Oahu radio listeners could have had another station choice for more than the past decade, had government bureaucracy not gotten in the way.
Using the words "government" and "bureaucracy" in the same sentence does seem to be straight out of the Department of Redundancy Department, but the Federal Communications Commission’s rules for doling out new radio stations are labyrinthine at best.
New Jersey-based broadcaster Dave Garey has been informed by the FCC that he has been chosen to build a radio station at 1600 on the AM dial, some 15 years after he initially applied.
Back then his market research, consultation with a broadcast engineer and discussions with a radio tower owner led him to propose construction of the station in Waipahu.
"It was a snowy day in (Washington) D.C., and my attorney and I drove down to the FCC to bring the application there," Garey said.
At the same time, Illinois-based KM Communications Inc. also applied to build a station at the same dial position, which it would have sited in Makaha.
"By 2002 my application was dismissed," Garey said, as the FCC favored the KM application. Garey appealed the dismissal but lost, and was notified of the final decision in 2003.
"I thought, OK, what can I do? It’s over," Garey said.
"Fast-forward, and 12 years later this surprise thing comes in the mail," he said. "It’s 2 1/2 pages long, and it’s awarding me the frequency because (KM) didn’t supply an amendment in time," he said.
The FCC letter gave him 90 days to get the station building process started, he said, but all this time after his initial efforts, key circumstances have changed.
Clayton Caughill, the engineer who presented Garey with a plan to maximize the reach of the station’s airwaves, has died. Broadcast owner Bob Loew, who had given Garey "reasonable assurance" that he could lease space on his Waipahu tower for the station’s transmission equipment, also has died.
That construction of the station was allowed to languish for more than a decade "boggles my mind," Garey said.
Available space for transmitters on AM radio towers is "extremely limited," said Dale Machado, chief engineer for the seven-station iHeartMedia Honolulu group (formerly Clear Channel Communications Inc.).
"The more stations you have on a tower, the smaller the bandwidth and the less the signal gets out," he said.
Machado estimates there are only five towers on Oahu for the island’s 19 AM radio stations, and "everybody’s trying to get rid of AM towers," he said.
The KSSK-AM 590 tower was formerly on Ala Wai Boulevard but was moved to its present location on Kokea Street in Iwilei because of escalating complaints from residents of adjacent Waikiki high-rises.
The tower houses KSSK-AM and three other AM stations, Machado said.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently reported that the tower will again be moved at a cost of $5 million in state money in preparation for the Kapalama Container Terminal project by the state Department of Transportation.
With the scarcity of tower space and the shortness of time he has remaining, Garey feels "like a person trying to find a good home for a dog," he said. His desire is to either sell the rights to build the station or to partner with someone in building it, which he estimates can be done for "less than a quarter of a million dollars."
He describes himself as a "stickler" for local radio, having been an on-air personality himself. The appeal of AM radio is "always finding a format that you can’t find on FM," he said, such as one that features local bands or ethnic programming. "Something local, where the person talking, he or she, is in the here and now," versus being beamed in from a satellite or airing hours after it was originally broadcast elsewhere.
"This station should have been on the air," he said.
Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.