In March, 2023, KCIW launched the KCIW Soapbox.
The concept is simple. Every Wednesday at 2PM, residents of Curry County, Oregon, and its environs are invited to come to the station and have station volunteers help them record their 2-minute messages for broadcast. People can “talk, sing, rap or rhyme,” the station announcement says. No matter the missive –with exceptions for libel and foul language–, KCIW is there to insure that community voices are heard.
The idea for a soapbox, says KCIW News Director Lori Gallo Stoddard, was planted back at a pre-Covid Brookings’ City Council meeting, when the former Mayor told vocal community members that, if they had complaints, they should “get on a soapbox.”
In the years following that meeting, KCIW news programming made sure that community calls for government transparency and accountability were not silenced; and, in 2023, the station was awarded a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for its News Documentary “Corruption in Curry County Government?” The KCIW Soapbox now adds a direct-democracy touch.
In November and December of 2024, I spoke separately with Lori Gallo-Stoddard and Candice Michel, one of the station’s founding Directors and current Treasurer, about the origin and workings of the Soapbox and about KCIW’s service to the Curry County community.
These separate interviews has been edited together for continuity. Each has also been edited for length.
Diane: As I mentioned, Lori, when I contacted you, I saw KCIW’s invitation to Soapbox speakers on the station’s website and was intrigued. But the story that you told me about how it came to be makes its service even more significant. Can we hear about that?
Lori: It got its name from a former Mayor who told the public at a council meeting that it was inappropriate for city volunteers, many who volunteered in committees on Tourism and Promotion–tourism is big here–, to criticize elected officials. So, they fired all of the volunteers. The Mayor said, if anyone wanted to criticize the government, they should get on a soapbox. I remembered that. We wanted to give the community a voice, and that’s why we [created] The Soapbox.
Brookings is a really tiny little town; and this is a very rural, Red, conservative area. The Democrats’ offices have had their windows shot out multiple times. So this is not a very friendly town or county for folks who are more progressive.
Diane: I saw the archived Soapbox pieces on the station website and looked at what topics people were talking about There are a number that address City Council issues and an issue with St. Timothy’s. So I wondered if you could talk about what people were eager to discuss at Council Meetings, what discussions city officials wanted to cut off, what matters to the people in your community.
Lori: Well, in these last few years, two major issues have impacted the city of Brookings immensely.
During COVID, things were really rough here, and we have a large homeless population. A lot of people here live in their cars. It’s a very poor, very rural area; and, when COVID hit, the City Council passed an ordinance allowing people to camp in cars at churches in the area.
St. Timothy’s is an Episcopal church that’s been around since before the city was incorporated, and St Tim’s has a ministry where they treat the unhoused. They offer meals; they offer showers. During COVID, they were the only place you could get tested or get a [vaccination].. And so they were a real big influence in the community. They are located right next to Azalea Park, [where] a lot of homeless people camp at night.
Well, [in 2021,] 21 people signed a petition asking that St. Tim’s stop its services. St Tim’s said, ‘No, we’re not going to stop our services.’ And the city said, basically, ‘F*ck you. We’re going to change the municipal code.’
So they changed the municipal code to make it illegal for St Tim’s to be doing what it was doing. And St Tim’s says, ‘That’s not okay.’ The Episcopal Diocese got behind it, and [in 2022] they sued the City of Brookings to allow them to continue their ministries and to not change the municipal code. It was a Federal lawsuit; and, of course, the city lost, because it was a church vs. state religious rights case.
[The other issue] is the fact that [in 2022] our City Manager was arrested for shoplifting at the local Fred Meyer, our big grocery store. She had been fired from a previous position, also for shoplifting; and, when she was arrested for shoplifting, she was arrested by one of the local Brookings police officers.
Now, as City Manager, she signs their checks. So this was a really big deal in the community, and people wanted her fired. The City Council, despite months of public outrage, put her on a paid leave of absence, hired our previous City Manager to come in and pick up the pieces for about six months. They did an investigation. They went back three months on video surveillance at the store and found that she had stolen at least [15 times] during that time.
