CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Public TV Stations Launch the Battle for Bakersfield : Maverick residents of the San Joaquin Valley city are being asked to choose between KCET in Los Angeles and KVPT in Fresno. Each station has petitioned for the right to serve Kern County.

Sitting on the far side of the Tehachapis, this is a city that likes to play it both ways. There is the Bakersfield that gazes south, shops Rodeo Drive and watches its Dodgers graduate from the Class A farm club here to The Show at Chavez Ravine.

Then there is the Bakersfield that peers north to the vast Central Valley, that loves its Buck Owens ear-splitting and its beef tongue Basque-style--sliced razor thin and drenched in vinaigrette.

Now the locals, always a maverick breed, are being pressed to choose sides in what might be described as a tug of war for the cultural heart of Kern County. On one side is KCET, the public television behemoth out of Los Angeles. On the other is Valley Public Television, a relative upstart based in Fresno.

Each has petitioned the federal government for the right to serve Kern County. Each sees this rich farmland-turning-urban sprawl as its own. Two stations, 230 miles apart, drawing a line somewhere outside Oildale.

“We have four or five thousand subscribers up there already who have been getting KCET through cable for years,” said Donald Youpa, KCET’s executive vice president. “The ties between Los Angeles and Bakersfield are strong and getting stronger. Bakersfield definitely looks south.”

Colin Dougherty, general manager of Fresno’s Valley Public Television or KVPT, counters: “There are millions of viewers in Los Angeles who aren’t being adequately served by KCET. So why leap over the mountain and come to an area where the social and political issues are completely different? Just because you’re a 900-pound gorilla doesn’t mean you can sleep anywhere you want.”

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As a matter of geography, Bakersfield clearly belongs to the San Joaquin Valley. About 100 miles north of Los Angeles and 100 miles south of Fresno, it sits at one end of a long trough that cradles the richest farm belt in the world.

But with a good chunk of the local economy tied to oil fields, Bakersfield’s identity has always been more complex than other Central Valley farm towns. Several oil companies operating here are based in Los Angeles, and real estate agents report more people are living in Bakersfield and commuting to jobs in the Southland.

Indeed, if Southern California developers have their way, the next 25 years could see this region transformed into a full-fledged bedroom community for Los Angeles. Already one new town, San Emidio, has been proposed at the base of the Tehachapis. It envisions 63,000 people, seven residential villages, three golf courses, two resort hotels and three artificial lakes.

KCET plainly sees the future.

“That’s where new cities will rise,” Youpa said. “And we want to be a part of that growth.”

The battle over who will beam Big Bird and Carmen Sandiego into the living rooms of Kern County began six years ago. That is when fledgling KVPT, with a paltry $2.4 million annual budget, tried to boost its Fresno signal to reach Bakersfield.

KCET, wielding a $40-million-plus annual budget, filed an objection with federal regulators. The PBS giant considers Bakersfield part of its turf from San Diego to San Luis Obipso. After all, Bakersfield cable companies have been carrying its broadcast for nearly 20 years.

Its Fresno rival eventually won FCC approval to place a low-power, 1,000-watt antenna here but not before KCET upped the ante and applied for Channel 39--Bakersfield’s sole educational station. Channel 39 would provide a full-power, 5,000-watt signal that could reach across Kern County and north to Visalia.

Whoever controls Channel 39, it is reasoned, wins Bakersfield. So the Fresno station promptly filed its application for the channel. A FCC license hearing is scheduled for mid-August.

“Being in a community by virtue of free cable and serving a community are two different things,” said Dougherty, who has managed KVPT since its inception in 1986. “If you look at KCET’s past record, they have never really served Bakersfield.”

Because of free cable, Dougherty points out, KCET has been able to build a subscriber base in southern Kern County without spending any money on equipment and little money on programming. “We, on the other hand, have done more than two dozen programs about Kern County and Bakersfield in the past three years alone,” Dougherty said.

KCET executives, however, point with pride to a recent feature on the Bakersfield Dodgers and a nationally acclaimed special on the origins of Bakersfield’s unique country music sound, which produced Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. But KCET does not dispute that its programs concerning Kern County have been few and far between.

“We’ve done some quality programs and we have every intention of doing more,” said Barbara Goen, a KCET vice president. “Being big doesn’t necessarily mean being a brute. We feel our resources, our award-winning production team, allow us to serve Kern County in a variety of ways.”

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As Bakersfield copes with a recent outbreak of valley fever, furor over the nude scene in a college production of “Hair” and the local Dodgers slouching toward last place, the fate of Channel 39 is hardly the buzz around town. But among local culture mavens and community leaders, divisions can run sharp.

“Geographically we are in the San Joaquin Valley but psychologically we are moving closer to Los Angeles everyday,” said Kelly Blanton, Kern County superintendent of schools. “In my view, KCET has a larger, more secure financial base to serve that future.”

Jerry Stanners, president of Freymiller Trucking and former CEO of the Bakersfield Californian, said his support of KCET grew even stronger when he discovered that 40% of new subscribers to the Californian were transplanted Angelenos.

“People drive down for Dodger games, the theater, shopping, the beach,” said Stanners, a KCET board member. “We’re still a farming and oil community but we’ve got our own personality that’s distinct from Fresno.”

But others wonder how KCET--which has been accused from time to time of neglecting Los Angeles’ Latino, African-American and Asian-American communities--can expect to do justice to Bakersfield.

“KCET is an excellent station but they’ve got their hands full trying to serve a diverse Los Angeles,” said Mary Helen Barro, a Spanish-language radio station owner here who grew up in Los Angeles and did volunteer work for KCET.

“KCET wants to get a foothold here before the boom hits. I understand that. But I feel it’s ambition misplaced. No amount of growth is going to change the fact that Bakersfield and Fresno are close cousins. I think if KCET truly loved Bakersfield, they would let it go.”