Nearly 10 years ago, an FM facility seeking to serve African American consumers in the Gainesville, Fla., market, downgraded from a Class C3 facility to a Class A FM licensed to Cross City, Fla. It was part of a plan put together by a licensee that in October 2012 agreed to purchase the station for $325,000. But, something went awry and the new facility was never built. As such, in April 2016 the station’s license was cancelled — something then-Commissioner Mignon Clyburn concurred with, as “spectrum squatting” is a no-no, even in cases where diversity of voices is at stake.
The licensee didn’t give up. However, the Audio Division Chief at the FCC has dealt another blow to William Johnson and his Florida-based licensee.
Johnson leads Urban One Broadcasting Network, which is not to be confused with the publicly traded Urban One, led by Alfred Liggins III.
Johnson’s entity on June 17, 2021 submitted to the Media Bureau a petition for declaratory ruling seeking to amend a December 2016 Petition for Reinstatement of Construction Permit. This 2021 request saw Johnson ask the Commission to reinstate his company’s forfeited permit to construct an FM radio station at Cross City and to grant an 18-month construction period. To to that, the FCC would need to remove 97.7 MHz from its table of allotments from the inventory of Auction 109.
Audio Division Chief politely denied Johnson’s petition. Why? The tale dates to early 2013, when his entity closed on its purchase of the former WURB-FM 97.7 in Cross City, Fla. from Alex Media Inc. Then, it had a 25kw signal, but no coverage of Gainesville. By reducing power to a Class A facility and putting the tower in Fort White, Fla., WURB could reach Gainesville as an Adult R&B FM. The Steve Harvey Morning Show was already in the works as the syndicated wake-up program.
While Johnson hoped to have WURB on the air by the end of 2013, it was still not on the air by the permit’s expiry date of July 2014. Simply put, the CP was put into effect by Alex Media, and Johnson’s time to act was predicated on that CP’s time frame.
Complicating matters: an informal objection from Suncoast Radio Inc. pertaining to a failure of compliance by Johnson’s group of section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Several back and forth applications and requests then transpired between the FCC and Johnson. Ultimately, the FCC’s dismissal of a petition for reconsideration led Johnson to file a Petition for Review with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This came on August 15, 2016.
The court dismissed the case in August 2017. With the appeal process all but exhausted, WURB’s call letters were deleted by the FCC. Then came Auction 109, and 97.7 MHz’s availability in Cross City.
That’s what prompted Johnson to attempt to get WURB back from the dead. His reasoning? The recent reinstatement of the eligible entity policy following the Prometheus v. FCC Supreme Court decision.
There’s just one problem, Al Shuldiner, the Audio Division Chief, stated. “The eligible entity policy was not in effect on July 21, 2014, when the construction permit was forfeited as a matter of law — on that date the station was not ready for operation, nor had Urban One filed an application for license, and the staff had denied its modification application … The 2021 Prometheus Supreme Court Decision, which forms the basis for Urban One’s most recent request for declaratory relief, did not change the fact that all matters surrounding the station were final in 2017, long before the Supreme Court reinstated the eligible entity policy in 2021.”
Fast-forward to January 14, 2022, when Johnson filed a Petition for Reconsideration. With no new facts or circumstances justifying reconsideration, Shuldiner said no.
Regarding equity arguments presented by Johnson, Shuldiner rejected Urban One Broadcasting’s claim that the Commissoin must reinstate its construction permit based on “equity and fairness.”
Shuldiner said, “Apart from contradicting the history of Urban One’s Cross City
construction permit, its appeals to ‘equity and fairness’ are nothing more than an attempt to relitigate the Modification Application, the Commission’s denial of which has been final for years … Having unsuccessfully sought Commission and court review of these contentions, Urban One may not simply re-argue the points, years later, by labeling them an appeal to ‘equity and fairness.’”
