Daystar Television Network, the Dallas-based religious broadcaster that claims the high bid to buy pubTV station KOCE in Orange County, Calif., told a state District Appellate Court last week that it should require the purchase to go through and not offer the option of leaving the station with its original owner.
The three-judge court ruled June 23 that longtime owner Coast Community College District must hold a new auction or not sell the station. The October 2003 sale to the station’s nonprofit affiliate, the KOCE Foundation, showed “the rankest sort of favoritism” against televangelists, the court said. The college district rejected an increased Daystar bid one day after deadline but accepted a $4 million reduction in the KOCE Foundation’s purchase price two months after the sale, the court noted.
In summer 2003, the college trustees had been split over whether they should seek the highest bidder, but by October they wanted to keep the station in PBS.
Where the trustees broke the law, the court said in June, was that they accepted the KOCE Foundation bid, which was mostly on credit, though state law requires sale of such property to the highest cash bidder. The ruling is posted online.
The trustees rejected Daystar’s cash bids of $25.1 million and $40 million but okayed the KOCE Foundation’s offer of $8 million cash plus interest-free installment payments of $17.5 million over 30 years, with no payments for the first five years, plus educational services valued at $2.5 million. The foundation later persuaded the trustees to drop the cash portion to $4 million in light of claimed liabilities the college district would face if it sold KOCE outside the pubTV system.
In the case of several stations threatened with sale to commercial or religious broadcasters, pubcasters have claimed that CPB and other grantmakers could recover years of past grants to the seller. But the court dismissed that threat, saying “there is no authority in this record that CPB has any viable repayment claim.”
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posted July 18, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee