Colorado Public Radio CEO Talks Layoffs, Podcast Host Dispute and New Building
Colorado Public Radio (CPR) is one of the state’s top news organizations, but it has become subject to outside media coverage this year, with layoffs, the purchase of a new building and a legal complaint from a former host.
According to CEO Stewart Vanderwilt, CPR is moving into a new era of public radio, with most of the recent moves made to strengthen CPR’s purpose of being a freely available source of news for the state.
“As we sharpen that focus, then you look at other things that you’re doing — and you have to look at them through the lens of, do these things enhance our ability to be a primary source of news for Colorado?” he says. “Do they contribute to our sustainability to be a primary source of news for Colorado, or are they ancillary to that?”
Financial sustainability has become a hot topic related to CPR. The organization’s income hadn’t outpaced expenses until 2023, according to IRS filings. On March 6, CPR announced it would lay off fifteen employees, mainly in its audio and podcast production studio.
But Vanderwilt says the decision wasn’t purely financial or directly tied to the listening numbers of its podcasts.
“There’s a numerical aspect of it, but it was really more about what we were producing and the resources that it took to produce relative to our news focus,” he says. “The switch is to move from producing limited series, topic-focused podcasts to podcast products that are at the intersection of daily news and long-form news storytelling.”
Podcasts will now be produced under the news division, with the aim of creating habitual listening rather than drawing in viewers for short runs on specific topics. Vanderwilt says CPR has rehired some workers who were laid off from the podcast studio, assigning them to work on podcasts for the newsroom — and it’s hiring for several other positions.
Still, the fifteen lost jobs represented the largest cuts to CPR staff in decades and came after the organization had gone from just under fifty employees in 2006 to over 200 as of 2022.
In an interview with Ryan Warner, host of CPR’s daily interview show Colorado Matters, Vanderwilt shared that sponsorship from national organizations dropped 40 percent in 2023. He said CPR had been consistently growing, but that “pretty much stopped” last year.
However, CPR’s February membership campaign was deemed successful and, given that the organization had just spent over $8 million on a new building, there are lingering questions about the layoffs.
New $8 Million Home
The purchase of CPR’s new building, located at 777 Grant Street, was funded by an unnamed donor who specified that the donation could only be used for that purpose. The donor paid $8.34 million in cash last August to purchase the building.
According to Vanderwilt, the new building is needed to provide a home for the radio signal, which is currently based in Centennial, and the newsroom, which has been located in Denver’s uptown neighborhood since 2019.
Vanderwilt came to CPR in 2018 and says it didn’t take long to realize that having the newsroom in Centennial was inefficient: People didn’t want to go there for interviews, and reporters had to constantly trek back and forth between the newsroom and Denver.
“It was absolutely necessary to get our newsroom closer to [Denver], but it was also not ideal to separate the organization into two locations,” Vanderwilt says.
CPR leadership was always interested in finding a permanent place where its workforce could be one again. Slowed by the pandemic, it landed on a final decision to purchase the new building.
Vanderwilt says the move will ultimately save CPR money, because it won’t have to pay rent and will no longer be on the hook for repairs and upkeep at the Centennial office, which requires a lot of maintenance. The new building also has two leasing tenants that are paying CPR rent.
Plus, it has 150 parking spots.
“We’re obsessed with parking, because for our staff, our staff gets free parking,” Vanderwilt adds. “When visitors come, visitors will have access to parking, and when you go to events in the central part of the city, a lot of people experience parking anxiety.”
There will be no such anxiety for events at the new CPR HQ. The 72,000-square-foot building was originally built for IBM in 1959 and once served as the home of the Denver Housing Authority. It was last renovated in 2020, but CPR plans more renovations before moving in. The current timeline is about two years: one year while CPR works on construction permitting to ask staff and audiences what they would like to see from the space, and another year for renovation construction.
The anonymous donation for the building’s purchase will not cover renovations, so Vanderwilt anticipates a need to raise additional funds to complete the project — and, as is the case with many news organizations, CPR isn’t exactly flush with cash.
CPR’s Financial Status
A nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, CPR’s tax filings are public record. The organization also provides annual audits to the public. Tax forms over the years show since Vanderwilt took over in the middle of 2018, expenses and income have both grown annually (with the exception of 2020 when its income slightly dipped).
In the past decade, however, CPR’s income last outpaced expenses in 2019, when it brought in $24.6 million and spent $19.4 million, and once more in 2023.
According to documents CPR has posted to its website, 2023 numbers show $36.8 million in revenue, including the $8.34 million donation, and $30.8 million in expenses.
In 2023, CPR spent a little over $2 million compensating officers, directors, trustees, key employees and highest-paid employees, and spent more than $20 million overall on salaries and other compensation for staff in 2023. It had nearly $4 million in fundraising expenses to make $29.6 million in contributions and grants. Vanderwilt’s base take-home pay in 2023 was $346,162; he also earned a $13,843 bonus.
However, employees report that raises and retirement-matching funds have been paused; Vanderwilt says CPR has “hit a ceiling” on membership numbers and donation dollar amounts.
“We’re not in decline, but we’re not growing at the rate that we were previously seeing,” he says. “That’s something that’s playing out across the country.”
CPR’s digital news consumption numbers are positive, however, and Denverite, the local news site CPR acquired in 2019, has “ongoing and continuous growth,” Venderwilt says.
