Duke Wright’s Midwest Communications was unable to begin building a lakeside FM CP, causing a deal for same to crater. Now local owner and engineer Mark Heller is stepping in, with a new tower site in his plans.
The station is WEMP-FM, currently licensed to Two Rivers WI. It’s a 6 kW Class A on 98.9 MHz.
The seller is Tri-County Radio Inc., headed by Charles P. Mills. Mills stands to earn $197,500 cash for the CP.
That’s just slightly less than Midwest was planning to pay – the earlier deal was for $200K. However, the deal was contingent on having a tower lease and necessary permits, and those two requirements could not be met. According to Heller, the targeted tower site near Lake Michigan and an unscale neighborhood ran into insurmountable NIMBY obstacles.
Heller’s plan will require a CP to change the city of license to Howard’s Grove, a move which will make it part of the Sheboygan WI Arbitron market.
If this attempt at a deal makes it to the finish line, it will be Heller’s third station in the vicinity. He has interests in WGBW-AM Denmark WI, serving Green Bay, and WLWB-AM New Holstein WI, serving Appleton-Oshkosh.
RBR-TVBR observation: The internet has done major damage to the fine journalistic art of wacky headline writing, formerly a staple of RBR-TVBR back before the TVBR part was added and when the publication was delivered to subscribers weekly via snail mail.
Unfortunately, that type of headline in the internet era fails to reveal the topic with the lightning speed required in this young millennium, and thus fails to generate the clicks that are the lifeblood of the new journalism business model.
However, were we still free to write a proper headline for this story, it would be this:
“Lakeside FM will be sold come Heller high water.”
