WXEL-TV (channel 42) is a PBS member television station licensed to Boynton Beach, Florida, United States, serving the West Palm Beach area. Owned by South Florida PBS, it is a sister station to Miami-based flagship and fellow PBS member WPBT (channel 2) and low-power station WURH-LD (channel 13). The three stations share transmitter facilities on Northwest 199th Street in Andover; WXEL's studios are located on South Congress Avenue in Boynton Beach. WXEL, WPBT, and WURH-LD are also broadcast by a translator in Fort Pierce.
The launch of a public television station to serve the West Palm Beach area gained steam in the late 1970s, after the Palm Beach County School Board abandoned its permit for channel 42. A group eventually known as South Florida Public Telecommunications won the construction permit in 1979 after a settlement with WPBT, which long claimed the Palm Beaches as part of its service area and had also sought channel 42. However, the construction process for what eventually launched as WHRS-TV was protracted, primarily by environmental issues with the tower site. WHRS-TV launched on July 8, 1982, and changed its call sign to WXEL-TV at the start of 1985; for its first 25 years, it was co-owned with WHRS (90.7 FM). Originally broadcast from the school board's former instructional television studios, WXEL moved to its present studios in 1990. It was still dwarfed by WPBT, which continued to have more members in Palm Beach County alone than WXEL had total.
In the early 1990s, an employee revolt that resulted in the resignation of the station president was followed by high turnover, a lightning strike on the transmitter, and financial issues. Barry University, a private Catholic institution in Miami Shores, successfully fought proposals forcing it to cede part or all of the WXEL stations to Florida Atlantic University and became the sole owner in 1997. Barry University brought much-needed financial stability and led the digitalization and professionalization of WXEL. However, after a change in president, Barry started what would be an eight-year-long station sale process that ended with the station's president leading a group to buy WXEL-TV.
In 2015, WXEL merged with WPBT, its longtime competitor for viewers and members. The station's spectrum was sold at auction in 2016; as a result, WXEL-TV is broadcast by WPBT from its transmitter, which is located south of the West Palm Beach market.
History Permit fight and construction Proposals for educational television in Palm Beach County first were floated by the Palm Beach County School Board in 1971, when a study was authorized to investigate the viability of such a station to operate on West Palm Beach's reserved channel 42. A construction permit application was filed that December with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but the school board never moved to provide the funding necessary for matching grants that would have financed construction. In 1972, a new superintendent came into office and argued that the board had no money to start a station and no business running one.
In 1975, a group known as Friends of Public Broadcasting formed to provide support for WHRS (91.7 FM), which the school board had previously founded. The group commissioned a study that found that 68 percent of Palm Beach County households could not receive Miami's channel 2 and there was enthusiasm in the county for a possible separate public station. In 1976, the school board signaled that it was willing to relinquish its channel 42 permit to make way for an application from the private group. Incorporating as the Public Broadcasting Foundation of Palm Beach, the group offered to take control of the county's neglected instructional television setup in exchange for the right to broadcast programs into the county schools. The proposed station and another outlet intended for Fort Pierce were seen as completing a statewide public broadcasting setup.
The owner of WPBT, the Community Television Foundation, filed an application for channel 42 on June 22, 1978, having previously investigated setting up a low-power translator on channel 42 before the Public Broadcasting Foundation filed its application. WPBT expressed its desire to continue serving its station members in Palm Beach County. One columnist for The Palm Beach Post, Alan Jenkins, wondered if the creation of a separate station merited the expense, particularly given the existing presence of WPBT among cable households. The competing applications led to a delay as the FCC adjudged the proposals; the Public Broadcasting Foundation also lost a federal grant because of the delay and incurred $67,000 in legal fees.
The dispute was settled in July 1979. The Public Broadcasting Foundation became the sole applicant for channel 42, while the Community Television Foundation received the Public Broadcasting Foundation's backing for a possible public station in Fort Pierce. In September, the FCC granted the construction permit, and the station received state and federal grants for construction costs. The station would broadcast from a tower in Greenacres City. This tower was being built by Malrite Communications, which would use it to broadcast a new commercial station, WFLX.
On July 1, 1980, the Public Broadcasting Foundation took control of the county's instructional television studios on Congress Avenue in Boynton Beach. Fundraising activities moved slowly at first but eventually perked up. However, foundation officials struggled to convince viewers that the station, which was assigned the call sign WWPF, would provide a different service from WPBT.
