College radio station KVTI a victim of budget cuts, drops Top 40 format

“I believe you don’t know what you’ve got until you say goodbye.”

This closing line to “Affirmation,” an upbeat song by Australian pop group Savage Garden, has special significance to John Mangan.

Sure, it was just one of thousands of Top 40 tunes that he and his students at Lakewood-based KVTI 90.9 FM had thrown into the radio station’s rotation since 1988.

But for Mangan, the station manager, program director and instructor since 1982, when the station’s programming consisted of soft rock music and public service announcements a few hours a day, it was a perfect fit for the last song ever aired on the commercial-free station run by Clover Park Technical College.

Shortly after midnight June 17, one of the most popular South Sound-based Top 40 stations – known to thousands of local teen- and 20-something listeners as “I-91” – went dead.

The station hit the airwaves again Monday with a different format: classical music and National Public Radio feeds. Washington State University now controls operations and programming for the 51,000-watt station.

The conversion was the culmination of a year of sadness for Mangan and his protégés.

Clover Park informed him last year that its decision was based on a hard budgetary fact: Radio stations are expensive to operate.

This month, Clover Park announced plans to cut $1.3 million worth of employees and programs from the college’s $30 million operating budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year, including radio broadcasting, mechanical engineering design and legal support.

The college also said it was paring back programs that offer less promising careers, and that radio broadcasting is struggling along with other media.

“We can’t sit back and invest money in something that doesn’t have a strong future for students,” Clover Park spokesman Shawn Jennison explained this week. “If a program is considered successful, you have to have more than a dozen students interested.”

The college’s reasoning didn’t sit well with Mangan, and still doesn’t.

“I was in shock,” he said this week. “I told the president I didn’t see that at all.”

Mangan, who lives near Fife, said even as the station counted down to its inevitable closure, it grew in popularity. Its audience peaked to an all-time high of 160,000 listeners per week over the winter, and hovered around 120,000 listeners when it closed this month.

He said it also had plenty of local sponsorships and support from local businesses.

And while the broadcast program had a 20-student maximum, 19 students were enrolled when the closure was announced last year. The last six students graduated this month. He estimates that more than 500 students enrolled in the program since 1982, and many went on to work at radio stations all over the country.

Mark Allen, president and CEO of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters in Olympia, said there continues to be a demand for skilled employees in the radio broadcast industry, especially for people with multimedia and other skills that are auxiliary to music or talk radio.

He also noted there are other schools that offer strong, post-high school broadcast programs, including WSU’s Edward R. Murrow School of Communication and Bellevue Community College.

“You can’t always find something that’s in your local community, but the opportunity is there,” Allen said. “I see a demand for folks who want to get into this.”

The new programming at 90.9 FM doesn’t require a person, let alone students, to operate the studio in Lakewood. WSU’s radio arm, Northwest Public Radio, is based in Pullman. It sends feeds to Clover Park and 14 other participating stations in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

Kerry Swanson, station manager at Northwest Public Radio in Pullman, said KVTI listeners have contacted the station about how much they like the new lineup.

He acknowledged the South Sound already has radio stations with classical and NPR programming. “If they’re an NPR fan and a classical music fan, they’ve got it all in one place,” he said.

But to local pop fans, the new KVTI is, like, totally lame. Mangan, who continued to grade papers and move belongings in the days after the station went dead, said shortly after the transition the station received “an avalanche of calls” from fans of the old lineup, some of whom were in tears.

During its heyday, the station won national and regional awards. It also regularly featured acoustic and open-mike sessions.

Two former students now working in the radio business say the station’s closure is about more than missing out on Lady Gaga.

Kaz “DJ Kaz” Nascimento, an on-air talent for Movin 92.5 FM in Seattle, attended Clover Park from 2002 to 2004. He wrote in an e-mail that he learned about different aspects of the business through his experience at I-91.

“The closing of KVTI will force people to choose a different career and give up their dream,” he wrote.

Justin McDonald, general manager at Spirit of Alaska Broadcasting, is a Gig Harbor native who attended Clover Park from 1993-1994.

“It’s not your typical college radio station,” he said. “Nothing in my experience was as valuable. It was like an internship.”

Brent Champaco: 253-597-8653 brent.champaco@thenewstribune.com