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When the board of KCET, L.A.'s public television station, ventured north to Santa Barbara earlier this month to consider the proposed budget for the fiscal year starting July 1, it faced a dilemma other public stations might envy.

While voting to hold its budget in line with the previous year's, at about $53 million, it chose to buck its smaller network brethren by approving an increase in dues paid to the Public Broadcasting Service.

The station's decision that it could afford to support a 7.5 percent increase to the roughly $5 million in dues it pays each year reflects the gains made in developing more home-grown programming.

The same question a year earlier at first yielded an operating budget of $42.2 million. But the addition of three locally produced programs, two of which were picked up by public television stations across the country, tacked on another $10 million.

Though new program costs meant the station had to come up with about 25 percent more money, it also meant it was taking steps to overcome a stigma that it has done little to develop its own creative content in one of the largest television markets in the United States.

Debbi Hinton, KCET's chief financial officer and executive vice president in charge of operations, said that while the 2005 budget was likely to fluctuate because of the difficulty in projecting donation levels and final production costs, it still signals stability for the station.

Nationwide, corporate underwriting of public television programming fell 32 percent in the two-year period ended June 30, 2003, according to Lea Sloan, vice president of media relations for PBS, the private, non-profit enterprise that serves the nation's 349 non-commercial television stations.

At KCET, station officials said production and programming revenue collected annually through corporate underwriting has remained stable in recent years--hovering in the range of $3 million. The bulk of its production and programming revenue--roughly 75 percent of the total pot of $20 million in its current fiscal year--has flowed from non-profit foundations.

Hinton said the station had been more successful raising funds from foundations than corporations, so "we weren't so vulnerable" when corporations tightened their philanthropic budgets.

# posted by Medical Information : 6:30 AM