EDITORIAL FOR JANUARY 21-23, 2010

I’m CAVE MANager Paul Lotsof.   Anyone who has rented property over a period of years can tell you what it is like to have a stinky landlord.     If you think you’ve had a stinky landlord, I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what a truly lousy landlord is unless you have rented property from the State of Arizona.

In 1998, this radio station was in need of a place to locate our transmitting facility including our tower.   We found a parcel of land  in a remote area  about six miles east of Benson and asked the Arizona Land Department if they would grant us a commercial lease.   We were told that the land we wanted was available but first we had to go through some formalities.   For one thing we needed to find an archaeologist who would write us a statement showing that those old beer bottles hadn’t been left there by Indians hundreds of years ago.    We also needed to take out a two million dollar insurance policy and we had to contend with Land Department employees who were scared to death that our tower might collapse and block a gravel road that hardly anyone uses.    Even though we knew that we couldn’t use the land until 2000, the Land Department insisted that we start paying rent as of 1998.  They even required us to immediately  pay extra for the right to use the gravel road that leads to the site.

Before we arrived, that four acre parcel was leased for cattle grazing and the state was getting less than a dollar a year for it.   But for our purpose, the rent went up from less than a dollar a year to $1,500 a year plus the cost of the  right of way.  Plus they even wanted a portion of our revenues. Although we clearly got the short end of the stick, we foolishly signed the lease, having no idea of things to come.

Our lease expired in September of 2008 and a couple months before the expiration date, I got a bill from the Land Department for the next year’s rent.    When I saw the new bill I laughed because I thought it was certainly a mistake.    The rent had gone up from $1500 to nearly $20,000 for one year for a piece of rangeland  in the middle of nowhere.    How could that be?

It turns out that in 2007, with no notice to any tenants, the Land Department  hired a company in San Diego to come up with a new schedule of rates for communications sites.   This radio station was one of 75 entities to be raked over the coals with these new rates which were based on what the State of California charges to cellular telephone companies who have towers along freeways in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco.   No wonder the new rates were outrageous.   How could a small town radio station in Arizona be compared with A T & T in Los Angeles?  The new rate schedule was crazy and the Land Department knew it.

We filed an appeal but first we went to two well respected appraising companies in Arizona and asked them what our four acre parcel was worth.   Both agreed it was worth a maximum of $4,000 if the department were to sell the land.    How could they charge $20,000 a year for something that’s worth only $4,000?    Even the Land Department’s extremely biased appeals board was willing to admit that the rent schedule was way out of line.   They reduced our rent to $7,200 a year.  Still an outrage.

Well, where do things presently stand?   The department still won’t issue us a new lease at the $7,200 rental rate and they are even threatening to evict us which would force us off the air.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this case is the fact that the Arizona Attorney General’s office is vigorously attempting to defend the Land Department’s outrages.   If I’m not mistaken, in the fall of 2008 it was our Attorney General,  Terry Goddard,  who attacked the payday loan industry for trying to get a spectacular return on the money it loans out.   It’s not okay for loan sharks to get a return of 500 percent a year but it’s perfectly alright for the Arizona Land Department to get  a 500 percent return on its investment each year.   Shouldn’t the state be setting an example of high standard of ethics?  How can Goddard condemn the payday loan industry while defending extortion by the state government?    Assuming that Goddard knows what his staff is doing, it would appear that he is a  hypocrite.

A year ago I met with some officials of both the Land Department and the Attorney General’s office.  I explained that we can’t meet their exorbitant demands and they could drive us out of business, put our employees out of work, and deprive the Benson area of its only source of daily news and information.   Their answer: We don’t care.  All we want is money.

In my opinion both the Land Department and the Attorney General’s office are both out of control.   Sure, the state needs money but the people of Southeast Arizona also need radio service.   A small town radio station can’t be expected to bail the state out of its financial crisis.

I’m CAVE MANager Paul Lotsof and the opinions you’ve just heard are mine and not necessarily anyone else’s.   If you’d like a copy of this editorial or you’d like to express your opinions, go to our web site: WWW.CAVEFM.com   .   That’s CAVEFM.com