Latin Broadcasting Company’s tower in Dallas Center IA had both the FCC and FAA up in arms, due to the fact that its lights weren’t working properly. But there was more – for instance, it came as news to the FCC the Latin Broadcasting Company even owned the tower.
The major problem was the lack of red obstruction lighting, which should have been reported to the Federal Aviation Administration and to the FCC. In fact, an FCC agent had a local law enforcement official visit the site, and the official discovered 7/13/12 that the entire top half of the tower was unlit.
The FCC agent confirmed the issue 7/19/12, and the next day arranged a meeting with what was expected to be a representative of Perry Broadcasting. It was then learned that the tower had been sold to LBC back in 2008.
The bookkeeping on the situation was inadequate – LBC said there were no reports of outages from 1/1/12 through 7/20/12, but also said that an operations manager attempted to report an outage to the FAA but failed to properly follow website prompts written in English.
The penalties: $10K for the dangerous lack of tower lighting; $3K for failing to report the change in ownership, and an additional $1K for the long duration of the failure to report the change in ownership; for a total of $14K.
