By Thomas R. Collins
Another deal might have turned to static for perennially for-sale WXEL.
Nine months after the Palm Beach County School District expressed an interest in buying the public radio and TV stations from Barry University, the School Board voted to pull half the money it had set aside for the deal to balance its economy-rocked budget.
The pullback might clear the way for other groups to again begin making a bid for the stations.
The School Board never officially voted no on the proposed buy, but the purchase of the stations is no longer up for a yes vote, either.
“Where is it exactly? I don’t know,” district spokesman Nat Harrington said.
That has left the stations, which Barry has wanted to sell for about four years, in its familiar position: on the air, but up in the air.
Barry spokesman Mike Laderman said he hadn’t heard from school district officials about their next step. “We’re looking for the right organization to take over the stations, so right now the ball is in the School Board’s hands,” he said. “We’re not doing anything assuming something will or will not happen with the School Board.”
The Community Broadcast Foundation of Palm Beach and the Treasure Coast is hoping that it can re-open negotiations with the university about buying the stations.
“We’re very actively interested in it,” said Murray Green, vice president of the foundation’s board and a retired radio and television broadcaster. “We felt that it was not right for the School Board to operate it. Most areas around the country, school boards and colleges and universities haven given up their public broadcasting stations and found that it was not the right business for them.”
The foundation was part of a deal crafted in 2007 in which the stations would have been sold to a New York station, WNET. But the Federal Communications Commission shot it down because of what it said was a lack of local control.
Green now says the FCC made the right decision.
The school district sought to include the foundation in its bid to buy the stations, but the partnership didn’t happen.
Green has publicly criticized the board’s approach to the proposed partnership.
“The district has said it will not be responsible for any financial shortfall in the budget,” Green wrote in a newspaper column for Scripps newspapers in April.
“The School Board wants to hold the license, sit as the board of directors of the stations, but have an outside party be responsible for management and finances. We will not accept these terms.”
Miami station WPBT has also expressed interest in buying the stations.
Green said the station takes in about $6 million a year, but would probably need $10 million for the first two years after being acquired because the building and equipment need upgrading.
“There is a major, major amount of work and a sizable amount of money that has to be put into it,” he said. Green said he has commitments from donors who would supply the stations with the cash they need. “What we have is a sizable number of people who have said ‘we will support you when we know that you have the license’,” Green said. “The problem has been that it has been sitting out there for so long, almost all of that has to start from scratch in many ways. We have commitments, but we feel that when the license is obtained those commitment would magnify.”
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