Community station breaks ground on new home

WMNF's new 12,100-square-foot building is slated for completion at this time next year.

TAMPA - Former state Sen. John Grant was a blessing after all.

Staffers and volunteers for WMNF-FM 88.5 didn't know it then, but the Tampa Republican did them a favor in 1997, when he engineered the Senate's denial of a $104,000 state grant because the lyrics of an Iris DeMent song ticked him off.

The $122,000 that listeners donated to WMNF after Grant's maneuver was proof that they loved the community radio station enough to pay for its survival.

"We didn't know how deep our support was until the John Grant thing happened," said Rob Lorei, a WMNF founder, host and news and public affairs director.

"At that point, we realized anything was possible, that listeners would step up when we needed them."

On Saturday, after nearly four years of planning and pleading for financial support, WMNF broke ground on a $2.1-million building that's already more than halfway paid for with listeners' pledges.

Some 300 WMNF fans from across the Tampa Bay area gathered in the heat to celebrate the station's 24th birthday, and the new 12,100-square-foot home that is scheduled for completion by this time next year.

As eclectic and global as WMNF's music, Saturday's crowd was black, Hispanic, Asian and white. Toddlers mingled with seniors. They sported buzz cuts, ponytails and Afros. Some wore tie-dyed T-shirts with Birkenstocks; one man wore a kilt and a proud smile.

During a brief ceremony, longtime WMNF devotees cheered the pioneering station's unconventional course - nationally noted in an industry where play lists are set by corporate offices, and where communities often don't see themselves reflected in the chatter coming from their radios.

"We serve the community, not the advertisers or the bottom line," said station manager Vicki Santa. "And while we've grown over the years in what we do, we haven't changed who we are. We're still the same family.

"We just need a bigger house."

With six airy, light-filled studios and ample room for the station's century-spanning collection of records and CDs, the new building will be palatial compared to the rundown Hyde Park rental where WMNF stored its records in a bathtub.

Nearly a quarter-century after WMNF's fledgling broadcast on Sept. 14, 1979, the bathtub is history and the impressive music collection overflows from a narrow room inside WMNF's Seminole Heights home of the past 15 years.

But that's precisely the problem. Every shelf, closet, nook and cranny in this former house along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is spoken for. The 12 full-time staffers, 80 programmers and more than 250 volunteers jockey for studio time and desk space.

The conference room, filled with scrapbooks of live concerts and stacks of boxes, doubles as an editing studio and phone bank for money-raising.

In the tiny studio for the weekly Live Music Showcase, large bands play shoulder-to-shoulder. Eager volunteers are turned away because there's nowhere to put them. The new building, designed by the environment-friendly Indialantic firm Spacecoast Architects, will triple WMNF's space for storing music.

One of the six studios will be dedicated to live music performances, with room for an audience of 20. Training programs for teens and adults interested in the radio business will be expanded, and the popular 6 p.m. news hour that debuted in January can broaden its reach once volunteer reporters have more room to work.

"This new building is where the newscast can really take off," said Nell Abram, news co-anchor with Mitch Perry. "We can empower people from Wimauma, Sarasota, Pinellas County, to tell their stories."

WMNF has grown from Florida's first community radio station, with a small group of dedicated listeners, to a nationally recognized station with about 100,000 listeners a week.

The station survived its skirmish with Grant, who has since backed off his criticisms. It also got through a lightning strike that hit the primary transmitter, forcing an eight-day blackout in 1996.

Some staffers and volunteers have been here from the beginning. Today, former co-workers are married with "WMNF babies."

The first years at WMNF were spent canvassing neighborhoods for handouts to pay for operations; today, about 80 percent of the annual $1-million budget comes from listener donations and the rest from state and federal dollars. At 70,000 watts, the station's reach rivals some commercial stations.

Throughout the week, offerings range from Ani DiFranco and Joan Baez to Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters and Al Green. There's gospel on Sunday mornings, jazz and Native American music in the evenings. In the wee hours, there's hip hop, metal and funk.

On Saturday afternoons, Saturday Asylum host Diane Dill-Peterson plays everything from John Mellencamp to new songs from alternative groups whose names can't be printed in a family newspaper.

But the station also focuses on current affairs, through shows like Fresh Air, Democracy Now and Radioactivity. Lorei, host of Radioactivity, said WMNF clearly has a liberal spin. But its public affairs programs also encourage input from the other side, he said.

"We're sort of fringe," said longtime programming director Randy Wynne. "But we also keep a foot in the mainstream. Some community radio stations would never air news updates from National Public Radio, or play a commercial artist like Sheryl Crow. We do."

"We're not targeting a certain demographic. We're targeting people with eclectic, progressive views. People who value all the ideas and diversity out there."

- Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 661-2443 or svansickler@sptimes.com

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