FCC Gives Hurricane-Affected Stations Extra Time to Pay Up

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The FCC is giving communications providers affected by Hurricane Florence an extra two days to pay their annual regulatory fee.

The FCC is self-supporting, paying for its operations through the fees it charges licensees to regulate them--according to how many full time employees (FTEs) the FCC calculates it takes.

Those fees are due by the end of Tuesday (Sept. 25). But given the communications outages caused by Hurricane Florence, the FCC is giving providers in most of a hundred counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia until Sept. 27.

The FCC has deactivated its voluntary Disaster Information Reporting System (DARS) for Florence. As of its last report on Sept. 24, there were only a handful of radio and TV stations out of service.

John Eggerton
John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.