An LPFM hopeful in Connecticut won’t get the chance to update its rejected application.
The FCC has denied a petition for reconsideration from a community group hoping to start a low-power FM station in Newington.
MCRALDIA first filed during the 2023 LPFM window. In its application, according to the FCC, MCRALDIA acknowledged that it did not satisfy the spacing requirements and instead submitted a contour overlap protection study.
The FCC dismissed its application earlier this year, saying it violated minimum distance separation rules. MCRALDIA then submitted a proposed amendment resolving the spacing issue and requested a waiver of the rule that prohibits new LPFM applicants from amending an application to cure a spacing violation.
Now the Media Bureau has rejected MCRALDIA’s alternative showing. “Nothing in the rules allows for the use of a contour overlap methodology and that an LPFM station cannot be authorized unless the minimum distance separations are met.”
The applicant told the FCC it wanted to provide targeted programming for a burgeoning Latino population that has no other Spanish public radio service. Newington is southwest of Hartford.
In the petition, Manuel Ramirez, director of MCRALDIA, also said the FCC LPFM application did not need to be so complex.
“The FCC FM translator short form, for example, is far more informal and more forgiving concerning technical errors. A community group does not have $5,000 to throw at an LPFM application, and then pay $7,000 to a D.C. attorney to defend an error for which all other broadcast services are allowed to make,” he wrote.
“The FCC’s expectations for flawless LPFM applications, under processing rules more draconian than other broadcast services, is unreasonable, unrealistic and counter to the intention of the LPFM application protocol the FCC envisioned.”
Certain aspects of the LPFM process “do not comport to the word and spirit of the directive of the original LPFM proceeding,” the group argued.
But in his denial letter, Audio Division Chief Albert Shuldiner said the commission will consider a petition for reconsideration only when the petitioner shows either a material error in the original order or raises additional facts not known or existing at the time of the petitioner’s last opportunity to present such matters.
The commission acknowledged that “an applicant for waiver faces a high hurdle even at the starting gate and must support its waiver request with a compelling showing.”
But the FCC says MCRALDIA’s waiver request did not demonstrate a material error in the dismissal letter or show special circumstances that would warrant deviation. Rather, the FCC said, the applicant had simply attacked the rule itself, which the FCC said had been duly adopted.
It concluded: “The other factors cited by MCRALDIA in support of its waiver request — namely, providing localized content and relating to short-spacing to an FM translator station — are also broadly applicable and therefore cannot be considered special circumstances warranting waiver.”
