In response to MA’s public records request, censored bid information was released by KCSM-TV’s owner, the San Mateo Community College District. MA was joined in the public records effort by the Palo Alto Daily Post, a local newspaper that has reported extensively on the District’s effort to sell, transfer or liquidate the 5th largest public television station in California.
The 4 bid proposals were received in the District’s 2nd requisition process. The first bidding process, which attracted 6 bids, ended in the Fall of 2012 when the District rejected all six of the bids.
The second requisition process allowed bidders to bid for either a transfer of the license or to partner with the District in pursuit of a spectrum sale that would end public television operations and transfer the station’s spectrum to private wireless companies.
The 4 bids were released in response to the 2 public records requests with the amounts of the bids blacked out and redacted by the District, requiring station subscribers, the campus community, and residents of the 10 Bay Area counties in the station’s broadcast area to guess at the details.
The District has apparently been negotiating with only one of the bidders, defined as the “top bidder” and at least two of the bidders have informed Media Alliance that they never received any follow-up from the District on their submitted bids. The District is expected to receive a recommendation from staff as to whether they should accept a bid from the defined “top bidder” at the next board meeting on May 15th, 2013 at 6pm at the College of San Mateo 3401 CSM Drive (at Parrot) in San Mateo.
The top bidder is anticipated to be the commercial wireless spectrum speculators Locus Point Networks who have been buying up commercial TV broadcast licenses to auction off in the planned FCC broadcast spectrum auction.
The three other bidders, The Minority Television Project (KTMP Channel 32), The Oriental Culture and Media Center of Southern California, and Public TV Financing, (a division of Independent Public Media run by Free Speech Tv co-founder John Schwartz) have committed to the continued operation of a public television station, in some cases financed by an auction of digital sideband signals, but not the main signal. Locus Point Networks intends to auction off the entire spectrum and cease broadcast operations.