On February 1, 2022, KPCQ-AM in Chubbock, Idaho, near the city of Pocatello, celebrated its fourth birthday under the ownership of its current licensee. But, future birthdays were placed in doubt after Media Bureau Chief Holly Saurer, who was just settling in to her role, sent the station owner a Hearing Designation Order and Notice of Opportunity for Hearing.
Given all of the attention to the Hearing Designation Order sent by the FCC’s Administrative Law Judge to Standard General, TEGNA and Cox Media Group to best answer lingering questions about that deal, did this HDO result in the death of a media property?
No. In fact, KPCQ’s life has been assured, but with conditions.
That’s good news for Ted Austin, who operates KPCQ licensee Snake River Radio.
As ALJ Jane Hinckley Halprin explained in a decision distributed late Thursday by the Commission, the HDO designated for hearing a determination of whether the license for KPCQ was automatically cancelled pursuant to section 312(g) of the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. § 312(g).
The reason: silence that lasted for more than 12 consecutive months.
A minimal record of operation for KPCQ, outlined below, was shared in the HDO in February 2022:
This shows that KPCQ was apparently silent for 80% of its license term. However, Snake River says that, on June 26, 2019, it filed a notice of resumption stating that KPCQ had resumed operation using its licensed facilities on June 15, 2019. “This discrepancy is not mentioned or explained in the exhibit to the Renewal Application,” Saurer noted.
However, that by no means meant a simple clerical error was made, in Saurer’s view.
“Because it is improbable that SRR was able to resume operation with the station’s licensed facilities after dismantling its tower, we are designating an issue to determine whether the station’s license expired pursuant to section 312(g) of the Act because the station failed to operate with its authorized facilities for more than 12 months,” she explained.
Austin in May 2022 responded to the HDO by asking that the Commission “delete all issues” related to the Order; Halprin said no, even as Austin contended that “the perception that the station did not operate at its authorized facilities for more than 12 months was due to a misstatement by counsel, and that the station had operated at its authorized facilities during the time in question.”
While Halprin admitted that Austin and Snake River “may have a plausible explanation” for the discrepancy, a full hearing proceeded, stretching more than 10 months. The Enforcement Bureau examined documentation, interviewed witnesses, and investigated Snake River’s claims.
Halprin said, “If, after conducting such an investigation, the Enforcement Bureau is willing to settle this matter, that is the Bureau’s prerogative.”
Guess what? Halprin’s April 6 ruling states that Snake River Radio “has proved by a preponderance of the evidence that the station was not off the air for more than 12 consecutive months.”
This means KPCQ will be allowed to remain a licensed station, acquired by Austin in 2018 nearly three years after the transaction was first announced. It was last reported to have had a Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) format.
But, as first reported on Friday by Streamline Publishing’s Radio Ink, “mitigating factors exist to find that a one-year renewal of the station’s license pursuant to section 309(k)(2) is in the public interest and constitutes an appropriate sanction.”
Those factors and extenuating circumstances point to information suggesting KPCQ had been failing when Snake River acquired it. Because of the fiscal challenges with former owner Inspirational Family Radio Inc., headed by President Beth A. Schafer, the former licensee allowed the lease for the KPCQ tower site to lapse. The site owner did not continue the month-to-month arrangement, and construction activity twice destroyed the antennas Snake River had been using to broadcast. Snake River argued that this left the problem mostly outside its control.
However, Halprin pointed to a recent FCC statement which states, “[Tower] site-related matters are considered within a licensee’s control because the licensee chooses the site” raises the question of whether the Commission would take the same position with respect to granting renewal.
— Additional reporting by Cameron Coats
