Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

Today the KUSP community mourns the loss of Dale Owen, who passed away yesterday at his Santa Cruz home.

Dale has been part of our station since 1982, when he first hosted a classical music program for us. “A Classic Example” and its forerunners entertained and inspired our listeners for the next thirty-one years.

From 1985 until 2009 Dale was also part of our professional staff, soliciting program sponsorship and other support from Monterey Bay area businesses. He was recognized as among the most effective fundraisers in public radio.

In 2009 KUSP’s Board of Directors elevated Dale to Lifetime Membership, the highest honor the station can confer on staff members and volunteers.

At this time we have no information about plans for memorials or other ways to honor and celebrate Dale’s life. We will share any public information when it becomes available.

I’m happy to report that the KUSP Spring Membership Drive reached its goal of $115,000 at 6:00 PM on Friday, March 15. The drive total, which is now in the neighborhood of $116,000, is the largest for any KUSP pledge drive in the past eight and a half years.

The public radio community is a very different place today than it was in 2004, as is the economy in our area, so we’re especially grateful for this generous support of our station.

We’re still happy to receive your gift, if you didn’t have the opportunity to make one during the drive… just go to donate.kusp.org!

Our Palo Colorado Canyon Recovery Fund (about which I wrote here) is still a little bit short of its fundraising goal, so if you’d like to support that, go to donate.kusp.org and put a note about the Palo Colorado Canyon project in the comments box.

As blog subscribers know, KUSP has been working since the start of December to restore our service to Palo Colorado Canyon on the Monterey County coast, north of Big Sur. Our 91.3 FM translator was heavily damaged in a winter storm and almost all of our equipment there was destroyed.

We recently received our insurance settlement and started buying replacement equipment, most of which has arrived. Reconstruction will proceed forthwith.

However, insurance being what it is, we have a $2,000 gap between the amount of the insurance settlement and the expected cost of getting back on the air. To fill this gap, we’re turning to our community of supporters in Palo Colorado Canyon and nearby communities.

The Palo Colorado Canyon Recovery Fund will take in any designated gifts for this project and use them to fill the gap between the insurance settlement and the cost of reconstruction. If our donations to the fund exceed the final costs, the remaining balance will be used for the upkeep of the translator (normally, the major expense for the translator is the cost of the electricity to run it — we occupy the plot of land it’s on rent-free).

We’ve e-mailed this news to many Palo Colorado residents, and KUSP donors in the region will be receiving invitations to contribute in the mail soon. If you’d like to help too, go to KUSP’s secure pledge page and, in the box on the online pledge form labeled “ordering instructions,” indicate you’d like your gift to support the Palo Colorado Canyon Recovery Fund.

Meantime, the KUSP Spring Membership Drive continues, in support of everything you hear on KUSP, no matter where you live — and your gift to that campaign will be appreciated just as much!

We’re in the home stretch of KUSP’s broadcast of the 55th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s KUSP’s 32nd year as MJF’s local broadcast partner, and the third year where we’ve collaborated with the festival on Internet-delivered content.

The big change this year, thanks to the festival and their sponsors, is our live video feed every night from the Night Club. We’ve seen some terrific performances the past two nights, and we’re looking forward to tonight’s Hammond B3 Blowout.

We’ve been mentioning the funding situation for the MJF broadcast on the air this weekend, and I think some of what we’ve said bears repeating here.

For most of the time our summer music festivals have been on the air (MJF, and the Carmel Bach Festival and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music) they’ve been paid for through a mix of KUSP funding sources. The biggest piece (typically over 90% of the festival production budget) has been made up of grants from non-profit foundations that support the arts in Monterey and Santa Cruz County. The specific sources have rotated around over time, but the foundation sector has been the go-to place for our broadcast funding. Most of these foundations also directly support the presenting organizations, and their support for our broadcasts sort of leverages the investment they make in the music festivals themselves.

In 2012, we experienced an unprecedented reduction in our foundation support. There are many reasons for this, most of which revolve around the shifting priorities of the foundation sector. The pressure on foundations to respond to cuts in government funding is immense and affects many different economic sectors.

In any event, at the start of this summer we were faced with a decision about what to do about our summer festival broadcasts, absent the foundation support that had been so important for so long. Having already committed to our Carmel Bach Festival season (the first of the three festivals each summer), our Board of Directors and our fund-raising leadership (staff and volunteer) determined to go out and raise the “missing” foundation money from our listener-contributors and our local business community. The original budget for the 2012 festival season was $35,000.

We reached our goal for the Cabrillo Festival by the end of July and then turned our attention to MJF. Going in to the start of the broadcast, we still had about $3,400 left to go to make our budget. We’ve invited our listeners to contribute at kusp.org in between the sets this weekend.

We are grateful to all the people who have made a gift so far to our music festival fund, and to our sponsor for the Monterey Jazz Festival broadcast, Nordic Naturals. But as you can see, with $3,400 or so left to raise, there’s room for you too!

After we get home from the jazz festival, we immediately turn our attention to the KUSP Fall Pledge Drive, the proceeds of which supports everything you hear on KUSP and experience at kusp.org. The goal for the pledge drive will be quite a bit higher than the campaign to save the summer music festivals, of course, and the stakes will be even bigger. It’s a critical time for public broadcasting in America, and this drive is our one best chance to not only fund the programming you’ve come to rely on, but to prepare ourselves as a station for what may lie ahead down the road.

