Roberts is jumpstarting KPDO 89.3 FM radio, an all-but-defunct signal founded on the South Coast seven years ago. His experiment will take shape in Pescadero in April, if not sooner.
The event marks his first licensed broadcast venture and is sure to test the poise of a staunch proponent of uninhibited speech.
 Daniel Roberts stands outside Pirate Cat Radio Cafe, a hybrid nonprofit organization, bistro and community-driven pirate radio station in San Francisco's Mission District. Roberts is making moves to reinvigorate Pescadero'€™s dormant KPDO 89.3 FM radio band. |
For almost seven years, Roberts has been running a hybrid radio station, bistro and nonprofit organization on a corner in San Francisco’s Mission District called Pirate Cat Radio Café. He and a fluctuating band of volunteer disc jockeys orchestrate the endeavor, a community-driven pirate radio signal founded on principles subversive to mainstream broadcast models.
Last year the station received commendation from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for “trailblazing efforts towards freeing the airwaves from corporate control, providing the community with training in radio broadcast skills, (and) empowering voices ignored by traditional media outlets.”
Be that as it may, the FCC imposed a $10,000 penalty on Roberts last April. Roberts says he received the citation shortly after the commission nullified the loophole upon which he’d based his operation: A federal law permitting provisional licenses during national emergencies. Roberts qualified Pirate Cat under a little-known provision of former President George Bush’s war on terror. He maintains the transmitter at the source of the citation belonged to a Pirate Cat fan who spread the signal of his own volition.
“I haven’t operated an illegal transmitter since 2002 or 2003,” he said, between sips from a latte. “They have a rather weak case.”
The prospect of community radio is music to the ears of many of the South Coast’s approximately 3,000 rural inhabitants, who, as it stands, are without a centralized means of spreading community news through their rural communities.
“The more local you can get, and the more independent, the better,” said San Gregorio General Store owner George Cattermole, known to patrons as a die-hard advocate of the First Amendment and grassroots politics. The market doubles as Cattermole’s soapbox. The radio station, he says, “would be a good forum for local people to voice their opinions and communicate with each other. I’m supportive of the idea.”
KPDO is the hard earned and lingering brainchild of Celeste Worden, a naturalist and educator formerly of Pescadero. The concept took shape 16 years ago inside what was then Worden’s classroom at the town’s middle school.
Rap music was gaining momentum in youth culture, Worden remembers, and she was stumped at inspiring her students in language arts. The connection clicked for her one day while driving.
“If I got these kids into radio, they’d write,” Worden said. Incorporating mock radio into her curriculum was a wild success with the pre-teens, she remembers.
That same year, she founded a nonprofit called Pescadero Public Radio Service and applied for a broadcast license from the FCC. The idea was threefold: Give kids a creative outlet, strengthen ties in the region’s Spanish-speaking community and establish a channel for emergency communications.
That was 1994. The license didn’t arrive until 2003, two years after Worden relocated upstate.
She returned to Pescadero in search of someone willing and able to implement her idea, but those efforts were fruitless. Meanwhile, she found a broadcast site and set up a transmitter. For the past seven years the station has limped along on autopilot, intermittently spurting classical music filler – fulfilling the base requirements to avoid cancellation.
In November, Roberts caught wind of Worden’s predicament with KPDO and pounced. Within three days, the radio lover produced a preliminary programming schedule and station plan. Worden was convinced.
“You have to have patience and passion, and he has both,” she said. She also hopes that bringing in an outsider helps alleviate broadcast biases.
“I don’t want someone in there with an ax to grind,” Worden said. “I want someone in there who’s going to listen to the community’s voices.”
For the past four months, Roberts has split his weeks between San Francisco and the South Coast, immersing himself in local affairs. He hits the pavement a few days a week to forge relations with local merchants and townspeople, meet with members of the Pescadero Municipal Advisory Council and Puente de la Costa Sur, and garner letters of support for KPDO.
“I think radio should be steeped down to the point where you have local communities that provide information to smaller neighborhoods,” Roberts said. Providing educational opportunities for kids, bolstering local politics and relaying emergency alerts are a few of the items on Roberts’ agenda.
“When the Pescadero Creek floods, people are going to tune into 89.3 and find out what to do, where to meet, where to get sandbags, and other emergency information,” he says.
Roberts aims to get KPDO on the air by the end of April. At first, it will broadcast recycled Pirate Cat shows – “some musical-based, some Spanish-speaking programs” and “eclectic” others – until the community participates.
If all goes according to plan, Worden intends to sign over the license to the station to Roberts after a year or so.
But first he needs 300 square feet of studio space, “plus an extra 10 for the bathroom, or at least an outhouse.”
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