It’s one thing to forget to file for a broadcast license renewal. It’s another to let the lapse drag on for over five years. The icing on the regulatory cake is doing it for both components in your AM-FM combo. The result in the case of a pair of Salmon ID stations is a very hefty $26K payment to the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau.
The stations are KSRA-AM and KSRA-FM. Both had an October 1, 2005 license expiration date, which calls for an application for renewal to be filed by June 1, 2005. The applications never went in, and the stations continued to operate without authorization until October of 2010, when they finally got around to seeking new licenses and also applied for an STA to operate without one.
The error was compounded when the STAs expired before new licenses were granted, yet the stations continued to operate.
The FCC charges a $3K penalty for the failure to file a required form. Unauthorized operation carries a $10K price tag, but the FCC frequently lowers it to $4K in a late license renewal case. But not this time.
However, it did not find a pattern of abuse or intentional misconduct and did grant license renewals for both stations.
However, licensee Salmon River Communications Inc. has been hit with a notice of apparently liability of $13K for each station, totaling $26K.
