The FCC reduced its fine, but One Mart Corp., former licensee of KEVT(AM), in Cortaro, Ariz., must still pay $6,400 for apparently violating the EAS rules.
During a 2006 inspection, a San Diego field office agent found that although the station had an installed a working EAS encoder/decoder, its logs indicated that before the inspection, from November 2005 to August 2006, the unit hadn’t worked.
In its decision, the agency said the engineer for the station had indicated the KEVT EAS equipment “may have been having technical problems.”
In August 2006, the engineer told the FCC he was getting bids for new EAS equipment.
One Mart didn’t dispute the violations but asked for the $8,000 fine to be reduced. One Mart said the destruction of two of its four towers in 2003 meant that it was operating at reduced power and had less income as it tried to rebuild.
The FCC said the penalty could not be waived but did cut the fine based on One Mart’s past good compliance history.
