Super Bowl Update

Martha note:  This morning I posted a memo from State Senator Mark Obenshain enumerating what was and wasn't to be funded in Virginia's budget. Initially, little cockeyed optimist that I am, I thought public radio's funding was left pretty much in place. But that balloon just popped, thanks to the following from Tom Duval.

State funding for public radio will drop by 50% in the coming fiscal year.  The General Assembly reported that it had restored 90% of funding for public broadcasting, but that figure is misleading.   

I'll try to make this brief but clear... 

The Assembly restored all of the money, more than $1 million, that Governor McDonnell had proposed cutting from the Instructional Television Service (ITS) grants to public television stations.  Then the Assembly added almost $550,000 more to those grants.  The grants are used to produce and distribute instructional programming and materials to schools, not for broadcast programming. 

The Governor also proposed cutting 50% of the Community Service Grants (CSG) that public radio and television stations use for broadcast programming.  Although the Senate countered with a smaller, 20% cut, the House-Senate conference committee finally settled on the 50% figure. 

Because the ITS grants increased so much, the Assembly was able to say that the overall cut to public broadcasting was only 10%.

However, for WMRA, we still get hit with a 50% reduction - about $43,000. 

Additionally, we are losing $10,000 that originally was budgeted for us to air messages supporting the Virginia tourism.  So our total reduction in state funding this July will be $53,000.  We expect that the remaining $43,000 will be gone in July, 2012.