Your daughter hits the first grand slam ever on the new Samohi softball field. You hear it live on the radio.

A startling solution for Santa Monica's affordable housing crisis is proposed at the Planning Commission. You hear it live on the radio.

Our School Board votes for a six month summer vacation starting in April. You hear it live on the radio.

It could happen. Well, except maybe that six month vacation.

All it would take is switching on a low-power radio transmitter and opening the microphone to the events and the people of Santa Monica. The community would instantaneously be better informed and connected.

Our Council has wisely invested in the future of municipal communication, just this week adopting a forward-looking Telecommunications Master Plan.

One of that Plan's public outreach focus groups sparked further discussion of a simple, inexpensive technology that reaches virtually every Santa Monican... radio.

With a tiny but transformative signal serving just our eight square miles of Santa Monica, we could turn the radios we already own into valuable civic tools. What could be more sensible?

Unfortunately, good sense doesn't always translate into federal policy.

Despite a mandate to manage the airwaves as a public resource, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has held that community-based microradio stations, in fact any station under 100 watts with original local programming, cannot be licensed.

Meanwhile, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to massive media consolidations. In the twenty months since the Act took effect, 4000 of our nation's radio stations changed hands, and over 1000 radio companies merged. An ever-smaller spectrum of views and opinions is available.

Who really owns and controls the public airwaves? The public doesn't seem to.

Monopolistic policy is being successfully challenged by Radio Free Berkeley, on the air in the Bay area for almost five years now and still successfully holding the FCC at bay in court. Over a thousand other microradio stations have sprung up across the country (www.freeradio.org), each providing very local audiences with local, not corporate, programming.

The big radio syndicates call these small stations "pirates," and through their sales association, the National Association of Broadcasters, raise smokescreen issues to protect corporate profits guaranteed by outdated licensing restrictions.

Interference with broadcast commerce is not a factor in Santa Monica. There is at least one spot on the FM dial where other signals cannot be heard anyway, and a deliberately limited Santa Monica signal would fade just beyond our city limits.

Arguments that radio transmitters must be operated by licensed professionals are outdated. Modern digital electronics are stable and self-adjusting. A low-power transmitter is far easier to operate properly than the average home VCR.

The FCC's rules were first written in 1934 to protect powerful regional signals carrying essential agricultural information to Dust Bowl farmers. Seven decades later, perhaps stinging from their Free Radio Berkeley court reversals, even the staid Feds are ready to acknowledge microradio's time has come.

Washington radio lawyer Harry Cole, writing in the current "Tuned In" trade magazine for broadcast managers, describes low-power radio status at the FCC as "preliminary green light."

If an ongoing court case suggests microradio is legal, and the federal government is about to codify that, why can't Santa Monica take the lead in putting civic process on the air?

A local microradio station, Free Radio Santa Monica, would become an indispensable community institution, making city government far more accessible.

Besides live and taped City Council, Board and Commission meetings, Free Radio Santa Monica could bring cultural, educational and other local events home to our seniors.

With will and organizing, we can make community radio a reality in Santa Monica.

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Michael Feinstein (mfeinstein@pen.ci.santa-monica.ca.us) is a Santa Monica Councilmember.

Kevin McKeown (kevin@mckeown.net) is a member of the City's Telecommunications Working Group.

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