This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Gov. Kristi Noem's proposed budget for fiscal year 2025 calls for a 65% cut to SDPB's state government funding.
"In the Moment" covers the story by sitting down with the people who understand the nuances of the news and who are most impacted by it.
Julie Overgaard is general manager of SDPB, and Ryan Howlett is chief executive officer of Friends of SDPB.
They join us to explore the landscape of public media in South Dakota.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Julie Overgaard:
SDPB is a combination of, depending on which way you want to look at it, 50- to 90-plus years of growth and change.
We started out as an experimental radio station in the 20s with somebody hanging their box spring mattress out of a window at USD to basically create then what became KUSD Radio. And then we expanded and became public television at USD, and public television and public radio separately from that at SDSU. And that's how we were for a number of years, just small college radio station and public television stations that were airing classes for students who wanted to get their degrees remotely.
And it wasn't until the late 50s and 60s and 70s that SDPB, as most people know it as a statewide public broadcasting television and radio entity, came into being by Republican legislators who put it into action in the late 60s.
Then in the early 80s, Governor Janklow talked USD and SDSU into— I don't want to say conceding their licenses but agreeing to give those over to the state for us to become public broadcasting as everybody knows us and knows it to be today.
But for most of the 70s and 80s and a big chunk of the 90s, we didn't necessarily do a lot of the same things that we do now.
And so I think we were really challenged over the last 20 years as broadcast has changed, as high-definition television has come into being, digital has emerged and the internet space grew, to constantly be an evolving public service media organization that meets people and meets South Dakotans where they're at today.
High school sports and open meeting and government streaming are all relatively somewhat new things in our evolution. And I don't know exactly what we look like in 2035, but I would like to think and hope that we will still be serving our state residents no matter where they live in a really meaningful way and using our over-the-air spectrum to do just that.
Lori Walsh:
Tell me a little bit about what the original mission was. As things became to grow, they grew intentionally in what ways?
Julie Overgaard:
Public broadcasting spectrum was carved out specially for the public good. And so we aren't a for-profit television or radio network, we are in essence the opposite. So it's not about raising money, it's about creating programming and providing local services that otherwise wouldn't be provided or that we need.
And the whole purpose of public broadcasting really is to do public good, to provide civic engagement, discussion on issues, news, culture, arts, all of the things that otherwise might not have a voice in our state. And our job is to give voice to the voiceless.
Lori Walsh:
Let's talk a little bit about how it's funded. Ryan Howlett, do you want to jump in on that? There's more than one funding stream that works together, explain how it works.
Ryan Howlett:
It is your typical three-legged stool that you hear about. The state is in for roughly $5 million, which is about half of our budget. Friends comes to it with another 30%, and then the Corporation for Public Broadcasting does the rest. We've got another sliver of dollars that we earn when we rent space on our towers.
Those four things together fund the network. It's really those three big pieces though that are the majority of our funding. The state of South Dakota has largely paid for our administrative and infrastructure costs. Those dollars maintain the network. They keep our towers upright, they pay our administration fees. SDPB is a state agency, so we contract with the state by mandate for our IT, our HR, our legal services. They pay Julie and her assistant and team's wages and keep things going. Friends of SDPB, we raise the dollars to pay for the program costs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's community service grant that we get from them helps us pay for the rest of the programing costs.
Lori Walsh:
So Friends of SDPB is not a state agency. This is a philanthropic arm that's separate from that oversight?
Ryan Howlett:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
When we have a membership drive and you hear the host say, give us a call, go online, click, and donate, what happens to that money?
Ryan Howlett:
That money goes into the bank in Brookings, South Dakota, our partner, and we take that and invest your dollars in creating great programs. It really is that simple.
When you give a gift to Friends of SDPB, the dollars get funneled back to create programs and the costs associated with those.
Lori Walsh:
So all that information because of transparency is available online right now. You can look at the entire budget and everything, Julie, right? I don't want to make people's eyes glaze over with what percentages go where.
But is there a key fact about the funding that you think in a radio context is important for people to know? And we'll put links up on our website to all the details so they can look at everything.
