“Who are you, and what are you doing?”
Perhaps not the most common question, but Pamela Burton is setting a scene. She went out on a cold, damp Saturday morning with microphone and recorder in hand to chat with Anne Engstrom, an environmental activist and member of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
Engstrom and a handful of other eco warriors braved the elements to operate one of the small pop-up parks that dotted the city of Seattle on Sept. 17 for “Park(ing) Day.” The street parking space was marked off by a small fence and decorated with cheery potted plants, but the crew spent most of its time under large umbrellas that kept catching the wind and flying off.
This was the first of several parks that Burton would visit that day as she put together a package that would later air on her online radio station, KBFG. She snagged those call letters to signify the geography that the station will cover when it makes the jump from online to airwaves: Ballard-Fremont-Greenwood.
Burton’s team is one of 15 groups in the Seattle and King County area that applied for and received permits from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch low-powered FM stations. The stations run on the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb, and they cover a roughly 3.5-mile radius, making them perfect for hyperlocal news and arts coverage that Burton intends to air.
Burton is an old-hand at radio.
She covered the riots after video came out of a young Black man named Rodney King being savagely beaten by police. She has a collection of reel-to-reel tapes waiting to be translated into a digital format and a vision for content broadcast 24 hours a day in the languages of the Ballard-Fremont-Greenwood community.
“I want to have a Norwegian hour, let people speak the language,” Burton said.
What she doesn’t have is the infrastructure to take her station from the internet to terrestrial airwaves, and she’s facing a stiff deadline: Unless Burton applies for and receives an extension, she and her team will have to get up and running by Dec. 30 or lose the station altogether.
In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act, a piece of legislation that got through the notoriously gridlocked Congress with bipartisan support from local senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and John McCain (R-Arizona).
It busted open the FM radio dial, creating room for new low-powered stations in urban areas to match a push that took place a decade earlier to do the same for rural communities. Large media corporations fought the move, saying that it would encroach upon their coveted airwaves, but the government moved forward and allowed groups to apply for the frequencies in 2013.
“This is the one and only time that they’re going to do this,” said Mike McCormick, who is starting KODX in the University District.
Fifteen low-power stations across King County including seven within the Seattle city limits won construction permits from the FCC, but the permits come with an expiration date of 18 months. Those can be extended once for a total of three years, which seemed like plenty of time to get up and running, but the process has been slower than many anticipated.
Of the 15, only three are currently on the air, including the KXSU station run out of Seattle University.
Putting together a radio station is not cheap and would-be station operators have to work with Seattle City Hall to satisfy local requirements. However, given that the chance to launch a low-power radio station has never come around before, they’re effectively making them up as they go along.
Burton wants to put her antenna on a six-story building in Phinney Ridge, a straight-forward process for a piece of equipment the size of a television antenna. But she needed a license, a construction permit and an expensive permit to put an antenna on the building. “They started talking like we were Comcast,” Burton said. “We had to talk them off that cliff.”
Originally, the city wanted to charge the station $10,000 for a permit, the same as one for a much larger, more powerful antenna would have cost. She managed to get that down to $3,000, but that’s still a hefty sum for a community station.
All told, Burton expects that the station will cost just over $20,000 to get on the airwaves. Of that, $6,000 came in from a grant from 4Culture, a local nonprofit that supports King County’s art scene, and there’s another $4,000 in the bank, but that still leaves $11,000 left to raise.
McCormick’s focus has been on getting through the permitting process — the station still has almost 95 percent of its costs left to raise, which he estimates will be in the mid five-figure range when all is said and done.
In the meantime, both McCormick and Burton already have content that they stream on the internet. Rainier Valley Radio, which is probably the closest to getting on the air, runs programming 24 hours a day using its online platform.
Although it’s cheaper and easier to stream online, getting on the air is an equalizer, said Sabrina Roach. Roach works for the ticketing company Brown Paper Tickets as a “Doer.” She organized the groups that got their permits from the FCC and is helping them through the process of getting on the air.
“Terrestrial radio still reaches more than 90 percent of folks in the United States weekly,” Roach said. “Radio is less expensive to produce and transmit than many other forms of media. Data plans and an internet connection to the home and the devices to gain access to that are not attainable for all folks.”
That access and ability to use the media to reflect the community is at the root of low-power radio’s appeal. That and a certain David and Goliath mentality that pits the scrappy local station against the corporate behemoths.
“A lot of people still do listen to the radio,” McCormick said. “It’s why radio is so important. It’s still ours, theoretically. It’s still in our hands.”