Revised LPFM-Translator Deal Draws FCC Notice, Lacks Wide Industry Support
The FCC is studying a revised radio deal between the Educational Media Foundation, which owns several hundred translators, and the Prometheus Radio Project, representing low-power FM (LPFM) stations, commission and industry officials said Friday. A memorandum of understanding between Prometheus and EMF seeks to sort out a long-pending pile of applications for FM translators and to give some rights to low-power stations looking to spectrum that full-service broadcasters had sought. Commissioners’ offices and career FCC staffers are considering the deal, as are radio industry bodies that haven’t signed on as the staffers had sought, commission and industry officials said.
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The agreement was changed in response to opposition to a version submitted to the commission in July. Media Bureau staffers had sought the changes before they would consider recommending that commissioners codify the deal as part of an order circulating on the 2003 auction, FCC and industry officials said. The bureau had recommended that commissioners reject the earlier deal (CD July 27 p5), spurring Prometheus and EMF to change it and seek support from others that had sought translators in Auction 83. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The new agreement partly deals with an objection by NPR, NAB and others that broadcasters seeking fewer than 10 new translators -- the limit for each applicant under the draft order -- would have to wait for stations because the bureau would have to process future LPFM requests before acting on some of those for translators. “Some such opportunity [should] be given to those FM translator applicants before the LPFM window suggested” in the deal opens, the new agreement said. Those with no applications in Auction 83 granted by the FCC should get the chance to “provide an engineering solution that would allow one of their pending applications to be granted prior to the LPFM window,” said the deal, filed Sept. 22 in docket 99-25.
The agreement also said a proposed cap of 10 translators may not work. That position drew support from Common Frequency, representing community and college radio stations, which last week asked the commission to change the cap to reflect the new deal. The agreement sought to reduce the chance that a successful applicant could flip a newly acquired construction permit, by not allowing a sale for two years after a translator begins broadcasting. NPR had said the earlier deal would “punish” those that made fewer than 10 applications in 2003 (CD Aug 12 p12). They would have to wait to get additional construction permits, because the deal envisions consideration of those applications being frozen. The public-radio broadcaster hasn’t taken a position yet on the new agreement, a spokeswoman said.
The agreement seems to be a good-faith attempt to deal with the commission’s qualms, but staffers don’t seem to have had time to decide how to proceed, FCC officials said. Prometheus and Educational Media showed good faith by quickly coming to the commission to discuss the proposal, instead of waiting about a month as with the summer deal, an official said. One issue may be whether the commission has authority to grant some of the LPFM licenses that the groups seek, getting priority over translators carrying programming from far away, without congressional approval of third-adjacent spacing, an FCC official said. The Local Community Radio Act (HR-1147), which passed the House, gives the commission that authority. The spacing would allow additional LPFM stations to be created in urban areas where most radio spectrum is already used, because a low-power outlet could operate three notches on the dial from a full-power station.
Senate passage of the bill is “very close,” and supporters keep pushing for it, said Associate Director Matt Wood of the Media Access Project, representing Prometheus. “It’s like a lot of pieces of legislation, both for communications and outside it,” in that “there are very few obstacles to doing it,” but other business on Capitol Hill gets in the way with little time left this Congress in the lame-duck session, he said. “We're certainly in active dialog with other groups and looking to address concerns” that arose over the earlier deal, he said. “None of them have expressed to us either agreement or disagreement with the new version of the agreement.”