Julie Overgaard:
I would just offer that when we talk about public-private partnerships, that I think SDPB is a shining example of a public partnership that has worked for over 50 years. And that is because the state puts in 50% of the money and that pays for the infrastructure. It pays for the basement of our house, that allows us to build a house upon. It also pays for the public safety, whether that's weather or emergency alert information or Amber Alerts. It pays for open government. It pays for the things that I think we as taxpayers have a responsibility for on the public safety side and the open government side.
And then we take that foundation and we raise privately another half of the budget, another $5 million, and we build a beautiful house on that. That's got great local programming and does great local things thanks to our donors and the grants we receive. And when you put it together, we have a broadcast network that can do its business for the taxpayers and we have a beautiful house that can do its business for the listeners and the viewers.
If we don't take care of the basement, the house will fall down.
Lori Walsh:
When we heard Governor Kristi Noem's budget address, she wanted legislators to look at per capita spending in South Dakota versus other states. I did not hear in the budget address criticisms about how the operation was run or the efficiency of it or even the content of it. Her direction at that time was, "We may be spending more than we should be compared to other states."
How does South Dakota compare to other states in the services that we provide and the funding that we receive?
Julie Overgaard:
It's a difficult question to answer in a few minutes because it's very complicated.
There are almost 200 public television stations around the country and over 400 radio stations that are all non-state networks. SDPB is unique in that we are a joint licensee, both public radio and public TV under the same leadership. That we serve the entire state, that there's no other competing public broadcasting station in our state.
So out of the 50 states in the United States of America, there's only seven other states that are organized like we are. And it was really done for efficiency purposes. Because why do we need five different public TV stations with five different general managers, with five separate engineers? So I think from a cost standpoint, we get the big bang for the buck in South Dakota, but we are already consolidated as much as we can be without being regionalized.
The other thing I would say is that there are so many other discussions, issues in this state that we had struggle with because we don't have a lot of population.
SDPB was built and created in a large reason to combat some of the issues that come with being a very large geography with very few people in it. And that is nothing SDPB did, that's just a fact of our state.
We fund our rural schools at a different level than we fund our urban schools because we recognize there's unique needs in those urban areas, and they still have to serve those students even though you're in a very, very, very small town. Wiring the schools and building out the K-12 network across the state was done to help all the rural schools have the same technology abilities that the urban schools have.
SDPB serves rural South Dakotans because we may be the only over-the-air free broadcast they get, the only emergency relayer of information they have available to them.
I'll use Nebraska and Wisconsin as two examples of statewide networks like us. They have larger populations. Nebraska probably a little closer to us, but still double our population. They receive more state funding than we do. Wisconsin a little less, but they both get a significant amount of extra money through their regental system.
SDPB does not get money from the Board of Regents. We don't get money and pay for services, as in we don't get paid to cover the legislature. We don't get paid for open government. We don't get paid to do boards and commissions meetings. Those are all things that come out of our existing budget because they serve the public good and they're part of our mission and responsibility to do.
If we were in a different state, it wouldn't just be the money we get from the state general fund, our budget would be significantly boosted by other revenue sources from the university system or from fee for services.
Lori Walsh:
Ryan, how significant would the cut be if Governor Kristi Noem's proposed budget was accepted just exactly on face value by state lawmakers? How significant of a cut to SDPB's budget would that be?
Ryan Howlett:
Well, our proposed expenses this year are right around $11 million, and this takes out $3.6 million of that. It's a lot trickier than that because the way that our CPB grant is calculated also depends on local funding. And so this would take another million dollars of that CPB grant away there. So this $3.6 million cut instantly turns into a $4.6 million cut. That's nearly $5 million against an $11 million budget.
Lori Walsh:
It's not $11 million from the state though.
Ryan Howlett:
No, no, $11 million is the total budget when you add in the Friends of SDPB fundraising and when you add in all of our funds together.
You think about what Friends of SDPB does. We raise $5 million a year, right around there. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more from the citizens of the state of South Dakota. Thank you everybody.
But you look at what we do. When we're out talking to donors, we're not talking about PBS FRONTLINE and the new Ken Burns special, we're talking about "In the Moment with Lori Walsh." We're talking about "Jazz Nightly." We're talking about "Dakota Life" and all of the special programs that we create locally like high school activities.
