I was talking with my father-in-law recently and we got on the subject of WTVP. I asked him if he was going to pledge any money to help “Save Our Station.” No, he said. He likes public television, but since he subscribes to cable, he’s confident he’ll continue to get PBS programming even if WTVP goes dark. They’ll probably just pipe in a PBS station from Champaign or Chicago to complete their lineup.

What bothers him about WTVP’s plight is that he feels like we’re not getting the whole story. Somewhere, there’s a missing piece, because what we do know just doesn’t add up.

He goes through the numbers. They owe nearly $8 million, and they’ve been making all their payments — they’re merely in “technical” default of their loan because they didn’t reach predetermined pledge quotas. If the bank forecloses and liquidates WTVP’s assets, the bank will get a fraction of that — my father-in-law thought he heard them say somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. That means the bank would be losing roughly $6 million.

I used to work at CEFCU, and I can tell you that financial institutions have no desire to repossess cars or foreclose on houses. That’s the last thing they want, in fact. First of all, they won’t get all the interest you would have paid if you had kept making payments on the loan. Secondly, they have to unload the repossessed property. In doing so, they have to try to get enough out of the car/house to pay off the loan. Hopefully they’ll get that, but often they take a loss on part of it.

So here’s Bank of America — if they foreclose on WTVP, they’re not even going to get the principal of the loan recovered. They’re not going to get $8 million for a 30,000-square-foot commercial building in the warehouse district, plus equipment that was worth about $1.7 million when it was new two to three years ago. Not even close. So, if WTVP is making their payments on time, foreclosing over a technicality would appear to be an incredibly stupid idea. There has to be more to the story. There just has to be.

My father-in-law can’t figure out what the missing piece is. He speculates that it could be a number of things. Perhaps the bank has a willing buyer — someone who wants to acquire a TV license in Peoria. Maybe the bank knows some financial or management information the public doesn’t know about the station — information that gives them no confidence the loan will continue to be repaid no matter what happens.

Whatever the secret is, we probably won’t find out until after January 15, 2008 — the date WTVP’s loan comes due and Bank of America decides whether or not to shut down the station.