Texas Watchdog on the sale of Houston’s KTRU

The Texas Watchdog combed through the paper trail on the sale of Rice University’s KTRU to Houston’s KUHF, and reported on broker’s fees and efforts to keep the deal secret. The University of Houston, which has a $9.5 million deal to acquire Rice’s student-operated KRTU pending at the FCC, signed a $200,000 contract to retain Public Radio Capital as its broker in June 2009, months after it had gone through a round of painful budget cuts, according to this report by the Watchdog‘s Steve Miller. Efforts to conceal the formative deal from public meeting notices of the University of Houston’s Board of Regents may have violated Texas Open Meetings Act, he reports. Some 250 pages of documents related to the transaction are posted here.