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FCC Move Could Shut Down High School Radio Station
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "This probably has been happening all along, maybe just not in my area. A broadcasting company bought an FM radio station in The Dalles, Oregon (a little hick town east of Portland), and wants to move it to a much choicer market in Seattle, Washington. The FCC has given the green light for the move. Problem is, the frequency in Seattle is being used by a station owned by a local high school, Mercer Island High School. The school has appealed, saying the decision ignores the FCC's own rules, and questioned the FCC's assertion that there's space available elsewhere on the Seattle-area radio dial. The school says the proposal is 'little more than an effort to migrate from a rural community to an extremely well-served urban area.' Critics of the proposal contend that the move is an attempt to tap the much larger Seattle radio advertising market."
The Dalles is 250 miles from Seattle and isn't a suburb of anything. It's 85 miles from Portland.
This isn't necessarily true. There are still a number of small owners in very small markets that make a decent business out of serving the community. Granted, you're going to hear high school sports, and "trade-e-o", and community bulletin board and all that folksy stuff, but isn't that what serving the community of license is all about?
Your comments that small communities had stations all to themselves isn't on point either. None of the reallocations I've been involved with had nothing to do with the smaller community not requiring the services of the station and everything to do with the new big owner (Cumulus, Clear Channel et al) wanting to push it into the market and require advertisers to buy multiple advertising packages on all stations.
Let me tell you, you'll never hear high school sports scores or community bulletin board on a Cumulus station. You'll hear rap music being piped to farmers, but nothing of community interest.
KMIH has been an exception to the FCC rules since 1978, when after being backed by NPR and universities operating larger stations in the dedicated "educational band" from 88.1 to 91.9 got the minimum power requirement for any station in that band to keep its primary status to be 100 watts. KMIH was lucky to have survived this timeframe... dozens of similar stations got bumped out of the band when larger stations filed for upgrades leaving the smaller station with nowhere to go other than out of business.
KMIH didn't meet its match until the 1990s when finally a larger station came forward with a plan that bumped them off their allocation. The FCC, however, was nice to them... they were given a gift in the form of being allowed to start a Class D allocation at 104.5. That represented an FCC rule being waived for them... Class D stations don't belong outside of the educational space. But, it came with a catch. Being a non-compliant grandfathered station, they were still stuck with "secondary status" which means any application for primary status would be able to bump them out of existance. The only thing that protected this station was the fact that the surronding 104.5 FM stations were owned by different owners, and none of them could really upgrade themselves without crashing into another commerical user who'd most definitely object.
Now, when LPFM came out... there was a chance for KMIH to get themselves out of the doghouse. They could have simply filed the paperwork to convert their Class D license into an LPFM1. It turns out, they were fully compliant already and they wouldn't have had to change their technical operations at all to change status, but it'd gain them the chance to become a primary user of the space they were hanging onto so that nobody could knock them out of it. They likely didn't do that because they didn't see this kind of problem coming, or if anybody raised the posiblity they weren't able to get the school to pay the legal fees to get the paperwork done.
So, when the surronding 104.5 FMs were able to create a plan that benefited all of them but left KMIH with no place to hide, KMIH's lease on life expired.
When you've got a secondary allocation, you've got to beware of those things possibly happening... clearly this high school operation wasn't and that turned out to be their undoing.