On air 50 years: KCBX has served as the Central Coast’s public radio station for five decades

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Local NPR affiliate KCBX has changed a lot over its 50-year history. Just ask retired attorney Steve Dorsi.

“I remember very well the day when I came to San Luis Obispo in 1974, and I saw that there was a public radio station, so I went up the stairs there in the Tower Building [to the KCBX studio]. I talked to [station founders] Steve Urbani and Steve Burrell, and I said, ‘Oh, what frequency do I turn to get All Things Considered?’ And they kind of chuckled. They said, ‘No, we’re just a low-power local station.'”

Dorsi, a longtime KCBX supporter and board member emeritus, jumped right in and helped the two Steves work through the process of becoming an NPR affiliate. He helped them apply for and receive a Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) grant. Over the last 50 years, KCBX has become an integral part of the Central Coast community, a station that provides local, state, national, and international news, as well as varied music programming and all manner of specialty programming.

It’s a rare thing indeed. From the curated eclecticism of Music Director Neal Losey’s Morning Cup and the many other genre music programs to locally produced community news to state news from The California Report to the deep dive interviews of Fresh Air with Terry Gross to NPR favorites like Morning Edition and All Things Considered to the independent global news of Democracy Now!, KCBX is truly unique among Central Coast radio.

KCBX will celebrate its 50th year with a daylong community event at SLO’s Octagon Barn on Saturday, July 26, with music, food and drink, and more. Naturally, you’re invited.

Where it all began

KCBX can trace its beginning back to the Bay Area, where the two Steves—Urbani and Burrell—met at college radio station KFJC while taking a radio broadcast class at San Jose’s Foothill College. Burrell, who died at 80 on Aug. 11, 2023, was working for DuPont in sales at the time. Urbani, now retired but actively volunteering, was working with the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park in its earthquake research division.

“The broadcast class was an evening class, so there were a lot of older community people like us rather than college-age kids taking the class,” Urbani recalled, “so we pretty much took over and ran the radio station up there.

“One night we were just sitting in the radio station and talking,” Urbani continued. “It was, you know, ‘What do you want to do?’ That sort of thing. We were both interested in starting a radio station or owning one.”

The Steves first looked for stations in the Bay Area, but since Urbani had attended Cal Poly and Burrell was from Santa Barbara, they turned their attention to SLO Town and the Central Coast.

Of course, the question was commercial or noncommercial, and according to Urbani, “We literally had a sheet of paper with two columns, the pros and cons of having a commercial radio station or having a noncommercial or public radio station. We were both really interested in doing community programming and things that were of interest rather than just playing one kind of music, so we then started our quest to start a community radio station.”

In 1973, they formed a nonprofit corporation and applied for a broadcast license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and waited. And waited. And waited. It took two years before they got the green light to broadcast.

“Probably nowadays that’s real quick,” Urbani quipped, “but back then it seemed like forever.”

They had already relocated their lives to SLO.

“We both did just odd jobs while we were here waiting and kind of plotting our course. Back then, there was no email, so we had to wait for a telegram from the FCC giving us the go ahead to start,” he said.

KCBX first signed onto the airwaves on July 27, 1975. A public radio station was born, bankrolled by two Steves who shared a dream.

“We funded it initially with the hopes that we’d get our money back,” Urbani recalled, “and that didn’t happen. We ended up buying just old, tube electronics, just a bunch of used junk, really, and got it working.”

They were offered a corner in the KSBY TV building on Cuesta Peak and allowed to stick their broadcast equipment on the building. The station engineer told them if they cleaned up an interior area, they could use it.

“So that’s where we ended up putting our transmitter, and it’s actually still there now,” Urbani said, adding that their first studio was upstairs in the historic Warden Building at 846 Higuera St., often called the Tower Building because it used to have a clock tower.

After operating on a wing and a prayer, with Dorsi’s help, they applied for and received that federal grant to upgrade their equipment and become an NPR affiliate. Still, Urbani couldn’t conceive that the station would become as popular as it has.

“I didn’t think it was going to fail, but I thought it would always be kind of a small community-based operation,” Urbani admitted. “But the community support was there from day one.”

The people’s station

KCBX survives on listener donations, and between sustaining members who donate monthly (usually with an automatic deduction), listeners who pledge during the station’s twice annual on-air pledge drives, business underwriters, and other fundraising activities, KCBX has managed to stay on the air and grow to now reach listeners from Santa Barbara to Salinas.

One reason for its success is the stewardship of Corporation President and General Manager Frank Lanzone, who helped grow the station into what it is today. In 1980, he left his job as manager of Public Radio KCSM serving the San Francisco Bay Area and moved his family to SLO and took over management of KCBX. He was one of the co-founders of KCBX’s popular annual fundraiser, the Live Oak Music Festival.

“We wouldn’t be here without the support of listeners in the community getting behind us,” Lanzone explained at KCBX’s current offices at Vachell Lane. “The only reason we survived is that people have supported us through thick and thin, people writing to their representatives, coming to our fundraisers. I’m always surprised at how much people believe in what we’re doing and come out of the woodwork from all walks of life, all kinds of people, just banding together and repeatedly standing up for us to support us.”

On May 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to pull federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides some funding to PBS and NPR. This federal funding for KCBX is negligible, but losing it would still hurt because they operate on a very lean budget.

According to both Lanzone and Urbani, two more frightening prospects than losing federal funding are KCBX being stripped of its nonprofit status or losing its FCC license—two other ways public radio could be undermined by those in power at the federal level who don’t see its value.

Lanzone noted that almost every time there’s a Republican president, CPB funding is left out of the budget. But in Congress, NPR and PBS enjoy bipartisan support, and funding has always been restored. The bottom line is people on the right and left, especially in rural areas, depend on public broadcasting. Sometimes it’s the only information source available.

According to the CPB, “Today, nearly 99 percent of the U.S. population can access public broadcasting’s over-the-air signals. This reach could not have been achieved without significant federal investment in rural communities throughout the country.”

These rural stations depend more on CPB funding than urban stations.

“I would bet that the first time that Steve Urbani turned on the switch for the station, he probably had a thought that’s a similar thought that KCBX has today, and that is, ‘How are we going to pay the light bill at the end of the month?’ And now with the federal funding situation, I think that question has come up to the top of the list again,” Dorsi said.

It’s hard to imagine losing the station that means so much to so many people in our community. Under Lanzone, the station started its local news team. The station’s gone from 38 watts to 5,000. Its community calendar publicizes local events. It’s where listeners tune in for weather emergencies and more.

It’s a radio station by the people, for the people. Δ

Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Jul 17-27, 2025.