KVHS broadcasts from a tower tucked in Harmony’s rolling hills, just a few miles southeast of the Port Chicago Naval Journal Nationwide Memorial on the shoreline of Suisun Bay.
Dave Hughes doesn’t have a key to entry the property, regardless of being the on-air persona behind The Beat of Diablo, KVHS 90.5 FM’s hyperlocal night radio present.
That’s not usually an issue, as a result of there’s not a bodily station to unlock. As a substitute, this small, DIY broadcast — powered by a four-member volunteer crew and laptop software program — remotely blasts songs, public service bulletins, occasion listings and different academic content material by a single, small antenna.
However continued entry to the unmanned, unassuming tower is now unsure, as Hughes and a number of other different neighborhood advocates struggle to stop 90.5 FM from going darkish July 1.
County training officers are slowly calibrating their bandwidth to purchase the station’s FCC frequency license for $1, take over the lease to broadcast from the tower and settle for the sophisticated guidelines connected to this publicly funded radio station. Whereas supportive of KVHS’ mission, they’ve balked at committing to a deal on-air.
The one noncommercial academic FM station presently broadcasting in Contra Costa County, KVHS has been licensed to Mt. Diablo Unified Faculty District for the reason that Sixties. However radio lessons and regional coaching packages constructed by college students and academics of Clayton Valley Excessive Faculty resulted in 2012, following the varsity’s legally messy constitution transition. MDUSD first signed the station’s tower lease in 2005, however has been funding all prices related to the volunteer-led program for the previous decade.
Along with Jamaican ska tracks, new releases from native artists and PBS-style deep-dive stories, KVHS has supplied essential public service bulletins to Contra Costa County residents over time; 90.5 FM is federally banned from airing ads, promotions or something aside from info.
A lot of different public neighborhood stations within the Bay Space serve the identical objective. KALW 91.7 FM is among the oldest independently-operated academic stations within the U.S., owned by the San Francisco Unified Faculty District and transmitted from Twin Peaks. Volunteers and college students UC Berkeley’s radio station, KALX, celebrated six a long time of broadcasting on 90.7 FM final yr. Within the South Bay, KSJS 90.5 FM presents underground music and public affairs from San Jose State College, whereas “Pirate Cat Radio” was just lately federally licensed to welcome listeners from Los Gatos and Santa Cruz at 92.9 on the FM dial.
Harmony’s FM radio station 90.5 KVHS will go darkish on July 1, 2025 if a authorities entity doesn’t take over its license and pay for the broadcasting tower lease. (Phil Moore)
Hughes, who works as a amenities supervisor for a downtown San Francisco legislation agency when he’s not moonlighting as a disc jockey, mentioned the destiny of KVHS can also be a matter of neighborhood entry, free expression and moments of unadulterated pleasure.
“I think that any municipality in central Contra Costa County — anyone within the signal range — should be approached formally and publicly to be given a crash course of what’s going on here,” Hughes mentioned this week, talking as a volunteer and native music advocate, versus a consultant of KVHS. “This is bigger than me. I would hate to see this legacy just fizzle out for no reason. I mean, it’s about money in the end.”
MDUSD officers, nonetheless, say they will now not afford to foot the invoice, which they’ve estimated has been practically half one million {dollars} over the previous 20 years.
A majority of the varsity board agreed final week that the totally volunteer-driven operation is now not the perfect funding to learn college students enrolled at MDUSD or neighboring East Bay faculties, particularly amid authorized considerations that none of that public cash has been used to offer radio lessons or programming for college students for a number of years.
The varsity board put KVHS’s frequency license with the Federal Communications Fee in the marketplace for only one greenback. Nonetheless, the customer have to be one other authorities company — one of many stipulations authorised within the Could 14 vote to not renew the district’s five-year, $170,300 lease with American Tower, which expires June 30.
If MDUSD fails to shut a deal for the FCC license by June 20, 2026, the station’s 56-year-old, four-letter name signal will likely be robotically surrendered to the federal authorities.
Hughes mentioned the radio station’s technical difficulties might be solved with a bit inventive pondering and belief — the identical manner he obtained his foot within the door as a KVHS volunteer in 2021.
The Contra Costa County Workplace of Schooling is in preliminary discussions in regards to the position it may play in protecting the radio station on air, Superintendent of Colleges Lynn Mackey confirmed in a press release Thursday.
“I have listened to KVHS since I was a teenager. That radio station is a community treasure that should be preserved for future generations,” Mackey mentioned. “We are exploring how to return the radio station to its roots as an educational resource that allowed generations of students to learn valuable skills in a diverse variety of subjects such as journalism, technology, business and civic engagement.”
The monetary and authorized path towards that imaginative and prescient, nonetheless, stays cloudy.
Marcus Walton, the workplace’s director of communications and particular tasks, mentioned there’s no set timeline for closing conferences or choices in regards to the KVHS lease and license.
“We’re not radio people, so there’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out,” Walton mentioned, including that they’ve began tapping nonprofit, training and radio trade consultants for recommendation earlier than signing any paperwork.
MDUSD Superintendent Adam Clark, who mentioned he was the one who reached out to Mackey with the proposal to take over KVHS for less than $1, empathizes with volunteers and listeners attempting to protect the station, however mentioned the eagerness for radio doesn’t outweigh pressures to enhance check scores, faculty situations or enrollment choices for the 29,000 college students and 55 faculties in his district.
“We have 45% of our kids who aren’t reading at or above grade level, so do I not focus on that and put resources into a radio station?” Clark mentioned.
CCTV Operations Director Chris Verdugo is photographed at their studios in Martinez, Calif., on Thursday, Could 22, 2025. Talking as a resident and taxpayer throughout the Mt. Diablo Unified Faculty District, Verdugo has joined a number of neighborhood advocates preventing to stop 90.5 FM from going darkish July 1. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Space Information Group)
Chris Verdugo, who oversees operations of CCTV because the Director of the Workplace of Communications and Media — and is an alum of the station’s former video regional occupation program class — usually thinks about the perfect methods to share essential info with as many individuals as potential. That work contains offering entry to studio tools and recording area for native residents, in addition to broadcasting public-access programming.
“KVHS is a community media asset, part of the local information ecosystem,” Verdugo mentioned, later including that if KVHS doesn’t discover a purchaser by July, going off the air is just not a complete loss. “The station will evolve, once again. But this is just part of what should be serving our community.”
