A Colorado school district has won a construction permit to build an FM radio station despite objections from broadcast engineer Jim “Turbo” Turvaville.
Brush School District serves 1,500 students in the community of Brush on the northeastern plains of Colorado. It applied for a noncom educational FM station during the 2021 NCE FM filing window and originally was part of a group of mutually exclusive (MX) applications; as a result of technical amendments it is now a “singleton.”
The school district wrote in its filings that it intends to include the station in its curriculum and plans to use it to teach communication, management and technical skills.
The FCC Media Bureau had dismissed its application in January of 2022 because of signal overlap with a co-channel station, but the school district amended its proposed channel and the bureau reinstated the application.
Turbo Tech Services, run by engineer Jim Turvaville, filed an informal objection, saying that the application remains defective for several reasons and should be dismissed for failure to provide corrective amendments “at the single opportunity provided by the commission staff.”
An important concept in the case is “nunc pro tunc,” a legal term used to describe circumstances in which an agency may change an outcome retroactively.
The commission now has rejected Turbo’s several arguments. (Read the ruling.)
The upshot is that the Media Bureau has issued the CP to Brush School District for a Class A FM station on 88.3 MHz with 3 kW effective radiated power.
The school system mascot, by the way, is a Beetdigger, and its logos bear the image of a beet-digging tool.
