Navigation

Paonia's KVNF Community Radio Will Lose Federal Funding

Paonia's community radio station KVNF in Western Colorado had some of its funding rescinded, and has to plan around the cuts.
Image: KVNF
KVNF is located in the center of Paonia's main street. Gil Asakawa
Share this:
Carbonatix Pre-Player Loader

Audio By Carbonatix

It's Olathe sweet corn season, and one of the most rewarding ways to eat this vegetable — besides just biting into a raw ear — is to take the kernels and make Sweet Corn Salad from a two-paragraph recipe provided by Tuxedo Corn, one of the largest and best-known growers of sweet corn in Colorado.

That recipe is included in Cookin' with Jazz, a compilation of recipes from farmers, local businesses and listeners of KVNF, a Paonia-based community station that began broadcasting in 1979, and whose signal reaches Delta, Montrose, Ridgway, Ouray, Lake City, Nucla, Norwood, Grand Junction and throughout the Grand Valley.

Cookin' with Jazz is named after the station's weekly show of the same name, which is hosted by Bob Pennetta, DJ REMAY and Lisa Jae on Friday nights.

"It's a really cool Western Colorado food record," says Ashley Krest, KVNF's general manager.
click to enlarge KVNF
KVNF's "Cookin' with Jazz" cookbook is a gift for donations to the community radio station.
Gil Asakawa
It's a record in a musical sense, too. Many of the book's recipes include a QR code that links to playlists curated by the station's personalities. The playlist for the very first recipe, "Pennetta Kick-Ass Granola," for instance, suggests musical accompaniment put together by station host Geitz Romo that includes Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Weather Report and more.

One recipe that doesn't have a QR code is still linked to music: Raspy-voiced British blues and rock singer Joe Cocker lived on the 243-acre Mad Dog Ranch in Crawford, just a few miles from Paonia, and his widow provided KVNF with the recipe for one of his favorite dishes, Joe Cocker's Shepherd's Pie. "Joe loved his shepherd's pies!" Pam Cocker says in the cookbook. "When we were home off the road in Crawford, I would make it for him once a week, and when he was on the road touring, he had his caterers prepare this recipe every show day!"

The book is chockful of other great recipes and food stories (and great music to hear while you make the dishes). You can cook up Shakin' Fried Chicken from Mountain Bird; Bison Short Ribs, Barley Risotto and Blue Corn Bread from White Buffalo Restaurant; and Vegetarian Lasagna with Tempeh from Donna Littlefield, which was served by the Bettys, a booster group, at the station's annual meetings back in the day.
click to enlarge KVNF
Ashley Krest, KVNF's general manager.
KVNF
The original cookbook is available in area bookstores for $35; it's also used as a gift to promise donations during on-air fundraisers.

But will the station be able to publish another edition? According to Krest, the project was funded primarily by one anonymous donor. But now she's worried about the future of the station and funding of community media in general, since Congress recently repealed $1.1 billion in already-approved funds for the Corporation for Public Media. CPB is responsible for distributing grants to public media stations, both radio and television; in 2026 there will be zero dollars allocated for those grants.

"What it means for KVNF is a concerted effort to find $161,000," Krest says, citing the amount slashed from the budget by the feds. "That's 20 percent of our annual budget last year. It's not a small amount, when you consider our service territory. I mean, we have 136,000 potential listeners in our service territory. We cover 10,000 square miles of very rural, under-populated places, and not your typical Colorado ski town, resort community, wealthy population."

So even if that big donation that paid for the cookbook comes in again, the funds might have to go toward operations. "We may now need to funnel special project funds like that toward filling this gap that has been created by the recent vote to take away and claw back our two years of appropriated funding," Krest notes.

KVNF is determined to find alternate avenues to keep projects going. "I really feel sad for the smaller stations, you know, like in Alamosa and Farmington, New Mexico," Krest says. "I'm not sad for KVNF. I mean, it's going to hurt and it's going to be hard, but we're here. We're an institution. We're not going anywhere. But I do see these smaller stations being challenged."