Recovered 1955 Radio Program Club Star Way WWNH Rochester

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Fri, 6 Oct 2017 08:39:08 -0400 (EDT), Rob Landry <011010001@interpring.com> said:

> WWNH was never granted a license to cover. The construction permit ran 
> out, and the station was allowed to stay on the air under an STA, but no 
> license was ever issued. The Commission seems to have decided to ignore 
> any application to which Mr. Dodge was a party, accepting it for filing 
> but never acting on it.

The FCC has a "red light" process for applications from licensees with
pending enforcement actions which puts all application processing on
hold (but still allows them to make the applications that are legally
required, since all the deadlines are for date-of-filing, not
Commission action).  Licensees can apparently now view their "red
light/green light" status through the electronic filing system --
apparently in the past it was only available by directly asking the
FCC.

NERW discussed the Dodge case /in extenso/ over the past couple of
years, since he had to come to an agreement with the Commission in
order to sell some of his translators during last year's "AM
revitalization" window.

It's important to remember that the FCC, established under the
Communications Act of 1932, does not follow the standard structure of
independent agencies under the Administrative Procedure Act, and in
particular, the FCC can act either as a rulemaking body (through a
version of the notice-and-comment procedure) *or* as a tribunal
(through quasi-judicial procedures), and the Commission is free to
decide how it is going to act on a case-by-case basis.  Many important
FCC policies and procedures are in fact decided by the FCC-as-tribunal
acting with respect to a single licensee, and then later applied more
generally, without ever being codified through a rulemaking procedure.
(Other New Deal federal agencies, like the Federal Power Commission
and the Securities and Exchange Commission, have a similar structure,
although in some cases later legislation has conformed those agencies
to the modern standard, which generally separates tribunal from
rulemaking functions.)

-GAWollman