And a cut of this size takes away our ability to produce local programming because after keeping the towers up in the infrastructure the most expensive thing that we do at SDPB is create local programming. And without the local programming that we create, because of this cut, we don't have the local programming to fundraise, to say, "hey, help us create this."
And so it also takes our fundraising. So over the course of 18, 24 months, our fundraising ability is kneecapped by this as well. So a $3.6 million cut becomes a $4.6 million cut, which over the next two years probably becomes closer to a $6.5 to $7 million cut. Against an $11 million budget, you literally can't survive that.
Lori Walsh:
Is it accurate to say it would in effect be a complete defunding of SDPB?
Julie Overgaard:
Obviously, it wouldn't be a complete defunding. The state is planning to leave us with $1.7 million. But our engineering costs to engineer and operate the statewide network, to serve everybody north to south and east to west, and push out all the programming is about 4.8, $4.9 million a year.
I don't know that we could effectively engineer and maintain the network on $1.7 million a year. Some of those engineering costs would have to get shifted over to CPB funding paying for them or Friends funding paying for them. And then like Ryan said, that would wipe out a lot of our local content, which would eventually wipe out, I believe, some amount of local support.
And as I've said to staff and others, whether or not you can't afford to pay your home mortgage in total or whether you can only pay 50% of your mortgage, eventually, you're going to lose your house. There just comes a point where you're just not a viable organization anymore. And I think yes, this would have the effect of doing that to us.
Lori Walsh:
How long have you been leading SDPB?
Julie Overgaard:
I have been executive director of SDPB since mid-1997, I believe. Just shy of 30 years or thereabouts.
Lori Walsh:
So you have been through funding questions before with largely Republican state legislators before because that's the nature of South Dakota. You've seen super majorities before. You've had these conversations before.
Bring back some of the other times that questions have been asked about whether something has value, how you've answered them, and how this fits into your institutional experience about funding through the state.
Julie Overgaard:
Yes. This is not the first funding battle that we have been through in my career. I've probably lost track of all of them. We went through a difficult time in 2005 when the legislature in the final days took away a half a million dollars in funding for us back then, but we were right smack dab in the analog to digital television conversion, and we really had to have every dollar we could scrape up to find matching grants to upgrade our infrastructure.
And we fought back at that time because we were going to have to shrink our coverage area if we didn't get the funding restored. And people in rural South Dakota let their voices be heard and heard loud and clear. The legislature went back on veto day and put our funding back in the budget. And we finished digital conversion and we survived to live another day.
In the budget tightening under Governor Daugaard in 2010-11, coming off pretty difficult financial times for everybody in the country in the mortgage crisis and other issues that were going on, the governor decided to do across-the-board reductions. I don't think everybody fully realized the impact that was going to have because not every state agency is funded by the general fund.
We ended up taking our cut and the cut for our sister organization in our bureau state radio, about a $760,000 cut. We reduced our staff, which we're still living with that today, from about 70 employees down to 62 employees. And we cut almost everything we could without cutting into local programming and without shrinking our service area.
It's taken us the past decade or more, again fighting through some other funding issues that have arisen in the last 10 to 12 years to build back what we had then to where we're at now. We still don't have the same number of employees we had back then. We're still fighting the uphill battle, but we've gotten a lot of it back.
This is larger by far than anything I've ever seen in my career.
Lori Walsh:
I want to ask you what lawmakers are asking you as you go and talk to state legislators.
But first, Ryan, what are you hearing from donors, new donors, and long-time donors? What are some of the questions that they're asking you and what are some of the comments that they're reaching out to you with?
Ryan Howlett:
For the most part, it's really positive. It's like, "Hey, we are here to support you. We don't think this is just. Go get them." There's also a sense of anger of why this would happen, if you want me to be really honest. And a sense of confusion, like, "Hey, what's going on? Why are you being singled out compared to other things in the budget?"
But the overwhelming sentiment, probably three out of four people, if I had to guess, is looking at the customer service reports are, "Hey, you got this. We're behind you. We'll make calls for you. We want to make sure SDPB stands strong and is a part of the state's ecosystem for a long time to come."
Lori Walsh:
What kind of questions are state legislators asking you?
Julie Overgaard:
Some of the questions about other state funding and how we fit into that. A lot of questions about services to the state, if you will. What we do and how we do public safety. How we do and what we do with open government.
