KCET Campaign Nets $20 Million Toward Goal

KCET Channel 28, currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, disclosed Thursday that it has received $20 million in commitments toward what it hopes will be a record $50-million campaign to construct a new building and parking structure, buy new equipment and bolster its programming resources.

William H. Kobin, president and chief executive officer of Los Angeles’ major public-TV station, said the campaign is designed to enable KCET to “meet the challenges of the 1990s” and become “a pacesetter” in the noncommercial system.

The fund-raising effort--which, station officials said, is separate from the station’s $36.5 million budget and its regular subscriber donations and fund-raising efforts--”is the largest campaign of any public-television station to date,” Kobin said.

According to a PBS official, the largest capital campaign was $28 million that New York’s WNET conducted between 1982 and 1987. “This is the largest campaign that I’ve ever heard of,” echoed a spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Public Television Stations.

One of the principal goals of “Campaign for KCET,” which is slated for completion in 1993, is to build a new broadcast origination center, which now is housed in 50-year-old buildings on the station’s historic 5.1-acre lot on Sunset Boulevard. The lot has been used by the entertainment industry since 1912 and was once the home of Monogram Pictures.

The new three-story building would be attached at almost a right angle to the present main building at its east end.

“It’s nice to be in an historic 50-year-old Hollywood landmark,” Kobin said, “but it is not compatible with operating a television station geared toward the 21st Century. The spaces are overcrowded, poorly laid out for our use and even susceptible to flooding when it rains.”

Kobin said KCET needs $7.9 million for the building and support facilities, and nearly $11 million to replace “old, outdated and in some cases obsolete” technical equipment, including a 25-year-old auxiliary transmitter generating only half the power of the main transmitter, four cameras that limit picture quality and a 10-year-old video switcher that restricts the station’s ability to produce critical special effects.

“Our studio cameras are so old that replacement parts are no longer available for them,” he said.

Building and equipment aside, the largest share of the money will go for programming--$20 million toward a production fund and $5 million for a “creative venture”--or research and development--fund.

The station’s primary need, Kobin said, is for “unique, high-quality programming in the face of increasing competition. This (production) fund will enable us to produce important local and national programs.”

The venture fund, he added, is “essential to develop proposals, commission treatments and scripts, option rights and produce pilots to enable us to raise money for production of programs.”

Another $2.4 million is being sought to match a recent National Endowment for the Arts challenge grant of $800,000. The remainder of the $50 million will be applied to fund-raising costs.

Kobin and KCET board chairman Sheldon Ausman said that among the $20 million already committed to the campaign are $7.5 million from an anonymous donor and $6.85 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation--including $5.35 million already announced for the production of a six-hour national series “The Astronomers,” scheduled for the fall of 1990, and $1.5 million to underwrite the presentation of “Sesame Street” on Channel 28 for the next five years.