KVHS broadcasts from a tower tucked in Concord’s rolling hills, a few miles southeast of the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial on the shoreline of Suisun Bay.
Dave Hughes doesn’t have a key to access the property, despite being the on-air personality behind The Beat of Diablo, KVHS 90.5 FM’s hyperlocal evening radio show.
That’s not normally a problem, because there’s not a physical station to unlock. Instead, this small, DIY broadcast — powered by a four-member volunteer crew and computer software — remotely blasts songs, public service announcements, event listings and other educational content through a single, small antenna.
But continued access to the unmanned, unassuming tower is now uncertain, as Hughes and several other community advocates fight to prevent 90.5 FM from going dark July 1.
County education officials are slowly calibrating their bandwidth to buy the station’s FCC frequency license for $1, take over the lease to broadcast from the tower and accept the complicated rules attached to this publicly funded radio station. While supportive of KVHS’ mission, they’ve balked at committing to a deal on-air.
However, KVHS is part of a network of radio stations throughout the Bay Area that regional officials have long depended on for getting information about community resources and news to the public — meaning locals stand to lose an important part of their safety net for disasters.
The only noncommercial educational FM station currently broadcasting in Contra Costa County, KVHS has been licensed to Mt. Diablo Unified School District since the 1960s. But radio classes and regional training programs built by students and teachers of Clayton Valley High School ended in 2012, following the school’s legally messy charter transition. MDUSD first signed the station’s tower lease in 2005, but has been funding all costs associated with the volunteer-led program for the past decade.
In addition to Jamaican ska tracks, new releases from local artists and PBS-style deep-dive reports, KVHS has provided crucial public service announcements to Contra Costa County residents over the years; 90.5 FM is federally banned from airing advertisements, promotions or anything other than information.
A number of other public community stations in the Bay Area serve the same purpose. KALW 91.7 FM is one of the oldest independently-operated educational stations in the U.S., owned by the San Francisco Unified School District and transmitted from Twin Peaks. Volunteers and students UC Berkeley’s radio station, KALX, celebrated six decades of broadcasting on 90.7 FM last year. In the South Bay, KSJS 90.5 FM offers underground music and public affairs from San Jose State University, while “Pirate Cat Radio” was recently federally authorized to welcome listeners from Los Gatos and Santa Cruz at 92.9 on the FM dial.
Concord’s FM radio station 90.5 KVHS will go dark on July 1, 2025 if a government entity does not take over its license and pay for the broadcasting tower lease. (Phil Moore)
Hughes, who works as a facilities manager for a downtown San Francisco law firm when he’s not moonlighting as a disc jockey, said the fate of KVHS is also a matter of community access, free expression and moments of unadulterated joy.
“I think that any municipality in central Contra Costa County — anyone within the signal range — should be approached formally and publicly to be given a crash course of what’s going on here,” Hughes said this week, speaking as a volunteer and local music advocate, as opposed to a representative of KVHS. “This is bigger than me. I would hate to see this legacy just fizzle out for no reason. I mean, it’s about money in the end.”
MDUSD officials, however, say they can no longer afford to foot the bill, which they’ve estimated has been nearly half a million dollars over the past two decades.
A majority of the school board agreed last week that the entirely volunteer-driven operation is no longer the best investment to benefit students enrolled at MDUSD or neighboring East Bay schools, especially amid legal concerns that none of that public money has been used to provide radio classes or programming for students for several years.
The school board put KVHS’s frequency license with the Federal Communications Commission on the market for just one dollar. However, the buyer must be another government agency — one of the stipulations approved in the May 14 vote to not renew the district’s five-year, $170,300 lease with American Tower, which expires June 30.
If MDUSD fails to close a deal for the FCC license by June 20, 2026, the station’s 56-year-old, four-letter call sign will be automatically surrendered to the federal government.
Hughes said the radio station’s technical difficulties can be solved with a little creative thinking and trust — the same way he got his foot in the door as a KVHS volunteer in 2021.
The Contra Costa County Office of Education is in preliminary discussions about the role it could play in keeping the radio station on air, Superintendent of Schools Lynn Mackey confirmed in a statement Thursday.
“I have listened to KVHS since I was a teenager. That radio station is a community treasure that should be preserved for future generations,” Mackey said. “We are exploring how to return the radio station to its roots as an educational resource that allowed generations of students to learn valuable skills in a diverse variety of subjects such as journalism, technology, business and civic engagement.”
The financial and legal path toward that vision, however, remains cloudy.
Marcus Walton, the office’s director of communications and special projects, said there’s no set timeline for final meetings or decisions about the KVHS lease and license.
“We’re not radio people, so there’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out,” Walton said, adding that they have started tapping nonprofit, education and radio industry experts for advice before signing any paperwork.
MDUSD Superintendent Adam Clark, who said he was the one who reached out to Mackey with the proposal to take over KVHS for only $1, empathizes with volunteers and listeners trying to preserve the station, but said the passion for radio doesn’t outweigh pressures to improve test scores, school conditions or enrollment options for the 29,000 students and 55 schools in his district.
“We have 45% of our kids who aren’t reading at or above grade level, so do I not focus on that and put resources into a radio station?” Clark said.
CCTV Operations Director Chris Verdugo is photographed at their studios in Martinez, Calif., on Thursday, May 22, 2025. Speaking as a resident and taxpayer within the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, Verdugo has joined several community advocates fighting to prevent 90.5 FM from going dark July 1. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Chris Verdugo, who oversees operations of CCTV as the Director of the Office of Communications and Media — and is an alum of the station’s former video regional occupation program class — often thinks about the best ways to share important information with as many people as possible. That work includes providing access to studio equipment and recording space for local residents, as well as broadcasting public-access programming.
But speaking as only a resident and taxpayer within the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, he argues that it’s more important than ever to maintain access to locally focused, community-powered news — a vital tenet of democracy.
“KVHS is a community media asset, part of the local information ecosystem,” Verdugo said, later adding that if KVHS doesn’t find a buyer by July, going off the air is not a total loss. “The station will evolve, once again. But this is just part of what should be serving our community.”