“It’s tricky, because we’re not going to put up a paywall, so we have to deliver something that’s so valuable that the audience will contribute to it even though you can totally have it for free,” he says. “We’ve had great success on the radio with that, and we have to move that success to the digital experiments.”
Vanderwilt admits there’s a ceiling, and he says he’s approaching financial and strategical decisions through the lens of the organization’s mission and values.
Those values, listed on its website, are that CPR will be creative, curious, ethical, inclusive and respectful — but in charges against CPR filed by former host Vic Vela, those values are currently under the microscope.
Disability Discrimination Allegations
Vela worked at CPR for nearly a decade as a radio and podcast host before being fired in January. In a charge of discrimination he submitted to the Colorado Civil Rights Division and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on March 12, Vela alleges he was fired after asking for “support and accommodation” in his ongoing recovery from crack cocaine addiction.
He shared stories about that addiction, as well as about living with HIV, on the podcast he created at CPR, Back From Broken. In his complaint, Vela argues that CPR was happy to earn prestige from his addiction but was unwilling to do what it takes to help him with that disability when he needed it.
“Back From Broken was CPR’s longest-running narrative podcast and by far highest-rated podcast while I worked for the organization,” Vela wrote in his complaint. “In the last year, I began to openly discuss and request help for my addiction disability and attendant mental and behavioral health disorders. I had never done so before. I was naïve to think I would receive any support from CPR.”
Vela says that tension and stress in the workplace were causing triggers, and he worried he might relapse. He had suggested that Back From Broken be moved from the podcast studio into the newsroom because of conflicts with podcast studio leadership. He alleges that CPR did not try to provide any changes to the workplace that would help.
Vela says he told a vice president, “The last thing I want to do is go running to the crack house right now.”
“Instead of something, anything positive, anything compassionate, [the vice president] brought me in and basically accused me of using my addiction to manipulate them into getting something I want,” he tells Westword. “I can’t even remember the number of funerals I’ve been to. I don’t even remember how many times I’ve been in the back of an ambulance because of an overdose. The mere suggestion that I would use my addiction to my advantage is insulting.”
In addition to arguing that CPR would not make accommodations, the claim also alleges that CPR violated rules preventing the termination of employees who ask for accommodations for disabilities. In an interview with the Denver Post, CPR said Vela did not ask for any accommodations.
Vela’s lawyer, Iris Halpern, says it was incumbent on CPR to engage in a dialogue with Vela when he told management that he needed assistance related to his disability. He didn’t have to propose a solution, she argues.
“All that’s required is identifying a problem, identifying their disability and being open to starting a dialogue with the employer about how to reach an accommodation,” Halpern says. “The employer knows how they want to operate, knows what their resources are, knows all of their various moving parts in an organization that an employee is not necessarily apprised of or expected to know.”
What’s key, Halpern says, is that people don’t even need to use the word “accommodation” for legal protections to kick in. However, Vanderwilt says CPR handles dozens of requests for accommodation per year successfully, and if anyone submits a request, the organization figures out how support can be provided within the context of someone’s work.
Vela says he didn’t receive that support. He says he felt stonewalled and hurt by the lack of response from the organization, and that filing this charge was a continuation of his work to destigmatize addiction.
“It was so sad to post on Facebook the other day about what I’m going through, because CPR was a company that I loved for so long and a company that I gave my heart and soul to, and literally, it’s so hard and it’s devastating,” he says. “But you know what? You’ve got to stand up for yourself, and at some point you’ve just got to say, ‘This isn’t right.’”
CPR posted a message to its website about the charge.
“Colorado Public Radio prides itself as a place where all employees and guests feel safe,” the statement reads. “We do not tolerate hostile, abusive or discriminatory behavior. Recently, one of our on-air personalities was terminated due to behaviors not aligned with that culture. Although we offered them ample opportunities to change their behavior, they were unable to meet those expectations, so they are no longer with our team.”
The statement adds that any allegations that CPR acted inappropriately are false, but Halpern calls it “damage control.”
“This is nothing more than their attempt to do damage control in the public and start trying to come up with ways to excuse their conduct instead of grappling with the fact that what they’ve done may have violated the law,” she says.
However, Vanderwilt says that’s not the case. He says it was a fraught decision, but CPR determined it necessary to say something in response to Vela’s declaration of his charge.
“When someone is saying things in public that are either untrue and/or non-reflective of the experience that we are creating and expecting within our workplace, we have to answer that in some way,” he says. “We can’t just let it sit there, and we’re not going to engage in a back-and-forth in the public sphere.”
Additionally, Vanderwilt says Vela’s termination was not a financial decision and was not related to CPR’s changing podcast strategy. Legal investigators will look into the complaint and determine how it should move forward, which can be a slow process.
Future of CPR
As the legal process continues, CPR continues to search for more eyes and ears.
The organization is proud of its move to bring KRCC, the NPR signal in Colorado Springs and its newsroom, under its arm; KRCC is the number-one-rated news radio station in Colorado Springs. And although it shuttered KRCC’s music programming, CPR doesn’t plan to shut down its CPR Classical or Indie 102.3 stations.
“Music is a part of the experience in Colorado,” Vanderwilt says. “Each summer, Colorado is the home of more classical music festivals than any state in the country. … Bikes, bands, beers and dogs are part of the experience of Colorado, so having Indie is a way for us to connect with a core Colorado experience.”
Denverite isn’t at risk either, as Vanderbilt calls it “an essential part of our service” that gives CPR — which tends to use a statewide lens — a place where Denver is the focus.
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