of sources, ranging from listener contributions and KPOO T-shirt sales to San Francisco’s hotel-room tax fund and the state Arts Council.
Lately, the money hasn’t been coming in the way it once did and Rudolph is getting nervous again. During the 1970s, when the anti-poverty spigots were still partially open, a cash flow from the federal and state governments would trickle down to KPOO and five other minority-owned and operated public stations in California.
Since Inauguration Day, 1981, KPOO’s budget has steadily eroded. There is a rogue’s gallery of Ronald Reagan pictures and news photos pinned up in the bathroom at the old KPOO studios, and the scrawled captions and graffiti are none too complimentary of either the President or Reaganomics.
Poor Are ‘Penalized’
“All these government agencies penalize you for being poor,” Rudolph said. “You know how many agencies are that way? They do it with matching grants. They say, ‘If you got $2 million, we’ll give you another $1 million.’ But, hey, if you got nothing, you get nothing.”
California shut the cash flow to most public stations in 1983, when Gov. George Deukmejian cut the California Public Broadcasting Commission from the state budget. Most public stations that are connected with colleges or universities, such as KCRW-FM (Santa Monica City College) or KLON-FM (Cal State Long Beach), have had their institutions on which to fall back.
KPOO and the other minority stations in Salinas, Santa Rosa, Fresno and Modesto had no such institutional underwriter. A sixth station run by the Hoopa Indian tribe near Eureka is subsidized by the tribal council, but its operating budget is even less than KPOO’s.
“You ever been up there? They have nobody--I mean nobody--running that station,” Rudolph said. “At least we got people coming in off the street.”
For a year after the dissolution of the California Public Broadcasting Commission, the minority stations continued to receive small grants of about $20,000 to $30,000 a year from the state Department of Education and the Employment Development Department for broadcast training programs at the stations. But last summer, even that money was quietly cut from the state budget.
For public stations like KUSC-FM in Los Angeles, with an annual operating budget of more than $1 million, state aid was always virtually negligible. For the minority stations like KPOO, the loss of state aid has been devastating.
Lost CPB Eligibility
Recently, Spanish-language stations in Santa Rosa and Salinas reportedly moved into the next phase of fade-out. Though they are both still on the air, the stations lost their eligibility for assistance from the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Under CPB guidelines, stations must have five full-time employees on the payroll, maintain an annual operating budget of $130,000 and broadcast 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. The logic is that of most grant makers or bank loan officers: If a fund-seeker can show a track record of success, he deserves more money. If not, he is probably a poor risk.
Rudolph holds that such logic doesn’t work in public broadcasting in general and with minority radio stations in particular, where the listening audience can’t afford to subsidize its station through subscription drives and donations.
Even in its gravy days three years ago, when KPOO was receiving state money along with all its other revenue sources, the station never had a budget much higher than $120,000 a year. In its 11 years on the air, KPOO has never reached the threshold level of CPB qualification.
Need $300,000 a Year
“If you’re CPB qualified, you get all kinds of opportunities,” Rudolph said.
Besides a basic community development grant that amounts to about $90,000 a year, there are a number of other programming, training and project grants that become available to CPB-qualified stations, Rudolph said.
“To run this thing right, we should be operating on a budget of $300,000 a year,” he said.
Each Monday at 2 p.m., KPOO broadcasts gavel-to-gavel coverage of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting. The rest of the time, it plays an eclectic mix of Asian, Filipino and black/urban programming.
The station is still the strongest of the half-dozen minority stations in California, in part because it has the resources of a metropolitan area to tap--even if it’s only a few interns from San Francisco State College who can be counted upon to keep the station on the air.
‘We Get Along’
Rural stations such as that run by the Hoopa Indians are in far more trouble, Rudolph said, and will probably fade away long before KPOO.
“We get along, but you got to remember that, at some point, we want to do real radio. We want to be able to send people out with tape recorders to press conferences and do some live theater and have a real news department,” Rudolph said.
“At some point,” he added with a grin, “maybe we’d like to pay people too. That’d be nice, you know?”
