JUNEAU — Public radio appears to have largely escaped the Alaska Legislature's budget-cutting ax this year, but a House-Senate conference committee Friday proposed to eliminate the state's $600,000 annual operating grant program for public television.

"This total elimination of funding for television came out of the blue," Bill Legere, the general manager for Juneau's KTOO station, said in a phone interview Friday.

He said the cut would hurt the state's four public television stations — in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Juneau, and Bethel — "pretty dramatically."

The proposed cut came at a Friday afternoon meeting of the conference committee, which is controlled by members of the Republican-led majorities in the House and Senate. The reduction isn't final, and minority Democrats could push for public broadcasting money in budget negotiations, but the proposal makes the cut less likely to be reversed.

The committee also decided Friday to preserve about $2 million in operating grant funding for public radio, rather than cut the money outright as the Senate's budget had proposed.

The $2 million, which was the figure budgeted by the House, is still a substantial reduction from $2.8 million last year, but stations have been preparing for the smaller cut, Legere said.

"I think people made the case on radio that it was very important to rural Alaska," Sen. Pete Kelly, R-Fairbanks, said in an interview after the meeting. He added: "TV, not so much."

For KTOO, the TV cut represents about $175,000 from its $1 million budget, and would probably eliminate programming from the national Public Broadcasting Service, like "Sesame Street" and "NewsHour," Legere said.

It would also reduce the budget for "Gavel Alaska," KTOO's public affairs program that covers the Legislature. And it would cut money for a fiber-cable connection between Juneau and Anchorage that KTOO uses to get its signal to stations around the state, Legere said.