Licensed to non-actual locations

[Scott Fybush]

Dave Doherty wrote:

> CDPs were meant to add substance to concentrations of population that 
> were not incorporated in the traditional sense. They are accepted by the 
> FCC as licensable communities without any further documentation. If the 
> community is not a CDP and is not incorporated, then there are 
> qualifications hoops to jump through - local governance, local school 
> district, local police force, band existence of local businesses all 
> help to establish a place as a licensable community.

I'm not sure I agree that the FCC accepts a CDP as prima facie evidence 
that a community exists for allocations purposes. My understanding (and 
I am not a communications lawyer, or any type of lawyer at all!) is that 
further documentation is still required, but that the presumption is 
heavily in favor of licenseability if a community is a CDP.
> 
> The peak of Mt. Washington is in Sargents, but the slopes include 
> Crawfords (where the base station is located), Beans, Chandler, Thomson 
> and Meserves, Cutts, and arguably several others. I doubt anybody 
> actually lives in any of these "towns," and not one is included in the 
> census places table. I am totally guessing here, but I suspect that 
> these "towns" represent the original landholdings granted by the King or 
> the territorial Governor way back when.
> 
> So, could you license WHOM today to "Mount Washington?" Probably not. 
> Gorham would a piece of cake, though.

The standards were much, much looser in the very early days of FM. I'm 
pretty sure that the Yankee FM on Mount Washington was actually licensed 
as a "Boston" station at one point. I think the Mount Mitchell FM in 
North Carolina may have been licensed as "Charlotte" around the same time.

What's interesting to me is that the "Mount Washington" COL was allowed 
to be reused when the current FM signal up there was licensed in 1958. A 
few years later, and it would have to have been licensed somewhere else 
- probably to Poland Spring, Maine, where its sister TV was licensed. As 
WMTW-FM, it must have had a main-studio waiver to put its studios first 
in Poland Spring and later in Portland, right?

> Tuck showings are intended primarily to establish that a community is 
> not a made-up entity within a larger community. It works mostly to 
> prevent wholesale moves of stations from small communities to large 
> metros. When you move a station to a new community, you can't propose to 
> serve more than a particular percentage of any recognized urbanized 
> area. As an example, you could not propose to move a station from, say, 
> Provincetown to Norwood, if the station would serve more than half the 
> Boston urbanized area.

That's not quite my understanding. The "more than half the urbanized 
area" test is what triggers the Tuck analysis. If you're proposing to 
move a station from outside an urbanized area to an urbanized area (by 
way of a COL change), the Tuck analysis is required when that 50% 
threshold is reached. It's a multi-prong test that looks at factors like 
whether the proposed COL has its own media (I've seen even local 
websites cited to meet that prong of the test), whether people who live 
in the community also work there (as little as 10% can fulfill that 
criterion), whether there are businesses that identify themselves by the 
community's name, whether the community has its own phone book, post 
office, local fire/police/schools, and so on.

One could argue, with quite a bit of validity, that the Tuck tests don't 
really accomplish what they were meant to do (as Dave so ably lays it 
out above) - I'd have no problem writing a convincing Tuck analysis that 
would demonstrate that Cambridge, for instance, is a community separate 
from Boston for allotment purposes. (Actually, that one's almost a 
gimme, since the FCC has a presumption that any community that already 
has stations licensed to it is therefore a licenseable community.)

The one I've always wanted to try is Brooklyn - except for the fact that 
it's governmentally part of New York City, it meets all the Tuck 
criteria and then some. (And I could probably spin the existence of the 
Kings County government and the Brooklyn borough government, not to 
mention noncomm WKRB-FM Brooklyn, to get over that hump!)

s