Biltmore Forest Broadcasting Fm, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, Liberty Productions L.P. And Orion Communications, Ltd., Intervenors

321 F.3d 155, 355 U.S. App. D.C. 170
CourtCourt of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
DecidedApril 10, 2003
Docket01-1392
StatusPublished
Cited by9 cases

This text of 321 F.3d 155 (Biltmore Forest Broadcasting Fm, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, Liberty Productions L.P. And Orion Communications, Ltd., Intervenors) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Biltmore Forest Broadcasting Fm, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, Liberty Productions L.P. And Orion Communications, Ltd., Intervenors, 321 F.3d 155, 355 U.S. App. D.C. 170 (D.C. Cir. 2003).

Opinion

Opinion for the Court filed by Chief Judge GINSBURG.

GINSBURG, Chief Judge:

Biltmore Forest Broadcasting FM, Inc. appeals an order of the Federal Communications Commission awarding an FM radio station license to intervenor Liberty Productions L.P., which was the high bidder in the auction of that license. Biltmore and intervenor Orion Communications, Ltd., each of which also bid, claim that Liberty should have been disqualified because errors in Liberty’s license application were not correctable after the auction and in its application Liberty had misrepresented facts about its access to a transmitter site. Because neither contention has merit, we affirm the order of the Commission.

I. Background

In 1987 thirteen radio companies, including Biltmore, Liberty, and Orion, filed application's with the Commission for an FM station license in Biltmore Forest, North Carolina. At that time the Commission’s policy was to hold comparative hearings in order to determine the qualifications of the applicants and to decide which of the qualified applicants would best serve the public interest. An Administrative Law Judge held such a hearing and determined that neither Biltmore nor Liberty had a “reasonable assurance” that a transmitter tower site was available to it, as the Commission then required. The ALJ determined also that Liberty had intentionally misrepresented facts about the availability of a site. Nat’l Communications Indus., 5 F.C.C. Red. 2862, 1990 WL 605681 (ALJ 1990).

The following evidence was before the ALJ when he made his finding concerning Liberty’s misrepresentation. Valerie Klemmer, the general partner behind Liberty, certified that Liberty had a reasonable assurance a certain site was available. Klemmer, a neophyte in the broadcasting arena, testified before the ALJ that her certification was based upon a conversation she and a friend named Tim Warner had had on August 25, 1987 with Vickey Utter, the owner of a parcel of land near Bilt-more Forest. Warner had had prior dealings with Ms. Utter in his capacity as an executive at WCQS, a public radio station in Asheville. He also had experience certifying that an applicant had a reasonable assurance a site would be available to it. Klemmer believed she had reached an *157 agreement with Utter on August 25. She made no plans to secure any other site for the tower in the event the deal with Utter fell through.

Utter consistently denied having made any deal with Klemmer. In other respects, however, Utter’s testimony was most inconsistent. In a February, 1989 affidavit she said she had no knowledge of Klemmer or Liberty and had never given Klemmer or any other representative of Liberty any assurance that her property would be available for a transmitter. Indeed, she denied having spoken to anyone representing Liberty. In a signed statement dated March 13, 1989, however, Utter said that Warner had reminded her that he and Klemmer had visited her and that they had discussed leasing a portion of her land, “but since [Klemmer] never contacted me again I assumed she found some place more suitable for her project.” Later in March Utter reiterated her position that she had never given Klemmer any assurance the land would be available, explaining that “[i]f we had discussed this or I had given her this assurance I certainly would have remembered and I would have been looking for her to make a commitment of some sort.”

At a deposition in April, 1989 Utter again recalled speaking with Klemmer and Warner, but she could not remember the details of the conversation. She did recall telling Klemmer and Warner about a lease she and Brian Lee, a representative of Orion, had executed on August 21, 1987 for the use of a portion of her land as a transmitter site. She had signed the February affidavit at the request of Lee, she explained. On March 11, Utter stated, Klemmer and Warner had visited her at her home and refreshed her memory of their earlier meeting. They had wanted her to sign a statement that she would be willing to lease the site to Liberty; Utter had refused but instead wrote and signed the statement of March 13 in which she acknowledged having discussed the matter with Klemmer and Warner in August. Utter stated in her deposition that although at the time she signed the March 13 statement she did not recall ever having discussed leasing her land to Klemmer, she included the assertion that she had done so “because that’s what [Warner] kept telling me the night he and [Klemmer] were at the house.”

Klemmer testified to a different version of events. She said that at the August meeting she and Warner told Utter of Liberty’s interest in leasing a portion of Utter’s property in the event Liberty received the license. They discussed a price of $4,000 per year. There was no mention of Utter having entered into a prior lease agreement with Lee or Orion. Klemmer believed her oral agreement with Utter gave her a reasonable assurance of the site being available for two reasons: Warner told her both that Utter had honored previous oral agreements he had made with her on behalf of WCQS, and that he understood from WCQS’s attorney that an oral agreement was sufficient for an applicant to certify having a reasonable assurance. In his testimony Warner corroborated Klemmer’s account of their meeting with Utter and the two statements she attributed to him.

Upon this record the ALJ made findings adverse to Liberty. In particular, the ALJ concluded that Klemmer had “absolutely no basis” for representing that she had obtained a reasonable assurance the Utter site was available to Liberty. Further,

she knew she had no basis for [doing so]. To argue that her feeble, half-hearted effort to obtain some of Vicki Utter’s land ... constitutes “reasonable assurance” strains credulity. No, Valerie *158 Klemmer has blatantly dissembled in a manner that doesn’t befit a prospective broadcast permittee.

5 F.C.C. Red. at 2879 ¶ 8. The ALJ did not address Warner’s testimony at all.

Various parties appealed the ALJ’s decision to the Review Board, which affirmed that Liberty was disqualified on the site issue and therefore did not reach the misrepresentation issue. Natl Communications Indus., 6 F.C.C. Rcd.1978, ¶ ¶ 8-12, 1991 WL 640145 (Rev. Bd.1991). The Board’s decision survived review by the full Commission as well as two petitions for, reconsideration. Nat’l Communications Indus., 7 F.C.C. Red. 1703, ¶ 2, 1992 WL 689428 (1992); Liberty Prods., L.P., 7 F.C.C. Rcd. 7581, ¶36, 1992 WL 690877 (1992); Liberty Prods., L.P., 8 F.C.C. Red. 4264, ¶ 4, 1993 WL 755891 (1993). When the appeal reached this court, however, we summarily reversed and remanded the case to the Commission for reconsideration, Biltmore Forest Broad. FM, Inc. v. FCC, 1994 WL 116196 (Mar. 15, 1994), in light of our intervening decision in Bechtel v. FCC, 10 F.3d 875 (D.C.Cir.1993); there we had held the Commission’s “integration policy,” which favored an applicant who intended personally to manage and operate the proposed station over one who intended to entrust its operation to employees, was arbitrary and capricious.

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Bluebook (online)
321 F.3d 155, 355 U.S. App. D.C. 170, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/biltmore-forest-broadcasting-fm-inc-v-federal-communications-commission-cadc-2003.