Baton Rougeans are slated to be hearing a lot more of themselves this summer, as WHYR 96.9 FM, the community radio station, will begin broadcasting in June. The station, which was initially awarded to the Baton Rouge Progressive Network in 2004 – after a four-year application process – was delayed for another six years after hitting a legal snag with a competitor.

The casual manner in which David Brown, chair of the Baton Rouge Progressive Network Board of Directors, describes the following ordeal makes you do a mental double check.

“It was a competitive process,” he said to me in an interview at Tipitina’s music co-op. “But one of the competing applicants was upset that we had been awarded the station, and not them.”

That applicant, named in the Federal Communication Commission report as “‘Heaven Sent’/Ethics, Inc.,” is a company that cost Brown and the BRPN six years of litigation to gain control of the station. ‘Heaven Sent’/Ethics, Inc. was somehow able to gain access to the FCC computer system, posing as BRPN, and stole the radio station.

“We’re not exactly sure how,” Brown said. “I don’t think the FCC actually knows how. The FCC seems to think they stole a password and placed some of the responsibility on us, but I don’t really know how – none of us have met any of these people, so unless they had a spy...” Brown trailed off. “But the FCC engineers and attorneys had never seen anything like this before.”

After being awarded the station, Brown and his team were given 18 months to start up the station. During this period, he said, his group focused almost entirely on the logistics of getting a radio station put together.

“[We were] just raising money and buying equipment and making a brand new radio station happen from scratch,” he said. “We had no idea that this sort of nefarious activity was happening in the background, until we tried to correspond with the FCC later on.”

After gaining access to the system, ‘Heaven Sent’/Ethics Inc. made a series of “minor modifications” to the application, which allowed them to gain control of the radio station from the point of view of the FCC.

“They were able to represent themselves as members of our Board,” he explained, “and then file the minor modifications and they replaced our entire Board of Directors with their own over time.”

“So then, when we tried to get into the computers later on, and communicate with the FCC, they didn’t really know who we were. It was now controlled by another entity.”

After replacing the BRPN Board members, ‘Heaven Sent’/Ethics Inc. applied to have the coordinates of the antenna moved to a new location in the overpass area, which Brown said he found just by listening to the station – his station.

“We didn’t have any high-tech equipment,” he said. “We were like, ‘Where is the signal the strongest?’ and finally one day we look up and see this antenna. We walked over there and looked in the window of this little aluminum portable building, and saw broadcast equipment inside.”

Brown and the board decided to hire a lawyer who had experience with the FCC in San Francisco to help them regain control of the station.

“He somehow knew about what had happened,” Brown said. “It’s a pretty small community of people that apply for these low-power FM community radio stations in the country, and he found out about it. And so when we talked to him about it, he was like, ‘I absolutely want to help, you don’t even have to pay me. Once you get on air you can start raising money that way, and you can pay me back.’”

After four years, and one president later, the FCC began its own investigation of the station. A few months later, ‘Heaven Sent’/Ethics, Inc. was fined $20,000, and the BRPN members were recognized as the proper permittees of the station.

“There’s a lot of questions that were never answered,” he said. “That’s a pretty terrible thing to do.

Mixing it up

“Somewhere over 80 percent of all these stations went to church-affiliated groups,” he continued. “There’s enough of that already. We want some more diversity on the dial here in Baton Rouge.”

Diversity has become a sort of mantra for WHYR.

“What we want to do with it is community programming, a little bit of everything. The intention is to go on the air with about 60 percent music, and the other 40 percent would be talk radio shows and news,” he said. “But all of it is intended to be locally-generated material. That means that, for the music, we want to give first priority to any local artists.”

But much more than music will find its way into the programming. Community activism is also central to the organization’s mission.

“The Baton Rouge Progressive Network has a lot of groups that we’re affiliated with,” explained Brown, referencing organizations like BRASS, The Sierra Club, LEAN, The Environmental Conservation Organization, YWCA, Planned Parenthood, Culture Candy, and Of Moving Colors. But, he mentioned, one of the founding principles of community radio is that anyone in the community can participate.

“So we want to go to neighborhood associations, civic associations, and ask them if they want to have any involvement,” he said. “And students at LSU, Southern, or BRCC who are working in broadcast journalism and want to put something on, or students at the high schools, or even elementary students that are working on projects.”

The radio station will start broadcasting in the first half of June. So far, the group has been reviewing programming applications.

“We have some Cajun shows, we have some Francophile shows,” said Lilian Gray, programming director for WHYR, in a phone interview last week. “I think it’s because some of the other stations around town have started to drop some of their Cajun shows.”

They also have a world beat program, a Spanish roots program, as well as some local DJs who will have two-hour programs.

“And then there are all these side conversations that aren’t official,” Gray noted, “but they will probably wind-up being shows.”

It’s kind of like a Wiki of music tastes in Baton Rouge.

“If it’s someone in the community who has an interest in sharing their love of music, we’ll put it on, as long as we have space for it and there appears to be support for it,” said Gray.

Want to get involved with WHYR 96.9, or the Baton Rouge Progressive Network?

Visit www.WHYR.org or www.BRProgress.net for more info. And don’t forget to tune in later this summer to 96.9 FM. The radio station will be broadcasting in the first half of June.