So, the City Council, the Mayor, the same Mayor that told us to go out on the soapbox, have known the City Manager since she was born and had a personal relationship with her. [They] were very protective of her and made sure that she got her job back.
This was immediately after an election, and the City Charter requires that, after people are seated, you have to wait six months before you can recall them. So, the minute the six months was up, three of the five members of the Council–the Mayor who told people to find a soapbox and two Council members–were targeted for recall, and they were all recalled. That Mayor was recalled by a landslide. About three quarters of the voters wanted him out, along with the two other council members,
Sadly, though, what happened then was, instead of having a special election to replace them, they resigned in a domino [sequence] before the election results were made official, First one resigned, and then their replacement was created. Then another one resigned, and they appointed a replacement. So the citizens weren’t allowed to vote on who was leading their city.
These two things have cost the city probably a million dollars, and it’s also created issues with regard to our insurability. So those are the two things that were going on at the time. And I think [they were addressed in] multiple Soapboxes.
Diane: And your station was recently awarded the Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for a News Documentary titled “Corruption in Curry County Government?”. Is that tied to what you’ve just spoken about?
Lori: That’s different. We have three Curry County Commissioners; and, at the time, one of them accused another of corruption. I had personal knowledge that that person was kind of calling the kettle black. So that gave me permission to ask questions about corruption.
What we found was that there is a strong good-old-boys network alive and well in Curry County. [We found] that multiple elected officials were recruiting candidates, including our Election Supervisor. The person who was in charge of elections went out and recruited a Curry County Commissioner.
Diane: I know that KCIW is the only community radio station serving the Brookings-Harbor community, Curry County and beyond. Can you tell us more about these communities?
Lori: The City of Brookings has 6700 people. It’s part of Curry County, total population 23,000. We’re rural, remote, old and conservative.
We are in a very unique environment and ecosystem. It’s a beautiful geography. It’s the most beautiful scenery you’ll ever meet. Our water is incredibly clean. The Native people who have lived here for literally 10,000 years say that this is the only area in their memory that wasn’t glaciated back 10,000 years ago, [leaving the topography more dramatic and more severe].
The main industries were fishing and timber, and both of those industries are dying. I mean, literally. All the fish are dying. [We’ve] been in a drought for about 15 years, which means that we only got 60 inches of rain instead of the usual 120. This is where the salmon run. [But] we aren’t seeing as many salmon as we had. We haven’t been getting the crab harvest that we want. There’s been a green crab invasion. Our kelp beds have been decimated by purple urchins. We’re seeing fish here that usually are seen in Mexico.
It’s hard to make it here. We have a huge homeless population that’s not being addressed. Our county has no Emergency Management Department in place. We are operating at a deficit. And there’s just not a lot for people to do here. We have a community college campus that’s underused.
The County doesn’t have enough money to finance itself. What’s more, the County skews very, very old. I think the average age here is just shy of 60. And what you get with an old, poor, rural community is a lot of people who have medical needs that aren’t being served. There’s a lot of people who are on Medicaid and on Medicare. And a couple of Medicare Supplemental GAP Insurance providers have pulled out of Curry County because it’s just not efficient for them to be servicing these folks. We are far, far away from any good medical facility. We have a hospital here that is funded partially by the taxpayers. It’s part of a special tax district; but, because it’s so rural, it can’t get competent doctors. [And] it’s six and a half, seven hours to Portland or three hours over to Ashland.
Diane: And then there’s KCIW, a relatively young station, all run by volunteers, that’s done so much effective work. Candice, can you tell us about the station’s founding?
