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Why Idaho Public Television Isn’t Like Oregon’s

By Sharon Fisher, 1-15-10

Producer, reporter and host Thanh Tan of Idaho Public Television

Oregon Public Broadcasting operates without any regular state funding. Idaho’s situation is different. Here’s why:

1. Oregon Public Broadcasting is not a statewide operation, said Peter Morrill, general manager of Idaho Public Television. It is centered around the Willamette Valley and operates a number of repeaters, or translator stations, along the northern half of the state, but the southern half of the state is a different public broadcasting system, Southern Oregon Public Television. OPB has five transmitters and 40 translator stations, said OPB president and CEO Steve Bass, compared with IPTV’s five transmitters and 42 translators.

Moreover, even though OPB did indeed stop receiving state operational funding in 2003, it did receive more than $3 million in capital support from the state in more recent years to help it convert to digital television—a process IPTV also went through over the last half decade (and which is not yet complete—several Idaho communities still lack such digital translators, after funding for them was cut last year).

“Had we not gotten [state funding], we would not be serving the rural parts of the state,” OPB’s Bass said. Even with federal grants, it can’t be done without some level of institutional support, he said. “With the rural populations we serve, it would never pencil out. You cannot raise enough funding in small rural communities to justify the cost of serving those communities, unless you have some funding source to make it work.” Plus, the cost of running a transmitter is the same regardless of the population it is serving, he added.

The market-driven argument could be made that, if rural communities can’t support public television, then it shouldn’t air there. But Oregonians aren’t like that, Bass said. “We have an ethic of wanting to provide equal service to people whether they live in an urban or rural community,” he said. “I never hear people from Portland saying, ‘Why are you taking my contribution and serving Baker City?’ I’ve lived in other states and that’s kind of a unique thing here.”

2. Idaho’s population and corporate base has grown since IPTV was first formed using state money. But the population base from which OPB draws its support is much bigger and richer than IPTV’s, even with this growth.

“What makes it work in Oregon is that we have the vast majority of the state’s population, from Portland to Eugene,” Bass said, with the Portland metropolitan area alone having 2.1 million people. “That is our sweet spot. Eighty percent of our financial support comes from there.” (Similarly, 82 percent of IPTV’s corporate and individual fundraising comes from southwest Idaho, including Boise, Morrill said.) Plus, they have more money. On a individual charitable basis, Oregon’s citizens give an average of $87 per person, compared to Idaho’s $47 per person, and have an institutional charitable asset basis of almost $6 billion, compared to Idaho’s almost $2 billion, IPTV’s Morrill said.

3. OPB produces a great deal of programming for the nationwide PBS network—fourth in the country, Morrill said—which nets it $10 million a year.

4. IPTV is just television, while OPB includes public radio, such as NPR, as well. “Three-quarters of our corporate sponsorship revenue comes in through radio,” Bass said. “45 percent or higher of individual support, we can attibute to radio. If we were standalone television, we wouldn’t be nearly as successful.”

What about other states, though, that also don’t receive statewide funding? Most Intermountain West states, like Oregon, don’t provide a statewide network, despite names that adopt that mantle, Morrill said. For example, despite their names, Montana and Wyoming Public Television are not state-owned and don’t cover the whole state; they are owned by educational institutions and cover just a fraction of the state. Similarly, despite its name, Colorado Public Broadcasting has a single transmitter in the Denver area. Rocky Mountain Public Television covers a much larger section of the state, but it is also associated with educational institutions, he said.

And it’s not just a matter of quibbling over ownership. While it may look like Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado public television stations don’t get state funding, they do—it’s just that the funding is funneled through the education budgets and isn’t as easy to find, Morrill said.

A number of other states—primarily rural ones, like Idaho—do have state-owned public television and do serve the entire state. But compared with them, IPTV tends to cost the state less and get more bang for the buck. In a list of 19 such stations provided by Morrill, using figures from the National Educational Telecommunication Association (NETA) as of December 2009, IPTV received the second-smallest amount of state funding, for the smallest total operating budget, resulting in the second-smallest percentage of state funding in its operating budget and the third-smallest appropriation per capita of population served.  IPTV also has the second-smallest number of full-time equivalent positions.