WWPF, which was already sometimes known as WHRS-TV in the local media even though the call sign did not formally change until May 24, 1982, intended to begin broadcasting on July 1, 1981, even though its hope to do so was threatened by cuts to public broadcasting made by the new Reagan administration. However, by May, the tower still had not been constructed because environmental approval was still pending on an access road to the tower site. One of the first board members and major fundraisers for the station, Victor Farris, resigned before going public with his concerns that WHRS-TV would never be built and calling the board members "dreamers". By that time, the projected start date had already slipped to the summer of 1982; Malrite was still negotiating with the Florida Audubon Society, a situation that persisted into early 1982. Founding board director Sam Marantz would later regret not using the Audubon Society to coordinate the five environmental agencies whose permits were needed and thereby reduce what turned out to be 14 months of startup delays.
The lengthy delays in station construction took a toll on the Public Broadcasting Foundation's finances, which were propped up by the operation of WHRS radio. Marantz, who had been a key figure in the incipient stages of the project but left in 1980, was reelected as board president in April 1982. He immediately cut 20 percent of the full-time staff and announced he would seek emergency loans to make payroll; however, this proved to not be necessary. He criticized the board as "self-serving" and noted a rift between the board and the full-time staff. However, the station was nearly complete.
Early years The WHRS-TV transmitter was activated for the first time on June 23, 1982, with test signals. The station aired its first program, Sesame Street, on July 8. The first locally produced program, Financial Freedom with Jim Barry, debuted on August 12; it was based on the asset manager's book of the same title.
In January 1983, Lewis M. "Dusty" Sang became the new chairman of the station licensee, which had become known as South Florida Public Telecommunications. Sang devoted most of his energies to righting the ship at the young WHRS-TV by increasing fundraising efforts and community programming. On January 1, 1985, WHRS radio and television became WXEL and WXEL-TV; the new call sign signified "excellence" as a goal of public broadcasting. Sang also cited shedding the association of HRS with the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services and increasing identification with the stations. Sang had gotten the idea for using WXEL from the station's program manager, who had once worked at a Cleveland television station known as WXEL in the 1950s. In 1985, the station began morning broadcasting for the first time, having originally been an evening-only operation that later added afternoon telecasts.
Despite not being owned by the school board, WXEL radio and television continued to share the school board's office space in Boynton Beach. In 1985, the stations received a $3.2 million grant from the state of Florida to build a studio and offices somewhere in central Palm Beach County. The city of Boynton Beach deeded South Florida Public Telecommunications land elsewhere along Congress Avenue in 1986; Protests from nearby homeowners over a microwave tower at the site led to delays; ground was broken in May 1988, but during the process, the original general contractor and the insurance company associated with the work both defaulted, the latter resulting in a month-long halt to construction. The stations finally moved to the building in February 1990.
The relationship between WXEL and WPBT continued to be frosty, as the two outlets continued to see each other as competition. WPBT dwarfed WXEL in public contributions ($3.79 million to $374,000), income ($8.5 million to $1 million), and employees paid more than $30,000 a year (73 to 6). WPBT refused to sell WXEL its Nightly Business Report; the general manager of WPBT told The Palm Beach Post, "Does Burger King sell their hamburgers to McDonald's?" WXEL considered that the agreement that led to its construction permit—and a promise not to pursue channel 21 in Fort Pierce—was voided when WPBT lobbied for cuts to state funding. An affiliate of Palm Beach Atlantic College eventually obtained the channel 21 permit, for which WXEL at one point entered into negotiations to acquire. When negotiations with WXEL fell apart, the college began talking to WPBT, which led to criticism not only from WXEL but from others in West Palm Beach television. The general manager of WPTV wrote the president of Palm Beach Atlantic College in disapproval, stating, "It appears the Miami outlet's sole purpose is to maintain its fundraising trolling in the more affluent communities in the West Palm Beach/Fort Pierce market." Had WPBT been successful, WXEL would have been sandwiched between two signals from its competitor, one to the north and the other to the south. However, the WPBT effort also fell through; unbeknownst to the Community Television Foundation, most of the equipment used in operating WTCE-TV had been sold to the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) for capital, and in order to settle the debt with TBN, the college was forced to sell the station to the religious broadcaster.
The early 1990s saw the station expand its over-the-air coverage to the north. In 1992, it announced it would build translator W44AY, rebroadcasting WXEL from the former WTVX transmitter site on the St. Lucie–Indian River county line to some 200,000 people that had no over-the-air public television service. The translator was in service by June 1994.
1992 employee revolt