Anyone tuned to local public radio couldn’t have missed the bomb dropped in July when Congress zeroed out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the first time in its 58-year history. CPB helps fund more than 1,500 local public television and radio stations nationwide. At President Donald Trump’s request, the Republican Congress cancelled $1.1 billion in already-approved funding for the next two fiscal years. The cuts led straight to the announcement that CPB will close next year, and stations across the country are scrambling to close the funding gap.
Oregon Public Broadcasting — where staff are represented by SEIU Local 503 and SAG-AFTRA — held an emergency pledge drive. Announcers implored the station’s 150,000-plus members to donate as much as they can to make up for the $5 million a year the organization as a result of the cuts, which represents about 9% of its budget.
KBOO, where all but the station manager belong to CWA Local 7901, was already reeling from layoffs in 2024 that shrunk the staff from 13 positions to eight. Data coordinator and union shop steward Mike Ftaclas told the Northwest Labor Press the loss of CPB funding feels like an energizing force. The station gets 80% of its funding from individual donors and is fundraising on the air now. About 9% of its funding was coming from CPB.
“We feel like this is what KBOO was built for,” Ftaclas said. “This is our calling. We’re mad, and we’re going to do something about it. There’s a sense that all of us — workers, management and volunteers — we’re in this together. This is an attack on all of us.”
At KLCC radio in Eugene, general manager Jim Rondeau said he had been anticipating cuts.
“It’s been a cause célèbre in some conservative circles that public broadcasting shouldn’t exist back to (former congressman) Newt Gingrich in 1994,” Rondeau told the Labor Press. “There are people who didn’t like it in 1967, even though it was a bipartisan effort.”
Classified staff at the station are represented by the Lane Community College Employee Federation, which represents all non-management employees of the college.
KLCC’s deficit is about $360,000. Rondeau said it will be easier for the station to move forward without CPB funding because it launched an ambitious fundraising effort two years ago to urge the community to support local news. “We’d planned to invest locally in local service programming journalism and knew we’d never do that fully on the basis of federal support.”
