KCET Funding Drop Prompts Layoffs : Television: Dismissals will come ‘from throughout the company.’ About 15 positions are affected.

Beset by a drop in funding, KCET Channel 28 has confirmed that it will lay off about 15 people, probably as early as mid-June.

The public-television station will not identify which of its 280 employees will be laid off, but spokeswoman Barbara Goen said that the dismissals will come “from throughout the company.”

Once the layoffs are announced, they will be swiftly implemented: According to Goen, those who lose their jobs will be given a choice of leaving immediately or remaining at KCET for one week. Severance packages will be offered, but their extent will depend on the type of job held by the individual employee and the length of tenure at the station.

Station president William Kobin announced the layoffs to employees on Thursday, confirming months of rumors and reports in newspapers and trade publications.

The cutbacks come at a time when KCET is unusually pinched for funds. The recession has so slowed corporate and individual gifts to public television that KCET will likely finish fiscal 1991 $1.5 million behind its original projections for the year.

The station is planning to cut back its budget for local documentaries next year, producing programs in its studios rather than filming in the community, Goen said. And a number of local productions, including “The Los Angeles History Project” and “By the Year 2,000” will be dropped.

Goen said that some local series will be replaced by new, lower-budget programs and that the station will continue to produce programs for the national PBS schedule.

Staffers will probably be notified of layoffs between June 3 and June 14, Goen said, the dates coinciding with key steps in the approval process for the station’s 1992 budget for fiscal year that begins July 1.

At the station, some employees grumbled privately that KCET might have saved money in ways that could have avoided layoffs, including a new, multimillion-dollar parking structure. The time spent raising funds for that should have gone into accumulating money for salaries and local programs, they said.