In addition, the way the phaseout is being performed could hurt the state more in the long run. Because some of the station’s funding comes from $4 million in federal grants to buy equipment that the station may no longer be able to maintain, IPTV may be in a position to have to pay back some of those federal grants, meaning cuts could be more severe than the 25 percent suggested for 2011, Morrill said.

“To pay those up front costs, the effects of the first year’s budget cut will be magnified,” said Marty Trillhaase in an editorial in the Lewiston Morning Tribune. “Public television studios at Pocatello and Moscow would be closed. So would the studio in downtown Boise that allows live coverage of the Legislature over the Internet and on public television. Not to mention about 20 of the agency’s 54 full-time workers who would lose their jobs.” In addition, the state would be abandoning a large share of the transmission network it just spent more than $20 million to upgrade to digital.

Some members of government—such as Wayne Hammon, administrator of the division of financial management—have suggested that IPTV could cut down on the seven channels it broadcasts, which is almost twice as many as those operated by comparable state-run systems. But some of these extra channels have to do with Idaho’s geography—not just big in and of itself, but so big that it covers two time zones, Morrill said. “Prime time in northern Idaho is 8 pm,” so northern Idaho’s programming needs to be shifted. Moreover, there’s regional variations between items such as public service announcements in southwestern Idaho, northern Idaho, and eastern Idaho, he said. In addition, IPTV runs two closed-circuit channels for the University of Idaho and provides most of the content for Boise State University’s cable channel, he said. “So we’re actually doing ten channels.”

IPTV also does other work for which it is not paid, members of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee heard earlier this week, including producing Legislature Live, which broadcasts the Senate, House, and JFAC in audio and video, as well as, new this year, other committee hearings in audio; assistance and advice in renovating the Statehouse to provide this; and a statewide emergency broadcast system. In response to a question from Representative Shirley Ringo (D-Moscow), “Hammon said he doesn’t think IPTV gets credit for all the things it does, and perhaps it should be paid for some of those. If the network provides teleprompters for the governor’s speech, perhaps the governor should pay, he said. If it provides live broadcasts for the Legislature, perhaps the Legislature should pay,” according to a blog entry by the Spokesman-Review‘s Betsy Russell.

And Representative Maxine Bell (R-Jerome), JFAC co-chair—also a big supporter of IPTV, being one of just three Republicans who voted against removing funding for the additional translator stations last year—added, “Your visit with Rep. Ringo about public broadcasting showed that they really have a right to some general funds in what they’re doing—perhaps just a different way of reorganizing will help,” according to Russell.

Statewide funding for IPTV has been cut before, in 1981, said Marc Johnson, president of Gallatin Public Affairs, in his blog (also noting that he had worked in public television for eight years). “That, too, was a time of severe budget constraint and legislators were looking under rocks,” he said. “Part of the discussion then, as now, was also ideological. Some lawmakers, including then-Senator Dave Little of Emmett, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee and father of the current Lt. Governor, simply didn’t think the state belonged in the “government TV” business.” Legislators restored the funding a year later, he added, as well as organizing it into a statewide operation—an important factor in a state where there is no statewide newspaper, he said.

As it is currently stands, if the Legislature votes to end public funding, IPTV will be getting the worst of both worlds: All the problems of being a state agency and none of the money, said OPB’s Bass, who privatized a city-owned public television station in Nashville, Tenn. As a state agency, IPTV would still be held to state-required purchasing mandates, rules and regulations, and personnel requirements such as its pension plan. “It would be far better either to look at some sort of continuous level of funding that could happen, or a complete privatization scheme,” he said. “I’m not sure it would work, but it would give the organization more flexibility than no money, with all the mandates and all the red tape.”

While Bass sympathized with the state’s financial difficulties, “the state has some obligation to look out and say, ‘What’s going to be best for the citizens of Idaho, and how can Idaho public television best serve them?’” he said.

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