KOCE
Many readers have reacted to the recent court decision that calls into question the future of KOCE-TV.
They have expressed concern that the only station that regularly covers Orange County issues, educates Orange County school children, and provides some of the best PBS programs in Southern California, ultimately could be taken over by an out-of-state religious broadcast network.
But there are critical issues that have not been publicly discussed in this debate about the fairness of the Coastline Community College District’s sale of KOCE to the KOCE-TV Foundation and the court’s narrow interpretation of a law designed to allow school districts to sell surplus property such as furniture or vehicles.
KOCE-TV is very different from a desk or a pickup truck. It is a public trusteeship whose federal, noncommercial broadcast license now is held on behalf of local citizens by the KOCE-TV Foundation.
In the past three decades, even during Coastline Community College District’s ownership of the station, the people of Orange County and Southern California contributed more than $50 million to the KOCE-TV Foundation to preserve KOCE as a local community service institution.
In reality, the people have purchased the station and invested in its future via the KOCE-TV Foundation. That’s not the case with surplus school district furniture or computers.
It now is up to the people to save KOCE. Since the foundation assumed ownership in November 2004, KOCE has been singularly successful with dramatic audience growth and donor support.
But a narrow and tortured interpretation of a state statute could take the people’s station away and leave Orange County viewers at the mercy of Los Angeles news stations for rare stories about our 3 million person community and vibrant, thriving economy.
If Orange County were not adjacent to Los Angeles, it would be known as one of the largest counties in the country and would have five local stations covering its issues, events and people. KOCE is our only tool for filling this local media void.
Some have expressed outrage that the entity coveting KOCE’s channel is a televangelist network. But that is not the issue. This is not about religion.
It is about localism and community service, something that KOCE does very well,something that will disappear in Orange County if KOCE is no more.
There are steps we can all take to help save KOCE. They are detailed at KOCE.org. I ask readers to get involved and save the local public service media enterprise that truly belongs to them.
Mel Rogers
President, KOCE-TV
Fuel Taxes, Toll Roads
For the past two years I served on a special committee of the Transportation Research Board. I was charged with looking into whether fuel taxes will remain viable as the major funding source for highways in the 21st century.
Our report came to some pretty strong conclusions.
First, we found that although the present system can get by for the next 10 to 15 years, it is gradually losing its viability. That’s due to two key factors.
One is changes in fuel economy and propulsion technology, along with rising oil prices. We concluded that in the near term, fuel tax revenues will keep coming in and unless public officials are willing to increase the tax rates, highway trust fund revenues may start to decline.
But even if hybrids or other alternatives really take off in coming years, the impact on overall fuel consumption (and hence revenues) will be moderate, because it takes about 20 years for the whole vehicle fleet to turn over.
So the further out you look, the more likely that fuel tax revenues will be declining.
The other troubling factor is a gradual erosion of the gas tax-equals-user fee principle that prevailed for most of the 20th century.
Recent decades have seen increasing diversion of highway-user revenues to non-highway (and sometimes even non-transportation) uses, along with a growing use of local sales taxes for highways and transit.
Overall, we concluded, the user-pays principle has a lot going for it, and should be preserved and strengthened in any reform.
Further, we think the public would greatly benefit if America shifted to a stronger version of this principle,namely, charging all road users per mile driven, with the road owner in each case retaining the revenues.
Under such a system, higher revenues generated in specific corridors would indicate where more capacity is needed, and would provide funding to add that capacity. And highways would directly generate their own funding for proper maintenance and repair. And of course direct charging means that value pricing could be used to better manage traffic flow.
We concluded that federal and state policy should foster greater use of value pricing and toll finance, to enable both highway customers and public officials to gain more experience with these approaches.
That way, when fuel tax revenues do start declining, we will have a much better basis for developing the transition to a road-user charge system.
There’s a lot more detail in the report, which you can find at the Transportation Research Board’s Web site at www.trb.org/publications/sr/sr285.pdf.
Robert W. Poole
(Poole is transportation director of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation.)
