[Kzyxtalk] KZYX's CPB funding

[Doug McKenty]

Notice the financials from 2010 on the stations website. This is the last year "membership donations" and "contributions" were itemized. You will notice that membership donations make up $141k, the worst year in the stations history (as far as we know). That year "contributions" make up a whopping $200k of the budget. That is $100k more than ever before in the stations history!!  Where did that money come from?

After 2010, these items are added together on one line of the financial statements entitled "memberships/contributions" so no one can tell how much is what. 

It could be that one large contributor is responsible for keeping the station afloat. Who might this person be?  Nobody knows....



Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 8, 2015, at 12:51 PM, Marco McClean <memo at mcn.org> wrote:
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>> On 4/8/2015 11:43 AM, sako4 at comcast.net wrote:
>> Hi Doug,
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>> This was posted in Coate's blog at the KZYX website:
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>> But we do not have that kind of money right now nor are we likely to get it very soon.  The fact is, we are in decent fiscal shape right now but looking ahead a mere couple of months, we have got to raise more money locally or we are going to not only be unable to afford these improvements, but we will again face cutbacks.  Right now is when the CPB is giving us the $54K less.  Our grant payment is due in days.  This year it's $33K.  Last year it was more than $80K.
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>     Marco here. Then are there more grants but secret ones? Why do you suppose everything is so secret with them, full details behind the recent farce of an election included? (An apparent turnout worse than any banana republic.)
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>     The simple fact is: without the CPB grant and other taxpayers' money bailing them out, KZYX would have collapsed under the weight of its operators' greed every year of its existence, including its most recent years under John Coate, Mary Aigner, David Steffen, etc.
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>     That's not great performance by board and management. It's terrible performance-- the worst possible. And if, as is now out in the open, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been going every year just to management in return for their purported tremendous expertise and skill and diligence at keeping things running right, you'd think, wouldn't you, that at least electrically and physically KZYX should be the Cadillac of radio stations, sparkling in the sun, and not firing on only six or seven cylinders so much of the time.
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>     A snarky letter to the editor of the AVA last week said that Sako and his gang of whiners should just shut up about KZYX costing a fortune for management, compared to other little radio stations, because KZYX has a great large footprint and is so much harder and more complicated to keep going and the writer "never even /heard/ of KMEC or KNYO." (You'll notice he doesn't mention KMUD.)
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>     Footprint? The difference between a 100-watt transmitter and a 1000-watt transmitter is: the 100-watt transmitter and all its support equipment (including the mixing board, STL link and lights and heat for the studio) costs around fifteen cents an hour to run, and the 1000-watt transmitter and the same support equipment costs two or three times that.  How far a bigger transmitter reaches doesn't make it any harder to run the radio station-- it makes it easier. Further, 9/10 of the county's population is in Fort Bragg and Ukiah and near them, which the little stations reach just fine. So, footprint, feh.
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>     The main thing the people running KZYX are doing is guarding it like junkyard dogs against being used by anyone who might say things like this every once in awhile.
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