As always, we welcome your support, and your comments.

Today the White House released the President’s budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts on October 1, 2012.

The budget keeps the annual appropriation to support public radio and television (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) at $445 million, which is the same amount as was passed into law for the fiscal year we are in now.

Public broadcasting supporters are generally very happy to see an initial proposal that does not cut federal funding to public broadcasting below present levels. That said, the appropriations process is very long and sometimes convoluted, so it will take some time to see how this all turns out.

Federal funding is only one of the tax-based parts of public broadcasting’s economy. Historically, many states (though not California) have also budgeted support for their local stations — though that support has eroded greatly in the past two years. This story in Current, a trade publication for public media, reports on the latest developments.

KUSP’s Fall Pledge Drive finished at 1:00 PM on Saturday 10/15. When all on-line and over-the-phone pledges were tallied and checked, the total came to a little over $103,800. This tops our Spring 2011 and Fall 2010 drives, both of which finished at just over $100,000. In fact, the $103,800 total is the most raised on a KUSP pledge drive since the spring of 2005 — when the state of the area’s economy, and the profile of public radio listening on the Central Coast, were both very different than they are today.

Our drive total did come up short of our $118,000 goal. We knew, going in, that this goal would be a stretch to reach. We were spurred along by our success in making all of last year’s pledge drive goals early, and we felt, given the growth in our audience lately and the positive feedback about our recent programming efforts, that this was a good time to aim high and see what would happen.

Topping our results for any drive in the past six years, at a time when the economy is as shaky as it is, has to be considered a success.

We’re deeply grateful for all the gifts we received — over 1,000 donors called in or pledged on-line — and for the hard work of the scores of community volunteers, KUSP programmers, and staff folks that made it possible for the station to realize your support. Thank you all!

Thursday, June 30, was the final day to collect contributions for our Upgrade 2011 fund-raising project (about which I’ve written before). In order to collect all of the available matching funds from the federal government and finish the project, we needed to raise $75,000 locally. At the end of the day on Thursday, the total we collected was $81, 871!

So the project is now underway. As we go along with the construction this summer I’ll take a shot at documenting our progress here with stories, pictures, and maybe some video. Many of the folks I got to know as we raised the local support were really interested in the details of the project. I hope this will be fun and interesting for readers; watch this space…

This afternoon KUSP completed a three-day on-air drive to wrap up Upgrade 2011. Between Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon over 300 donors contributed $30,000 to the project.

This was the last piece of fundraising for a project that started in 2010, when KUSP received one of the last matching grants awarded by the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP), which funded critical technology projects at public radio and TV stations for almost 50 years until the White House and Congress eliminated it in April.

PTFP projects usually require the station to raise an equal or greater amount of money for the project in the communities they serve. We began raising the required $75,000 from our listeners over the winter. An event for donors in Big Sur in January, and another at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in February, got things underway; many Leadership Circle contributors added their support this spring.

With the June 30 deadline for matching contributions approaching, we turned to our entire listening audience to provide the last piece of the fundraising puzzle, and we’re delighted (as always) that you responded so quickly.

We’ve already begun lining up the Upgrade 2011 equipment; major work will happen over the summer, with final project completion set for September.

If you haven’t yet made a gift to support Upgrade 2011 you still can – just follow this link and select “Upgrade 2011″ when you check out.

S. 493 is a bill to reauthorize two fairly small programs in the U.S. Small Business Administration. Three Republican Senators whose politics are towards the far edge of their party’s spectrum of views — Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn — are planning to introduce amendments to this bill that would stop funding for public broadcasting.

The exact language of these amendments is not publicly available as I write this post, but one Congressional source indicates that Senator DeMint’s amendment would go even further than the bill already passed by the House by requiring the return of federal funds that had already been appropriated by past Congresses (but not yet made available to public stations).

When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was first set up in the 1960′s, one of the ways in which the founders and political leaders of the day sought to reduce political influence on public TV and radio programming was to “forward fund” some of public broadcasting’s activities. That is, a year or two would go by between the time Congress acted and the time the funds could be available to stations. This helped with planning (from the local station’s perspective) and — people thought — would make it less likely that Congress would retaliate against specific programming that might be politically problematic for whoever was in power at the time.

While previous Congressional action this year was aimed at stopping future appropriations to public broadcasting, the DeMint amendment, as described by these sources, would go even further by taking previously-appropriated money back.

Senator DeMint’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Public Broadcasting Should Go Private,” is at the moment front and center on his Senate web page, so he leaves very little doubt as to his feelings about what we do at stations like KUSP.

You can, of course, let your Senators know how you feel; 170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting has tools to help you communicate with them…

After the last two posts, I’m very happy to look on the bright side and thank about 1,000 KUSP listeners and Internet users who made a gift during our just-completed Spring Membership Drive!

We finished the drive tonight at 7:00 after eight days of fundraising, a full two days ahead of plan, raising $100,000. Our Spring 2010 drive raised $80,000 in ten days, so this is a real upswing in our fortunes.

Great thanks go out to all the volunteers who pitched in to make the drive a success, and to my very hard-working colleagues on KUSP’s professional staff.

Many public radio stations are enjoying successful spring campaigns, demonstrating the commitment our audience members have to the stations they love. Onward!