How a secret plan to save KDHX’s broadcast license collapsed

Up until the day that lawyers for KDHX made their first appearance in bankruptcy court, Steven Fitzpatrick Smith and Jon Parker thought they might be able to work with the embattled community radio station’s leadership—to maintain not just local ownership, but its presence on the FM dial.

Smith (owner of The Royale Food & Spirits) and Parker (owner of Parker’s Table) had been quietly meeting with one of the station’s board members ever since spearheading a public letter in January 2024 calling for change, hoping to find common ground. And on March 16—after the station filed for bankruptcy but before the first hearing in court—the pair participated in a remarkable clandestine meeting aimed at finding a local alternative to K-LOVE, the Christian radio behemoth that the board is now eager to sell to.

At that time, KDHX’s bankruptcy filing had revealed that the station had recently taken out what’s called a debtor-in-possession loan. KDHX’s board had taken the $150,000 loan from K-LOVE, suggesting the Christian company was being set up to buy its broadcast license.

Smith and Parker desperately hoped to prevent that, and former Mayor Vince Schoemehl sought to facilitate a negotiation. He brought together the two businessmen, along with developer Jason Deem (who’d been working with Schoemehl to try to keep KDHX in local hands), KDHX board member Joan Bray, and KDHX board president Gary Pierson. 

At a March 16 meeting at the bar/key shop Clements Lock & Security, Smith, Parker, and Deem offered to loan the station $150,000, with the idea of swapping themselves in as the lender instead of K-LOVE. By making the loan, they hoped to buy time to raise enough money to keep KDHX in community hands, transfer the nonprofit to a transition board, and keep it on the airwaves. 

Smith, Parker, and Deem say they thought their proposal went over well. Smith and Parker both thought they had a deal and would need to get the money in place within 24 hours. Deem, who owns Clements, says the two board members and the three businessmen then had a drink together.

But the deal collapsed almost immediately.

The next morning, Deem heard back from Pierson. He didn’t want Parker and Smith involved, saying he blamed their letter for costing KDHX community support. 

Deem said OK, he would still get the money.

But an hour later, he says, Pierson called back to say it was too late to sub in a different lender. The board was sticking with K-LOVE. Deem says he was left with the impression that the negotiations were over.

Pierson confirms most of the sequence of events (although he takes issue with the idea that the meeting went well, saying that Smith and Parker acted like they were  “hostages”). He says he was only willing to meet with Smith and Parker because they needed to be “held accountable” for what they had done to KHDX, and that any deal needed to involve public condemnation of the letter they’d written, as well as a plan to address the harm done to staff and board members. He was frustrated by the duo’s lack of focus on that.

Says Pierson, “Steve or Jon did nothing to apologize or to even take back anything that they said. They didn’t want to talk about what they had done in the past to hurt KDHX, and all they wanted to talk about was a future that involved different management, period. That was all they cared about.” 

Pierson confirms that Deem offered to come up with the money without Smith and Parker, but says his hands were tied because the board had already brought in K-LOVE. Pierson says, however, that the door was still open if Deem could put together a much bigger package. 

Deem says that was never presented as an option. He says he was fully prepared to raise $3 million—until Pierson pulled the plug.

The last-ditch effort seems to have ended with bad blood on all sides. Pierson calls the negotiations a “pressure campaign” and goes so far as to accuse Deem and Schoemehl of making threats he felt were “very inappropriate, bordering on unlawful,” suggesting their closeness with Mayor-Elect Cara Spencer would give them leverage over him. Pressed for details, he says the threats were not specific: “It was more, ‘We will be in power.’” (Bray, for her part, says she was not present when any threats were made, and Deem says he never made any. Schoemehl declined comment.) 

As for Bray, she says she was frustrated by the negotiation’s focus on the station’s future, versus those who had been “wronged.” 

“We’re concerned about staff, we’re concerned about our debtors, we’re concerned about everybody who’s been involved with this that has potential to get burned,” she says. “We want to make them whole. And there was just none of that.” 

Asked if one issue was whether the board wanted to make sure the station’s controversial executive director, Kelly Wells, would get severance, Bray says, “The problem is, some of us don’t feel like Kelly Wells needs to be severed.” It goes unsaid that selling to K-LOVE will allow her to remain employed—even if there’s no longer a station on then airwaves for her to run. KDHX stands to receive $4.8 million for its assets if the K-LOVE sale goes through quickly, leaving the board with a significant amount of money after its debts are paid. 

Now Parker and Smith are among the many critics of station leadership seeking to block the sale. KDHX will be back in court on April 16, and a group of former DJs has hired a lawyer to object to the K-LOVE purchase. Smith and Parker support them. They believe the preservation of local ownership of the broadcast license is far preferential to a multi-million dollar sale that would enrich the nonprofit’s coffers. 

Smith is now calling for the station’s board members to step down and “allow a community-led transition to new leadership that reflects the true spirit of KDHX.” 

Of the board, Smith says, “The entire community has lost confidence in them. The board is not reflective of the community.” He adds, “There are alternatives. If they stepped aside, the money would flow in.”

Deem also echoes those calls. “A community radio station exists to serve the community,” he says by email. “KDHX has failed in their mission and the community has withdrawn support leading to a negative cash flow. Liquidating the primary assets (FCC license and tower) won’t bring back the community. To be sustainable KDHX needs new leadership and management. An institution with a $4.8 million asset and $2 million in liabilities is salvageable. It’s clearly in the black.” 

Parker’s Table was a longtime underwriter of the station. Parker says he’s worried about what it will mean to the community and to local music fans when its promotion of live, local music goes away. “Do you want only people who can afford national ad campaigns?” he says. “The DJs were always talking about who was going to play where that weekend. It wrecks the small business economy in St. Louis to no longer have that.”

More than anything, Parker and Smith want St. Louis to know that the fight is not over. They urge anyone who cares about maintaining the radio station as a community asset to support the LOVE of KDHX group of former DJs, which has hired a lawyer to intervene in the bankruptcy.

Says Parker, “It’s not a done deal.”