Some Progress on Alerting Public Officials to PBS 39’s Spending Habit; Why Did Easton Give an Organization With $80 Million an $8,000 Grant?

— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs

I’m starting to get some responses from elected officials about PBS 39’s reckless spending.

As noted before: this organization has $80 million invested. That’s easily enough for a $5 million annual return over the long term. That money came from the federal government.

In fiscal 2023, somehow PBS 39 (aka Lehigh Valley Public Media) spent $15.15 million, or $8.66 million more than it took in.

Yet in a show of immense hubris, PBS 39 is still going after public money.

I’ve been contacting people in Easton, Bethlehem, Allentown, Lehigh and Northampton counties, and the state and federal government, asking them to stop giving this organization money to burn.

I’m starting to get somewhere.

“They will get no more money from us,” one official has told me. Two others expressed surprise at the situation. I won’t identify them, but the word is getting out to the cities and counties.

I suspect that when PBS 39 goes hat-in-hand to government for money, it doesn’t say, “We have $80 million endowment and ran an $8.66 million deficit in fiscal 2023. We paid the person in charge of this more than $300,000.”

I am still contacting people in the PBS 39 10-county area. I’ll also be watching to see if and when they go to government for money. Taxpayers’ money for them to burn on pet projects.

Here’s one thing I wish I could find out: Why did the City of Easton give PBS 39 an $8,000 grant in July? Wasn’t there a better use of that money somewhere in the city, instead of throwing it into the PBS money pit?

Anybody in Easton City Hall could have spent three minutes looking up the public outlet’s finances, and found what I did.

Why does an organization with $80 million go to little old Easton asking for $10,000 (it got knocked down to $8,000)?

Was anybody looking? Who in city government was aware of PBS 39’s financial situation?

Hmmm.

It’s time to stop the financial madness. Ask your city, county, state and federal officials to stop giving money to an organization that runs big deficits, misses its own financial forecasts and generally is a mess.

Ask the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to step in and find out what’s happening. That’s their job, to monitor spending in public television.

Send email to oigemail@cpb.org.