Community radio as an element of local cultural planning

 I have a bunch of entries on radio:

-- "Local music used to define communities: today with radio chains and national music distribution systems, not so much," 2021
-- "Culture planning and radio: local music, local content vs. delivery nodes for a national network," 2019
-- "Thinking anew about supporting community radio," 2019
-- "Revisiting community radio," 2020

And on various elements that I think should be in community cultural plans, but usually aren't, such as:

-- "What would be a "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for DC's cultural ecosystem," 2019
-- "Cultural plans should have an element on culture-related retail," 2018
-- "Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?," 2016
-- "Culture planning at the metropolitan scale should include funding for "local" documentary film making," 2016
-- "Another example of why local culture plans need to include an element on retail/dealing with for profit elements of the cultural ecosystem: Nashville's Tubb Record Shop," 2022

Salt Lake's community radio station KCPW just went out of business.  The station was originally owned by another nonprofit, and sold off to a different nonprofit a few years ago.  But for $3.5 million, and evidently that was too much, and the station wasn't able to successfully compete for donations for operations as well as loan payments, as they faced KUER-FM, the NPR affiliate owned by the University of Utah.  (The area has another low power community radio station, KRCL-FM.)

KCPW had a 31 year run.  It ended up being bought by KUER ("KCPW FM-88.3 is sold — to KUER and PBS Utah," Salt Lake Tribune) and for the time being it will rebroadcast the NPR Spanish feed, Radio Bilingue.  While Salt Lake County has a fair number of Hispanics, they make up only 1/11 of the area population.

A loss for community-based radio programs.  KCPW was noteworthy in that it was based on the campus of the main branch of the Salt Lake City Library ("The Salt Lake City Central Library is absolutely incredible," 2013) as part of pathbreaking mixed use functions in the library and they had a feedline between the library auditorium and the station so that programs there could be broadcast live or recorded.  

The station provided a fair amount of independent programming, partly because they couldn't afford NPR dues and because the area probably can't support two NPR stations as the population is relatively small.

The community benefited from having two very different public radio stations.  KCPW being absorbed by the University of Utah reduces the diversity and programming opportunities within the community in very significant ways.

It's unfortunate that radio isn't covered in local cultural planning.  

Monitoring the health of local cultural organizations in case something goes wrong.  One of the things I argue is that there should be a "distant early warning network" in the cultural community to identify the potential for organizational failure, and there should be the creation of funding and other systems to be able to step in and help.  Although I imagine most cultural professionals in the Salt Lake area are likely to think the acquisition by KUER was a good outcome.

A potential funding source (but too late now).  Salt Lake County was an early adopter of a sales tax to support "the arts."  It's called ZAP and it covers three areas: the Hogle Zoo, Parks both the County system and projects by the various cities, and funding for cultural organizations.  

The tax had to be approved by the Legislature originally and is renewed every ten years.

(Summit County where Park City is then developed a similar tax, called RAP, Recreation, Arts and Parks.  I don't know if other jurisdictions elsewhere in Utah have done the same.)

While it is a pathbreaking initiative, at the same time, it's static in that it is a funding source extremely difficult to modify for supporting "new" programs, because it requires the State Legislature to change the enabling legislation.  

I'd argue that community/local radio independent of large organizations like the University of Utah should/could be an element of that funding stream. But the time to change that is not when an organization is about to fail, but long before.

Also see "A comprehensive list of funding sources for arts and culture," 2019.