An effort by a New Mexico school board to revive a local radio station appears to have failed.
The FCC’s Media Bureau last September had denied a request by the Albuquerque Board of Education to reinstate the licenses of KRSN 1490 AM in Los Alamos, N.M., and its FM translator. The school board then asked for a review, arguing among other things that the Media Bureau had not given the case the appropriate “hard look.”
But now the commission has upheld the outcome. Simply put, it found that the school board did not have the standing to file for KRSN’s reinstatement.
According to local news coverage in 2020, the family that had owned the station for 15 years planned to close it due to declining revenue but were trying to find a buyer. That effort apparently failed, because last May, Gillian Sutton surrendered the station’s licenses voluntarily.
On May 4, public notice of the cancellation was made and the commission considered the cancellation final on June 13.
The Albuquerque Board of Education, however, then filed a petition with the FCC on Aug. 2. it sought reinstatement of the licenses, acting as their temporary operator. The school board expressed concern that Los Alamos County would be without a local AM broadcast service. It included a letter from Sutton in support of its petition.
But the board had no prior stake in the licenses that the commission said it could establish. The FCC also said that the board filed it as an “Emergency Petition for Extraordinary Relief,” but there are no such pleadings in the commission rulebook. And it said petition was filed well after the commission’s 30-day deadline of the public notice of KRSN’s cancellation.
“The commission has held consistently that it does not have authority to waive or extend, even by as little as one day, the statutory 30-day filing period for petitions for reconsideration,” it wrote. Despite the boards claim to the contrary, the petition was also not properly filed as a late-filed waiver request, it said.
The licenses for KRSN and its associated translator will remain in cancelled status.