It's interesting to me, for as well-used as our open government meeting recordings are used by legislators themselves and it has our logo right on it, that they are not fully aware that we're the one providing that service.
So it's been a lot of education, a lot of really good questions. I haven't left any conversation we've had with anybody being mean or nasty or out to get us or any of that. They've been generally inquisitive and generally thoughtful questions and all leaving going, "Boy, I just didn't know that. I'm going to have to think about that."
But also recognizing we're in a down year and revenues are low and other big projects to get through and deal. I think it's going to be a lot more talking and a lot more meeting throughout the legislative session to try to solve the situation for SDPB.
Lori Walsh:
When you say open government, for people who don't know, you mean every house debate, every senate debate, every budget address, every state and every committee meeting.
Julie Overgaard:
Every committee meeting.
Lori Walsh:
And that's all archived on SD.net. So you can go back and you can find those. So part of this too, and I think about that with this show a lot as well is the ongoing archive of stories. And I was just looking through an SDSU archive the other day and how many times this scholar had saved this interview that I did.
Throughout the archives of the state, there have to be tons of audio files and video files. This is creating the history, the political history but also the arts history and science history and medical history of the state.
Julie Overgaard:
I couldn't agree more. I mean, if you think about our long history in the state, we are a living, breathing capture point for the history as it's happening in our state, whether that's legislative history or issue history or whatever the topic of the day is. We got a call and we have shipped off all of our historical locally-created content to the Library of Congress and they're going to digitize it all for us for free. And all of the things SDPB has created over the years will reside in the Library of Congress.
Lori Walsh:
So every documentary, every "Dakota Life," every radio program?
Julie Overgaard:
I do not know if that includes every radio program at this point, but every documentary, every local production we have done of consequences will be digitized.
Lori Walsh:
That's remarkable.
Ryan Howlett:
Certainly things like "Black Hills in the Balance."
Lori Walsh:
What is the call to action at this point? What are you asking people to do, Ryan?
Ryan Howlett:
I think right now check out our website sdpbfriends.org/advocacy.
You can find your legislators there. Call the legislators in your district. Tell them in your own words what SDPB means for you and that when it comes up this winter, you appreciate their vote to restore SDPB's funding. A simple, straightforward message. Restore SDPB's funding with your vote, check it out sdpbfriends.org/advocacy. It's also sdpbfriends.org/funding. Let your legislator know, the ones from your district, that's what matters. Why it's important.
I mean, Julie, I, Lori, any of us at the station can talk about what's important to us, but what do you value in SDPB? Is it news? Is it the documentaries? Is it Karl Gehrke and the music? I mean you have your reason why you listen and why you watch, and articulating that to a legislator, that's more powerful than anything we could say at the station.
Lori Walsh:
And Julie, we know that in January, a new administration, new conversations about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will also come up nationally. That's another funding source. And people are asking the question, what is public media for now? And sometimes you hear this idea that, well, at a certain time it had value, but maybe we've outgrown that because the media landscape has shifted and expanded and there's the internet.
But why do you think that public media in places like South Dakota still matter and are still relevant in the modern era?
Julie Overgaard:
I think public media matters at its best if it's representing the public needs and the public good primarily in a local way. My concern has always been, because of our rurality, because of our lack of population, what we've seen even happen in the commercial broadcast industry here, SDPB is now the last locally owned TV station in our state.
And I don't think we're too far before we're the last locally owned radio station in our state. And you don't have to pay for broadband or cable or any service to get us. As long as you have a TV, you can pick us up for free and you can access the services we provide for free. I don't like it when everybody just assumes that everybody has the same equal access to news that is only streamed. I think there still is a role for over-the-air TV and we're certainly seeing that in our audience numbers over the last several years.
People are dropping their cable or their DISH network subscriptions and they're just going over the air and using maybe Netflix or Hulu.
That puts more pressure and more eyeballs and ultimately I think more ears into the local programs we create, that are separate and unique and different than maybe what somebody else is creating.
I also think we're moving more and more into AI. We are already seeing this. It's getting harder and harder to distinguish whether you're on your Facebook or on your newsfeed, whether a story is original, legitimate, all of those things. What happens when we can't make that distinguishment anymore? And I think public broadcasting may have a whole new role to play in being the place where either by federal law or agreement that AI will not enter the public broadcasting sphere so that everybody will always have at least one media outlet to know that everything is coming from a real person.
