WESTERN SKIES - November 15, 2005

*** PUBLIC RADIO UPDATE ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Colorado's small public radio stations are growing, this in spite of the perpetual challenge of raising enough money to keep the lights on. And many stations are trying to figure out how to serve a rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community. That's the report from this year's annual meeting of the High Country Community Radio Coalition, or HCCRC ("hick-rick") for short.

Representatives of ten public stations in Colorado, plus KZMU in Moab, Utah, got together in Durango last weekend to share strengths, evaluate weaknesses, get some training, and tip a few beers.

Among those expanding their signal is KHEN, or K-HEN, the relatively new station in Salida. KHEN has only been on the air since 2004, and broadcasts from the top of a two storey building downtown. The station now has a new tower on top of Tenderfoot Hill, just across the Arkansas River. Jane Carpenter is the outgoing General Manager of KHEN.

JANE CARPENTER: It's taken us two years to get the tower up. We have not moved the transmitter yet. That's probably another week or two down the road. That's very, very exciting. It will greatly improve our signal, it will sound better, and we'll have a much bigger range.

WHITNEY: Carpenter says that once the transmitter is in place atop Tenderfoot, it should give KHEN a solid twenty-five mile reach, which will be a big boost for the designated low-power station. Carpenter says that means the signal should come in loud and clear in Poncha Springs, and might even get all the way to Buena Vista.

Carpenter says KHEN is still about five thousand dollars away from raising the thirteen thousand dollars it will cost to move their tower and transmitter.

And, while five thousand dollars is serious money in Salida, it's nothing compared to the more than four million dollars that Boulder-based KGNU is trying to raise to pay off the AM frequency that it bought to get its signal into Denver. KGNU started broadcasting at 1390 AM in Denver in August of last year. The station recently refinanced much of the debt required to buy the frequency, and will save over a million dollars in interest. The refinancing package also buys KGNU more time to pay off its principal.

SHAWNA CLAIBORNE: Shawna Claiborne, I'm the General Manager from KDNK in Carbondale.

WHITNEY: Carbondale is the rapidly growing little town between Glenwood Springs and Aspen. The station there just re-jiggered its broadcast signal too. In a joint deal KDNK, Colorado Public Radio, and KAJX, the public radio station in Aspen, together just put up a new tower, which, since April, has allowed KDNK to serve a whole new town.

CLAIBORNE: We brought community radio to Leadville listeners. They've never experienced this type of radio. They've not heard any radio station bringing their news, information, and public affairs to the airwaves, and so that's been very exciting for us.

WHITNEY: When it comes to serving small towns on the Western Slope, KVNF is the public station with the broadest reach and biggest audience. Broadcasting from Paonia, the fruit-growing town south of the I-70 corridor, KVNF's signal spreads to seven counties, over ten thousand square miles. Sally Kane is the station's General Manager.

SALLY KANE: The big news for KVNF is that we are two years into a capital campaign, and in the last year managed to purchase our building, do all the interior demolition to prep it for construction of a state-of-the-art studio that is also registered with the U.S. Green Builder's Council. And we're looking for, the name of the credential is LEED, Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design, and we will be, if we are successful, the first certified green radio station in the U.S.. So, we are just plugging along on trying to upgrade our facility after twenty-six years of operating in an old miner's flophouse.

WHITNEY: KVNF, as well as the stations in Carbondale, Aspen and Boulder all say that they're looking for ways to increase their relevance to the growing Spanish speaking population in their communities.

Multicultural broadcasting has always been a priority at KSUT, the only public station in Colorado located on an Indian reservation. Based in the tiny town of Ignacio, south of Durango, KSUT meets this challenge by broadcasting on two channels. One serves Ignacio and the surrounding Southern Ute reservation. Its other signal, Four Corners Public Radio, covers a huge swath of mountains and desert in the region where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet. Beth Warren is the general manager at the stations, which are both licensed to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe.

BETH WARREN: The most exciting thing at KSUT in the last year has been the growth in local programming on our tribal signal. Which is always a tricky thing, because the second signal at KSUT which serves a tribal audience probably has at best, at any given time, about three-thousand listeners. So how do you put more emphasis into something when your larger station's serving thirty-thousand listeners and you always have a wish list there?

But what we had to look at was, from the inverse of how underserved we were, we couldn't just have a tribal station and not really serve the tribal audience. And we've added programming with the elders, we have two Southern Ute employees now full time there. We have a young Navajo woman working for us who's only seventeen; it's her first job. And hearing really solid programming taking place on the tribal signal is probably the most new and exciting thing that we've done and the local community loves it.

WHITNEY: That's all the time we have to report on the latest with public and community radio in Colorado. To learn more about the High Country Community Radio Coalition, log on to www.hccrc.org.