Candice: So this is a great story. Once upon a time, there were two people, Tom and Linda Boza, [who] were involved in the Democratic Party here in Curry County. And they noticed that there was no local media. We had The Curry Coastal Pilot newspaper; it was still fairly local; and the radio station in town, which is corporate-owned, had some fairly local management. But both of those were on the right side of center, and what Tom and Linda wanted to do was have a community radio station that gave all members of the community an opportunity to play with it, be represented and have something that was ours, a place on the airwaves. That was in 2013. So, they started working on it, got other people interested, filed the paperwork for a nonprofit and EIN.
I got involved [around] January of 2014. My dad was a disc jockey when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; so I used to visit and occasionally he’d let me go on the air. I had that feeling of belonging with radio.
At that point, we had six, maybe seven, Board members. I joined the Board. We set up committees so we could talk about programming, scheduling and [a] mission statement. And it just steadily grew. We went on the air, 24/7, in 2018, and that was a big deal. It was really remarkable. Before we even had our own office space, we had 30 or 40 people involved.
Diane: All of the events surrounding the creation of the Soapbox happened during COVID. That must have complicated your work.
Candice: COVID changed everything. We had to close our studio. This is a community of aging people. This has been a retirement community for a long time. So we had to err on the side of caution. We lost a lot of volunteers. We had to teach ourselves how to continue broadcasting from our computers at home. We’d taught ourselves every single aspect of running a radio station, and we had to teach ourselves again during COVID.
And we did. We stayed on the air 24/7, and that’s one of the ways that Pacifica has been such a bonus for us. We could get programming that was good programming. We didn’t have to make all of our own. That was our original thought, and we had a lot of local programming; but, when COVID hit, that ability was kind of truncated. We [still] did some interviews. I had two different interview shows, and I kept doing them from home. But, thank God for Pacifica because we had 24/7 to fill and certainly couldn’t do it with just local programming.
Diane: Has the station recovered in these past years?
Candice: Definitely. We’ve seen an increase in our volunteers. We’ve got 20, maybe 25, which is up from last year, when we had about a dozen. We were closed all of ’20, all of ’21, and really all of ’22, so coming back is a slow process Some people aged out. We’re getting younger faces. We still have several music programs that are local. We have The Insider Report every week, interviews [with] local people and talk about upcoming events and [another] live interview show. Podcasting is really important, and we also stream at this point, so, if you can’t get the radio signal, you can always log in and stream our shows. And all of our talk shows and interview shows are on our podcast.
Diane: And , Lori, how did you get involved with the station?
Lori: I’m a writer/producer with 45 years of television broadcast experience. My background is eclectic; I started in TV news but began freelancing in 1997. I have produced and/or written pretty much everything from commercials to infomercials, news stories to documentaries, corporate branding, educational videos and more.
I got involved in the station [in 2017] when I founded a local Indivisible group and met some of its volunteers. I’m the News Director.
Diane: So, as News Director, can you talk about what you have done with the news, how the programming has been developed and is being expanded?
Lori: We’re especially interested in growing our news organization. We just got a $12,000 grant [from the Roundhouse Foundation] to do that, and we are partnering with KFUG, another community radio station immediately to the south of us, in Crescent City, California. Brookings is located at the very southwest corner of Oregon, so we are the closest to California you can get.
What I bring to the table is that I’m a good storyteller. My background in doing documentaries has been really helpful here, because I’m able to put content into context. And what I’m hoping will happen with our new grant is that I can hire some high school and college kids and train them to be journalists, really train them to be journalists, to know what kind of questions to ask, to always attribute, to make sure that you double check your sources, the nuts and bolts of how to be a reporter. We’re hoping that will bring us some younger, enthusiastic volunteers; and, if we can do that, if we can bring clean, good, unbiased reporting to this community; it’ll help people.
For me, KCIW has been a true opportunity to bring people information, like that piece we did on corruption in the Curry County government. That was important. That was an eye opener for a lot of people here who didn’t know. The pieces that we did on the City Manager, those were important to the community.
Diane: And the Soapbox.
Candice: The award [too] makes the Soapbox all the more important, shining the light. Democracy dies in darkness.
Diane: And in silence.
All photos used with permission of KCIW radio.