KVIE is harming itself and CapRadio with its needless tower lawsuit | Opinion
If a recent court skirmish is any indication, KVIE public television has little chance of convincing any judge that it owns Capital Public Radio’s primary transmission tower in Elverta.
It is beyond time for these two pillars of Sacramento’s local media to support one another and stop suing each other. And that starts with the aggressor, KVIE. If it continues to pursue CapRadio’s tower by seeking to diminish the radio station in the eyes of the court, it risks doing lasting damage to itself in the court of public opinion.
This is a twisted local story. It started when a 2023 university audit unearthed a financial disaster at the radio station, which was unable to pay for leases on fancy new office space downtown. Then it turned into a meltdown between the station and a nonprofit support affiliate. Then this nonprofit literally gave away the tower land to KVIE, all without the knowledge of CapRadio or its license holder, Sacramento State.
CapRadio has documentation showing that it has owned the tower since 1990. Yet KVIE, choosing to get itself into this mess and believing it was gifted both the land and the tower, has essentially sought to make the radio station’s financial problems worse. It has been seeking to immediately strip the radio station of about $10,000 a month in rental income that it receives from the tower while the two sides continue battling over its ownership in court.
But Sacramento Superior Court Judge Thadd Blizzard last month denied KVIE’s request to place tower management in the hands of a third-party receiver. In his ruling, Blizzard found that KVIE had not demonstrated its “right to or interest in the Tower is ‘probable,’” according to the ruling. KVIE did not meet a burden to show the property is “in danger of being lost, removed or materially injured.”
No path to a tower ‘victory’
I was the lone member of the public to witness this proceeding, as the others present were lawyers presumably getting paid by the hour thanks in part to the donations of faithful local radio and television consumers. And I was pretty sickened by KVIE’s chosen path to “victory.”
In court and in its briefs, KVIE is portraying CapRadio as such broke, poor stewards of this tower that its one-time ally, the nonprofit Capital Public Radio Endowment, had no choice but to donate the tower to KVIE to basically rescue it from the radio station.
“I think the record is very clear that CapRadio is in dire financial straits,” said KVIE attorney Sean Moore. He outwardly mocked the impact of the radio station’s recent fundraising drive. “In spite of their representations that they had a successful Big Day of Giving, I don’t believe that is enough to erase the concerns regarding their finances.”
This endowment, Moore told the judge, had done the right thing for the tower by trying to get it out of CapRadio’s hands. “This all illustrates no good deed goes unpunished.”
KVIE offers an utterly one-sided version of events that avoids all kinds of facts and is completely unbefitting of a public media outlet. The full story finds no shortage of human imperfections among all parties.
This endowment, for example, had basically been sidelined by the university. Sac State suddenly wanted to control this nonprofit’s money. But this long-standing support organization had no interest in withering away. Instead, the endowment was openly hoping for a partnership between CapRadio partnership with KVIE.
CapRadio, which for a while entertained such a partnership with KVIE, ultimately backed away. It was only later that the endowment gave the tower land to KVIE, surprising a radio station grappling to regroup after findings of lavish spending by its former general manager, Jun Reina.
It’s beyond uncommon for a support organization to abandon its historic partner. But that is precisely what the Capital Public Radio Endowment did to CapRadio.
“I don’t think they foresaw a future where they were not working together, hand in hand,” CapRadio attorney Jonathan Shay told Blizzard.
If CapRadio doesn’t own this tower, then why are companies such as Verizon renting space on the structure from the radio station and paying it rent? And how would stripping CapRadio of this rental income, as KVIE sought to do, somehow make CapRadio’s so-called “dire” finances any better?
Even Blizzard was clearly struggling to follow KVIE’s logic. He openly wondered whether depriving CapRadio of the rental income “would cripple them.”
Why does a TV station fight for a radio tower?
Now that KVIE has failed in this interim effort to deprive CapRadio of the tower’s rental income, the case heads toward resolving who owns the tower itself. CapRadio has a 1990 lease that transferred ownership of the tower to the radio station. It has years of history overseeing its operation. And it has something that can be important in court — intent.
Sacramento State bought this land for this tower. It never intended a future where it could be lost. Granted, CapRadio and the university may have been sloppy with some paperwork and decisions over the years. And Sac State sought to diminish the future role of the Capital Public Radio Endowment due to financial problems that were not of its doing. For KVIE to somehow become heir to this tower, as a result, just makes no sense.
Why is KVIE fighting so hard for CapRadio’s tower? “We will decline to respond to any further questions from you on this topic.” KVIE General Manager David Lowe emailed on April 25, his last communication.
By all outward appearances, CapRadio is slowly but steadily climbing out of its financial hole thanks to its own faithful listeners. The fight over this tower is a distraction for both institutions, as they should be in lockstep fighting presidential efforts to dismantle public media outlets nationwide. Instead, KVIE has managed to create Sacramento public media’s version of a circular firing squad.
Something tells me that not a single KVIE donor wants to pay for an ugly, expensive lawsuit to own a radio tower it doesn’t even need.