Emergency system upgrades for KHNS in Haines, Skagway stalled after federal program halted

KHNS public radio officials during an annual meeting. (Chilkat Valley News)

By Rashah McChesney

Chilkat Valley News

A plan to upgrade the early warning and alert systems in Haines and Skagway is on hold after a federal grant program issued a stop work order to KHNS, which was in the middle of ordering equipment for the upgrades.

The now-defunct Next Generation Early Warning System grant program was designed to help public television and radio stations replace and upgrade infrastructure around alert and warning systems.

It was administered by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is set to shutdown at the end of September after Congress voted to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting, defunding local PBS and NPR stations across the country.

KHNS was awarded nearly $90,000 in 2024. The idea was to upgrade its translator system in Skagway, with the goal of increasing coverage in areas that don’t currently get signal, creating a backup system in Skagway that could still broadcast even if Haines’ fails. It also would have gone toward purchasing a backup generator, as the station’s current generator is getting to the end of its working life, said program director and engineer Marley Horner

Horner said he was able to buy some equipment before the program got shut down, but it cannot be installed without the remaining hardware and funds for an engineer.

“We would need another $10,000 or so to finish the equipment purchases,” he said.

And, we never got the generator.”

Horner said he had been applying for the program since 2022 and was elated when the award finally came through. But just about two weeks after the presidential inauguration, he and other station staff in Alaska say they began getting inconsistent messages about the future of the program. First, there was an email reassuring grantees that they would be able to get their funds.

During that window, Horner said the station made its biggest purchase, $30,000 in equipment.

Then, a few days later, Horner said the station got its first notice to stop work from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which said the funds – which came through the Federal Emergency Management Agency – had been frozen and purchases would not be reimbursed.

“I spent the last four months just trying to make sure we got reimbursed,” he said. “We got reimbursed for everything we have spent so far, minus about $2,000 in batteries.”

Horner said KHNS is among a number of stations in Alaska left in the lurch after the cancellation of the program.

Ketchikan’s public radio station, KRBD, was awarded just under $100,000. General manager Mike Gates said the station was only able to spend about $6,000 before the stop work order came through.

Gates said he waited to order equipment because he didn’t want to spend $90,000 when there was a risk that it would not be reimbursed.

The station needs a new transmitter; he said the current one is 30 years old and he’s not sure they’d be able to find replacement parts if it failed.

“In a normal year, perhaps we could order the stuff and cross our fingers and toes and just pray that it would be covered,” he said. “But, this is not a normal year.”

At KUCB in Unalaska, general manager Lauren Adams did not wait to order equipment she said is badly needed. The station was awarded $224,000 and she said Wednesday that she’d managed to spend just under $220,000 of it.

She submitted her last receipts on Friday before getting a stop-work order on Monday.

So far, the station has been reimbursed for about $7,000 of those funds.

“I’m very nervous about getting the rest of it,” Adams said. “I’m very hopeful, I’m very optimistic.”

Adams, who said she’s not sure what she’d do if the funds weren’t reimbursed, said she would not have taken the risk if it wasn’t such a critical need.

“We didn’t have backup power in the studio. Every time the power goes out we have nothing,” she said.

Additionally, the station broadcasts at sea level. Already there have been two tsunami warnings this summer, meaning whoever stays at the station to broadcast emergency messages to everyone else who needs to get to higher ground cannot themselves head to higher ground.

“We got the stuff we need to broadcast from high ground,” Adams said.

Most of the equipment is still in transit, but she said the station is on track to have it fully installed by the end of September.

Adams, Gates and Horner all said they do not blame the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the failure of the program.

“My grant agent for CPB has been really helpful and kind and nice and tried to communicate with me to the best of their ability,” Adams said. “It’s just kind of a really uncertain, tough time.”

Horner, who said this was his first experience applying for a grant, said it was also the largest grant KHNS had ever received and to have it fail was disheartening on several levels. For one, Horner said the federal funds that have been spent have been wasted.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” he said. “They just spent all of this money to get stations halfway there and now nothing. It’s absolutely a sunken cost.”

A larger problem for Alaska is that rural radio stations play a crucial role in carrying emergency alerts that could reach people via other methods in other parts of the country where cellphone service and broadband access is more reliable. The federal funding cuts have put some of those stations in the position of facing closure.

“Congress continually said ‘oh we’re not defunding the [Emergency Alert System] program.’ It doesn’t matter if you’re not defunding the EAS program. It doesn’t matter if the EAS goes out and there’s nothing to carry the signal,” Horner said.

• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.