Lori Walsh:
I do want to ask you about what happened during the pandemic. And because one of the things that I noticed, and I had just a small slice of this where I was at, was this entire conversation about classrooms and the channels that we had. Is there something from the pandemic that happened, Julie, that you think people might not understand that having local public broadcasting meant you were in conversation with the Department of Education, especially in the education realm with SDPB's education department. What's relevant here to that?
Julie Overgaard:
Well, we certainly did have to switch gears very quickly when students were sent home to learn, and so we changed some of our television programming and we're working closely then with the Department of Education on whatever secondary resources we could apply and offer for free to help teachers and families and students when they were struggling in that moment.
Four years later, as we sit here, some of the outcome of that has been I think a new awareness on our part and much increased usage on teacher's part of digital learning objects in their classroom. And so we've really made it a priority to try to find those intersections between what the teachers or Department of Ed sees as needs or parents or homeschoolers see as needs and how we can bring our production skills and our local South Dakota knowledge to bear so that we can create intersection points of that.
So we've done a series of dissection videos that teachers can use or parents or homeschoolers can use. We recognize rural schools don't always have the teachers or maybe can't afford to buy the pig, so we made a nice arrangement with the Vermillion School District. They let us into their lab. Our Science Steve shoots the videos. I think we just completed our third or fourth dissection video, and last year they were used 65,000 times in classrooms.
Lori Walsh:
Wow! What else didn't I ask you that you think you might like to leave us with?
Ryan Howlett:
I love what Julie said earlier about the house and I think about Friends of SDPB as that margin of excellence. You guys at the proper SDPB network have built something just extraordinary with what you do, and I love that we get to develop the dollars to make something that's already great just extraordinary and provide that. And so thank you to the people of Friends of SDPB, both the staff and the donors for doing that.
I also think about this not as a fight but working with the legislature as there's just so many unknowns, and I hope the audience stays with us over the course of the next few months. Because we didn't ask for this to happen and we don't know where it's going to go, but I just wonder what happens to the network of 52 towers if we don't get our funding restored? And what happens to the things that are behind the scenes, like what SDPB does with public safety and all of the other things with open government? That if this funding doesn't get restored, what happens to our broadcast licenses?
Those things just don't automatically go away. Maybe 50, 60 years ago when the physical infrastructure of SDPB, those 52 towers were being erected and set up and those broadcasting licenses were being acquired, we wouldn't have done it this way, we wouldn't have had to make the choices to build the network that have led to how we fund it and how we maintain it now. The decisions that got handed to us or potentially got handed to us seemed short-sighted to me and just leave lots and lots of questions.
And so that unknown and that worry is where my brain is at today.
And I don't want to leave the audience with that, and so I want to leave the audience with, we will keep in touch with you. Sign up with our website. Go to that SDPB.org or sdpbfriends.org/advocacy and click that box to sign up for our email alerts so that we can keep you informed and you can make the calls when the time is right and come to SDPB Day at the legislature on Feb. 7 and be part of the solution of helping us maintain and build what we have and be part of that margin of excellence to help SDPB be great.
Julie Overgaard:
I would say that it has been my pleasure and my honor to serve as executive director over the last two-plus decades, that I think we all as South Dakotans have every reason to be really proud of SDPB and the work that you and all of your fellow staffers here do. We are all people that truly care about this state and strive every day to serve the citizens well and to make the work we do be meaningful, not only to us but to them as well.
Real South Dakotans who really care about our state, care about our issues, care about our people and our places. I think something really, really special would be lost forever and I think we'd regret it. I just want to make sure that we don't have to regret it. That future generations get to enjoy what I got to enjoy as a kid, what you got to enjoy as a kid, what Ryan did.
I still carry "Sesame Street" with me every day and my daughter carries "Barney" with her every day, and I think there's magic in that.
Lori Walsh:
That's Julie Overgaard and Ryan Howlett. We'll put links up to all kinds of reference material on SDPB if you want to dive into the numbers.
Until then, yes to Mister Rogers, yes to a little more kindness in the world.
