History of Kohala Radio
The idea of Kohala Radio has deep roots all the way back to the early 1990’s in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, the home of Northern Exposure. This TV show and its radio station, KBHR 570 AM, captured a large Kohala audience and kindled an interesting question: could we ever have a station here? At that time there was no interest at the Federal Communications Commission in community radio, so we dreamed of a rogue radio station operating illegally and housed in a roaming mobile trailer to escape FCC detection. It was just a dream, but it was real and had legs.
The first opportunity to make Kohala Radio a reality occurred in 2007 when the FCC opened a window for new FM stations nationwide. A group of local residents formed, raised a little money, and we filed our application in the October 2007 window for a 25 watt non-commercial educational FM station construction permit to broadcast in North Kohala.
Unfortunately, there were a total of 88 applications in the State of Hawaii, eleven of which conflicted with our application. Since only one or two applications would be awarded a construction permit on the Big Island, and we were competing with larger higher wattage applicants, in early 2008 we lost out to Hawaii Public Radio for a repeater in Kona which was designed to cover most of the west side of the island.
This disappointing foray taught us a hard lesson: in future windows we had better not apply unless we knew the game and had a good chance of winning. But we didn’t give up. We decided to wait and see what the FCC might do next. Our Washington D.C. based attorney predicted that another window would open in the next several years for a different type of station: a low power (100 watts maximum) noncommercial educational station designed to cover smaller communities. We would be situated much better in this kind of competition.
In the meantime, nature gave the idea of a Kohala radio station a big boost. At 7:07 am Sunday morning, October 15, 2006 a 6.7 magnitude earthquake rocked Kohala. It shook hundreds of local houses off their post and pier foundations, seriously damaged the local gym, and closed the Kohala Ditch for two years. All access into and out of Kohala was closed for almost 15 hours. No information about these conditions was broadcast by any radio station reaching Kohala. As a result, the North Kohala Community Development Plan (a document prepared by the community in the 2006-07 time frame and passed into law by the Hawaii County Council in 2008) called for a local radio station as a “huge enhancement to the community’s emergency communications,” and to offer benefits like “communicating community events and information, networking, and educational opportunities.” This action gave Kohala Radio a strong foundation of community support and led to significant support from Hawaii Civil Defense organizations in the County and at the State level. Kohala Radio would provide emergency radio reports to Kohala for the first time in the history of the islands.
In the mean time, after three years, our attorney proved to be right. President Obama, fresh from his Christmas get-away in Hawaii, signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010 on January 4, 2011. Then nothing happened until June 2013 when the FCC announced a window in October for applications for Low Power FM noncommercial educational stations nationwide. Only nonprofits could apply, and they had to have a clear record of operating in their community for at least three years. Since the North Kohala Community Resource Center qualified, as did the Kohala public schools, a small group of radio enthusiasts came together to apply for the FCC construction permit as a sponsored project of the Center, and began the daunting task of organizing a group of community volunteers to create Kohala Radio. We filed in October 2013 and this time we won the competition hands down. We received our construction permit in February 2014 with an on air deadline of August 21, 2015. The game was on.
Our aim is to create a sustainable community supported, volunteer, low cost operation to provide programming of local interest and also a communications channel for the community to meet the needs for local news, information, dialogue, and, of course, to emergency communications. And as of this writing, in April 2015, we are a few short months away from going on air.
Readers with an interest in the details of all of the steps we’ve taken to get this far, the road blocks we’ve cleared, the extraordinary learning curve we’ve been on, and the incredible amount of work and accomplishment by the scores of KNKR volunteers, may read the detailed notes of our general meetings on line at www.knkr.org.