City of Kent considers starting up FM radio station

If the city of Kent operated an FM radio station, would anyone listen to it?

That’s a question city officials would like to know the answer to as they try decide whether it would be worth starting up a radio station. They also want to know whether sponsors can be found to fund the operation.

Mayor Suzette Cooke, who proposed the idea for the radio station, has asked the City Council for up to $50,000 in the 2015 budget to hire a consultant to study the issue.

“I have to admit it made me feel a little outdated when it hit me on the head that some people say, ‘Who listens to the radio anymore?'” Cooke said to the council at a Tuesday budget workshop. “That appears to be a basic question whether to even continue this pursuit. That’s when during discussions that (City Chief Administrative Officer) Derek (Matheson) suggested to hire a consultant to see the viability of having a radio station.”

City staff last year applied for the FM radio frequency license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and received the license for a public information station. The station would reach about 156,000 people in the Kent area.

Cooke said the station could be used for public safety programs such as what to do during a fire, windstorm, flood or earthquake as well as emergency alerts. Other programs could be police amber alerts, sex offender notification information, street closures and traffic reports.

“Most of us don’t get that when we listen to Seattle-based stations,” Cooke said about a potential Kent traffic report.

The mayor also sees the station as a way to reach out to the city’s diverse community.

“It’s an opportunity for some of the organizations who don’t have English as their language to communicate (in their language) at certain times of the day,” she said.

Council President Dana Ralph agreed with Cooke about concerns of who will listen to the station.

“That’s my biggest struggle,” Ralph said. “Having teenagers at home and their music and information all comes from streaming not from the radio. I wonder where the audience is and how long that audience will exist. So even if we are talking about the senior population is this an investment that we’re making that in a period of years would not be relative.”

Cooke initially proposed starting up the station next year at a cost of $209,000, with $115,000 of that for capital start-up costs and $94,000 for a multimedia coordinator to run the station. She proposed it be funded through sponsorship dollars. The $50,000 for the consultant would come out of the general fund next year while the other potential costs would be pushed to 2016.

“My view is to find an avenue where it is self-supporting,” Cooke said. “If there’s not enough value to generate the sponsorships then one has to question even pursuing. …This is a potential gem. And the question is, is it a valuable gem or is it going to be a rock we want to throw back?”

The council will have another workshop Tuesday when it plans to start figuring out what to add or cut from the 2015-16 budget. The council plans to approve a budget either at its Dec. 9 meeting or on Dec. 16 at a special meeting if it needs more time to craft a budget.