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Over their toast and coffee, Southwest County residents can sometimes flick on the television and watch a high-speed car chase from the night before in Inglewood. But if they want to see what the traffic is like between Southwest County and San Diego, they're likely to be disappointed.

Padres fans can watch their team play the Dodgers. But the Mets? Fuggeddaboutit.

And what about the Gulls or the Storm? Drop the remote and reach for your keys.

A Riverside-based investment company wants to plug these holes in local life, and make a buck while doing it. Page Enterprises, which owns several small strip malls in the Inland Empire and Las Vegas, is bringing a TV station to Southwest County. Company officials aim to start broadcasting from Temecula in mid-September. Within a few years, they want to have their own channel on a local cable network.

Company executives and elected officials in Southwest County say the local broadcasts will connect Southwest County residents with news and events in their back yards and in the not-so-distant San Diego metro area.

And, they say, it could be the first step toward a separate broadcast market for the vast area that lies between Pomona and Palm Springs. Kevin Page, the station's chief executive, complains that most of the Inland Empire's 1 million households are 50 to 100 miles from the stations that generate the area's television news.

"It really puts a choke on localism," Page said.

Page Enterprises has operated a station in Hemet since 1996, broadcasting as Channel 27 to televisions there. Until last year, its programming came mainly from the national Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Pages' denomination.

The station costs little to run, but generated virtually no revenues, since it didn't accept advertising until April 2004. Page Enterprises covered the station's costs with profits from the company's commercial real-estate business and the occasional donation, Page said.

The station's newscasts, oriented toward Hemet and Temecula, have also become available Monday through Thursday on Adelphia Cable Channel 10.

The company is spending several hundred thousand dollars to move KHEM's headquarters to an office building in Temecula's Rancho California Business Park. Behind the building's black glass last week, Page and the station's general manager, John Roberts, met with suppliers and discussed plans to outfit the building's studios over the next several weeks.

On Thursday, Roberts' black poodle, Haji, had free run over 11,000 square feet of dusty gray industrial carpet. The office space belongs to a Temecula-based packaging company, which still uses the much larger warehouse in the rear part of the building.

Page's initial investment is a move to serve the demands of a growing population that is chafing at the fringes of the Los Angeles broadcast area. Roberts said he hopes to add another 12 employees to his paid staff of 16.

Southwest County has become increasingly important as a housing market for San Diego County workers, who return home to television news and other programs that are aimed mainly at Angelenos.

And as retailers, hospitals and other organizations rush in behind the housing boom, Page's move also represents a business decision to cash in on a widening range of potential advertisers here. The station expects to become profitable by next July, Roberts said. Already, Southwest County businesses are buying spots during the eight half-hour news programs cablecast by Adelphia in Temecula and parts of Murrieta.

"If they're interested in buying time on a 30-minute news program out of Hemet," Page asked rhetorically, "what are they going to do once there's a real news station here?"

City officials in Southwest County have also gotten behind Page's efforts, meeting regularly with county Supervisor Jeff Stone. Doug McAllister, a Murrieta councilman, said Page approached him late last year with the proposal for the new station. The officials' longtime concerns included public safety: When wildfires or other calamities break out, can nearby residents count on Los Angeles stations to warn them in time?

"If we have a good local station, that's what people are going to watch," McAllister said.

KHEM's evolution began in April 2004. The station hired news staff and began generating news reports from Hemet and Temecula. It ran two newscasts each weeknight, broadcasting them in the Hemet area and running them on Adelphia's cable network in Hemet, Temecula and parts of Murrieta.

KHEM boosted its signal in August. When the 10kHz signal starts broadcasting from Temecula, it will reach Lake Elsinore and toward Sun City and Menifee, Page said. A stronger signal would require the approval of federal regulators, a complicated matter.

The station will drop its call letters for KZSW, a recognition of its new home. As part of the station's remake, Page is stepping aside as the station's general manager and has hired Roberts, who recently managed two local radio stations for national giant Clear Channel Communications: 94.5 KMYT, which plays light jazz, and classic-rock station 103.3 KTMQ.

Page and Roberts said they're nearing deals with the San Diego Gulls, a minor-league hockey team, and the San Diego Riptide, an arena football league team. They were ironing out the details of a lease for the building last week.

Managers are also planning to air programming produced both in-house and outside. Some programming will be civic-oriented; other shows will be for entertainment. Page said he's hoping to air talk shows with elected representatives and programming produced by local churches and civic groups. Roberts said he's also considering syndicated sitcoms that are old enough to be had cheaply to help fill out the programming. High-school sports will also be in the mix, they said.

National programs ---- even newer syndicated programs ---- are out of the question, though. Los Angeles-based stations almost always have exclusive rights within their local area, which includes Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, most of San Bernardino County, and western Riverside County. Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, which are walled off from broadcast signals by mountains, are in a separate area.

These "designated market areas" and the 208 other markets around the country are determined by Nielsen Media, a national research company. For Stone and city officials in Southwest County, the eventual goal is to establish a separate market.

Such a move would face economic and political opposition from Los Angeles stations, and probably wouldn't happen without legislation, Page and McAllister said.

Roberts, as KZSW's general manager, said the first goal is to expand Southwest County news and get other local programs off the ground.

Initially, only the two nightly newscasts, Monday through Thursday, will be available to both antenna users and Adelphia subscribers. The station's round-the-clock broadcasts will be available only to the 10 percent to 20 percent of households that have antennas.

To get around that problem, Page said he's prepared to hand out as many as 80,000 palm-sized antennas that viewers can plug in to the backs of their television. Page hopes that Adelphia, when faced with competition from such a widely viewed broadcast station, will bring the station on as a full-time cable channel, multiplying the viewership of the station's programming still further.

"This whole strategy is based on the 24/7 television model, not a half-hour on Adelphia," Page said. "The ad dollars are here to support a local station."

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.