Future of Gig Harbor’s tiny public radio station KGHP-FM may be up in the air

Gig Harbor’s tiny public radio station may have dodged a bullet, but staffers are not entirely sure of KGHP’s future.

The Peninsula School District, which owns the station, has put “on hold” a planned study by an outside contractor to determine the value of the station’s equipment and frequencies, a district spokesperson said.

“The radio station is in status quo at this time,” said Aimee Gordon, the district’s communication’s director.

Spencer Abersold, the station’s manager and a former Gig Harbor councilmember, raised alarms earlier this year when he told the Key Peninsula News that he feared the district wanted to close or sell the station.

“If the school district decides to cut funding to this radio station, we’ve lost it,” Abersold told The Gateway this month.

Low-power license

KGHP operates under a special low-power license limited to non-commercial, educational use. If the district wanted to sell it, the buyer would have to be another nonprofit, educational entity, Abersold said. Chances of finding one are dim, he said.

“It would have to be a school,” he said. “There are not a lot of options.”

Abersold said he was worried when his boss, Kris Hagel, the district’s head of technology, told him in July about the appraisal. Since then, nothing has happened, and no one has told him anything further, he said. Hagel did not immediately respond to a request for comment made through Gordon.

KGHP broadcasts in FM on three low-power channels: 105.7 in Gig Harbor, 89.9 on the Key Peninsula and 89.3 on Fox Island, using between 40 and 90 watts. It programs an eclectic mixture of jazz, blues, rock, classical, country and talk shows, all presented by volunteer DJs. Abersold is the only paid employee.

The station hasn’t had an audience survey in about six years, Abersold said, but he reckons the audience is between 10,000 and 15,000 people. Even with low power, the station can be heard as far south as Olympia and across the bridge in University Place and Tacoma, he said.

Local media outlet

One of the station’s volunteers is Robyn Denson, a Gig Harbor councilmember who hosts HarborChat, a talk show.

“I think it would be a terrible disservice to the community to close the radio station,” she said earlier this month “All the other stations are out of Seattle, so having our own media outlet means a lot to a community of our size.”

The station reaches a lot of people on the Key Peninsula who don’t have broadband internet access, she noted, and it plays an important role in the region’s emergency communications plans.

“It’s more than just music,” she said.

KGHP has been on the air for almost 40 years, but lately it has become sort of a red-haired stepchild within the district, Abersold said. He blames lack of support from the district for a recent hard-drive crash that wiped out the station’s 27,000-song music library.

“I told them that was coming, but they put it off and put it off, and finally it crashed,” he said.

He’s restored about 7,000 songs, he said.

Part of a trend

Educational institutions have been shedding public radio stations in recent years as student interest in the broadcasting field has waned, and schools look to sell the scarce frequencies.

Pacific Lutheran University triggered an uproar in 2016 when it tried to sell KPLU, its popular jazz station, to the University of Washington. In the end, the university agreed to sell it to a hastily organized nonprofit for $7 million, and it now broadcasts as KNKX, with studios in both Seattle and Tacoma.

In 2010, the Clover Park Technical College quietly stopped offering broadcasting classes and transferred programming of KVTI-FM, its radio station, to Northwest Public Radio, operated out of Washington State University in Pullman.

The Peninsula School District, too, stopped offering its electronic media classes this year, after the retirement of its longtime instructor. Abersold thinks that’s a mistake.

“Look how big podcasting has become,” he said. “Look at TikTok, look at YouTube. Just recently, you had a story in the paper about a kid in his teens with two million followers on TikTok. Those are skills that kids can use and want.”

“Yet they have classes in batik, they have classes in pottery. I don’t know anyone who has become a millionaire doing batik.”

Asked for details about the “hold” on the survey, Gordon said: “The radio station is a complicated situation.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said KNKX broadcasts from Seattle. Although its transmitter is on Tiger Mountain near Issaquah, the station has studios in both Seattle and Tacoma.

This story was originally published December 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.