KSVY Sonoma fulfilled its community media mission during the October fires

On a fateful Sunday night last year, Oct. 8, Bob Taylor and his girlfriend Donna Hays were outside, listening to sirens in the night, but as the wind grew stronger they went inside their Fetters Hot Springs home to get some sleep.

'At about 11:15 social media started blowing up,' remembers Taylor, the 49-year-old general manager of KSVY, the community television and radio station in Sonoma. 'We were waiting to see what happened, wondering how close the fire was going to come.' Then the power went out as the wind continued to rise.

About 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning, Tim Livingston, one of the station's on-air hosts, sent Taylor a text saying his power had gone out, too. They agreed to meet at the studios behind Papa Murphy's Pizza on West Napa to figure out what to do about the catastrophe unfolding all around them.

There they decided to prepare a 'breaking news' alert for the first thing in the morning. Livingstone headed out about 6 a.m. to pick up his sister at the airport, and remembers looking up Arnold Drive to see two big fires in the hills to the west of Sonoma.

'Bob wanted me to record some sort of story from the field that we'd use for our breaking news alert,' said Livingston. 'It soon became clear it was going to be more than that, we were going to go full coverage.'

On Monday morning, after a brief nap back home, Taylor met with the station's regular volunteers and gave the primary instruction on what to say on the air: Don't spread rumors.

'The hard part was getting accurate information – nobody knew anything,' said Taylor. 'I called the Sheriff's office and my first question was, how bad is it? They couldn't answer the question for me, they probably didn't know anything either. Until midday Monday, they were just getting people out of their houses.'

For the next six days, Taylor along with Livingston and a number of the station's volunteers, helped to keep Sonoma informed in the midst of the rolling disaster. They reached out to then-Mayor Rachel Hundley, City Clerk Rebekah Barr and City Manager Cathy Capriola, Police Chief Bret Sackett and others to communicate whatever information they needed to get out there.

Since much of the news came via the Sheriff's alert system, Nixle, and at odd hours, Taylor would sleep with his cell phone and a laptop by his side. When a new report came in of an evacuation or an outbreak or anything else, he'd record a public service announcement on his laptop and send it via the internet to the station, where he had set up a program to play two jazz songs, then the PSA, then two more songs, and repeat until a new PSA was inserted – all though the night.

'That whole week, it was a lot of last-minute troubleshooting, trying to do everything to keep the news flowing as best we could,' remembers Livingston. 'And to keep the information right – we tried to be a 'steadier' of the information out there.'

'The fires made me realize the shortcomings of modern communication technology and how durable and helpful radio can be,' said Hundley. 'Because people, including myself, could stop in and share an update or call in with new information, KSVY became one of the fastest modes of mass communication.'

Taylor credits Livingston's 'calm voice' with providing reliable information to the community during the chaos, but the 32-year-old Livingstone demurs. 'We were doing everything we could over those six days getting the information out to people.'

In a time of heroics large and small, as a community radio station, KSVY was just doing its job.

Community radio as a category falls somewhere between commercial radio, supported by advertising, and public broadcasting, supported by federal grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as sponsorship, membership and pledge drives.

KSVY finds most of its support in local sponsors, as well as memberships, ad hoc donations and some grants, which usually go to technical efforts not staffing or programming. There is a membership pitch on its home page at ksvy.org, but it's a soft-sell compared to the barrage of desperate pleas that area public broadcasting stations air during their 'pledge drives.'

The station first broadcast in February, 2004, under the leadership of founder Bill Hammett. The current nonprofit that owns it, Sonoma Valley Community Communications, took over in 2015, and Taylor became chief operations and general manager.

Their transmitter is on Denmark Street near Fifth Avenue East, and puts out a mighty 1500 watts – for a coverage of a 10 mile radius. Which means the 'Voice of the Valley' truly is a local, community station, heard from Schellville to Glen Ellen, and that's about it.

Unless you have the app.

The KSVY 91.3 stream is available for Apple or Android, and lets listeners listen to the station no matter where they are on their cell phone. (During the fires, recalls Livingston, they had listeners from as far away as Texas and Rhode Island.)

'I've always been an audio guy,' said Taylor. He would fix his own gear using the techniques he learned in Dean Knight's electronics club at Sonoma Valley High School. Which mean he's also always been a Sonoman, a graduate of SVHS (Class of '87) whose daughter now goes to the same school (and is taking a class from Mr. Knight).

Though he did work for an amplifier company in Petaluma and took television and film production classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, Taylor now says he can find anything he needs to know on YouTube, and shares the local skepticism of going anywhere else. 'Why leave the island?' he asks, rhetorically.

But as capable a broadcast technician he is, there's a downside: he is the station's only employee. 'There really should be three or four,' he said, citing administration and another technician as necessary jobs. 'Somebody else that knows how stuff works.'

Fortunately volunteers help out with the day's programming, and they usually pick up an intern or two from the high school's media program, run by Peter Hansen. But the list of things the station does cover, not only in radio but on their television stream, is significant: all the City Council meetings, the Planning Commission, the school district board, the Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Committee, as well as special events like candidate forums and other community meetings.

All that, and sports. KSVY also covers the varsity home football games – 'It's Studio A, Arnold Field,' joked Taylor – and now volleyball as well. Though there is a small television studio at the West Napa location, most of their video work is done outside, with the support of a Chevy van that doubles as a rolling mixing studio.

All this adds up to an annual operations budget of about $250,000 – 'but we could use 350 or 400,' said Taylor. As such, they've brought on Bill O'Neill (who doubles as an editorial cartoonist for the Index-Tribune) to help build the sponsorship model: Local businesses pay $100 a month to underwrite a block of time, more if they can afford it.

But last year, they ended up with a 20 percent shortfall in revenue – due in part to the fires. A fundraising 'roast' of Gary Saperstein, scheduled for Oct. 17, 2017, was canceled, and couldn't be rescheduled because things just didn't seem that funny after October.

Taylor hopes the shortfall is temporary. But, he says, another year or two like that and KSVY would be over the financial cliff. 'In the end, we are community supported,' he said.

'I'm very proud of what we did,' said Livingston, now a business analyst with Restoration Hardware. 'I'm extremely proud of the people who said we helped them, it was great to hear that. It was amazing, it really was.'

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.