It was announced this morning that a community group will be given the chance to purchase KPLU from Pacific Lutheran University, providing listeners some hope that the public radio station slated to be sold to KUOW may yet survive.

According to KPLU, both the University of Washington—which oversees KUOW—and PLU have agreed to allow a community group to submit a competing bid for the license. If PLU finds the bid acceptable, UW has agreed to stand down on its purchase.

The announcement comes after widespread outcry over the sudden announcement that UW and PLU had crafted, over the course of several months, an $8 million sale of the station license, which would shutter KPLU’s newsroom and turn 88.5 into an all blues and jazz station.

But there’s still a lot of ifs to KPLU’s survival.
Stephen Tan, president of KPLU’s community advisory council, tells Seattle Weekly that supporters of the station must first determine how they should go about raising the money. One group, Friends of KPLU, is already registered with the state, but they have to “make sure that entity is qualified to accept funds,” Tan said.

Then, the group has about six months come up with the cash. Tan says it’s not yet clear whether the group will have to beat UW’s bid, which included $7 million in cash and $1 million in underwriting credit, or whether PLU would accept a smaller amount in order to see the station survive.

“There already has been some movement in fundraising, mostly voluntary, by people saying they’d like to pledge,” he said.

Tan emphasized that a community board owning and operating a public radio station would not be unusual; of about 1,000 stations in the country, a third are community owned.

His said the model would help protect against future situations like the current sale, which he suggested was in part due to the station being run by a college board of regents.

“Their fiduciary responsibility is to the university, not the station,” Tan said. “They see the station as an asset.”

There has been wide speculation that the KPLU sale came in light of financial troubles at PLU; the university has denied it.

Daniel Person is News Editor for Seattle Weekly. He can be reached at dperson@seattleweekly.com or 206-467-4381. Follow him on Twitter at @danoperson.