KOCE Draws a Late Bidder

A Visalia broadcasting company has joined the bidding for Orange County’s public television station at the last minute, with plans to turn it into a noncommercial Spanish-language station.

Mike Angelos, vice president of Pappas Telecasting Cos., said the firm has offered $25.1 million for KOCE-TV Channel 50, about the same amount as four Christian broadcasters offered in the first round of bidding. The fifth prospective buyer, the KOCE-TV Foundation, is the only bidder that wants to keep the station a PBS affiliate.

Angelos said the station would be the nation’s first noncommercial Spanish-language TV station and would program a mix of educational shows for children and community affairs and political shows.

The privately held company owns 20 stations in the United States affiliated with Fox, WB, UPN and CBS. Four -- including KAZA-TV Channel 54 in Los Angeles -- broadcast in Spanish and are affiliates of the Mexico-based network Azteca America.

“We think in public broadcasting Hispanics are really underserved, in the same ways they were underserved by commercial broadcasters until a few years ago,” Angelos said.

Final bids were due Wednesday, the day Pappas submitted its offer. The trustees of the Coast Community College District are expected to choose a buyer next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, financial and legal pressures from outside Orange County are mounting for KOCE to remain with PBS.

In an Oct. 7 letter to Paul Berger, president of the community college board of trustees, a Pittsburgh-based public-interest group said it would oppose the Federal Communications Commission’s license transfer if KOCE is sold to a televangelist. The group, Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, has helped hold up the sale of a Pittsburgh PBS station for seven years.

Jerold M. Starr, director of the group, wrote that if the board chose a religious broadcaster “that featured syndicated programming that is not educational for the diverse population of Orange County, we would feel compelled to actively oppose your license transfer application to the FCC.”

Berger said trustees were aware that a sale to Christian broadcasters could elicit challenges. “All I can say is that all members of the board need to take that into consideration,” he said.

The Pittsburgh organization might not be alone in looking to the FCC to prevent the license transfer. John Lawson, president of the Assn. of Public Television Stations in Washington, D.C., said Friday his group would seriously consider fighting a sale.

In addition, the Corp. for Public Broadcasting wrote a letter in March saying that if the station is sold, it might expect KOCE to return the $22.56 million it had given the PBS affiliate since 1973.

A major plus to their bid, KOCE Foundation officials have said, is that the district would incur costs of $12.26 million if it chooses a competing bidder, not including litigation.

The foundation was the low bidder, at $10 million, when the first offers were submitted in August. The foundation, supported by many of the county’s most prominent executives and educators, announced this week it was increasing its bid substantially. Foundation officials said they could not provide specifics.

Other bidders are Trinity Broadcasting Network of Costa Mesa and Daystar Television Network of Dallas, the country’s two largest religious broadcasters; LeSEA Corp. of Indiana and Almavision Hispanic Network.

The two-trustee committee that is supposed to make a recommendation to the full board decided this week not to consider offers unless the company had bid in the first round, said Ron Berggren, a vice chancellor of the district.

However, he said the Pappas bid still would be forwarded to the board.

Angelos said that Media Venture Partners, the district’s broker, had solicited the offer and told Pappas that several trustees had given permission to accept the late bid.

Pappas’ offer stunned one local Latino leader.

“I’m really blown away.” said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County, an Anaheim-based Latino rights group. “Aghast by it in a pleasant way. Is the Latino community ready to support such an ambitious undertaking?”