As an alum of WFTU and Five Towns College, I can offer some accuracy. The school was intended to be located in that part of Nassau County, but somehow got pushed further east into Suffolk: first in Seaford, and then to the present location in Dix Hills. Exit 50 off I-495.
When I was there between 2009–12 WFTU was run by Bob Stern, who had worked at several stations on the Island including WLIM. He was forced out for some reason in 2013 and passed away in 2014. Another NYC radio person, Gene Free (known on-air as "Gene Michaels") succeeded Bob and oversaw the station until he passed in 2019. The on-campus studio facilities have been upgraded, but as I haven't been to the school in over a decade I haven't seen them.
That pea-shooter signal from Riverhead is an albatross. I'm shocked it took this long for them to decide it wasn't worth keeping (though the Town of Riverhead helped make that call). WFTU should have went internet-only years ago. But the apparent lapse in letting the FCC know the station was silent is really not surprising.
To quote the Church Lady
(HT to Dana Carvey): "Well, isn't that special!"
It's been a long time since I lived on Lawn Guyland, but I had no idea about any of that history. And that 5 page letter from David Cohen is especially special. It reads like a circular firing squad. "We know nutting, they know nutting, nobody knows nutting." Holy moley, does anyone at Five Towns College talk to anyone else at Five Towns College?" (Which is, in fact, 45-or-so miles away from the actual Five Towns, and another 40-or-so away from the radio station they ostensibly own and operate but can't receive OTA.)
Where do I begin? How far away from each other does the current station GM sit from Mr. Cohen? Is the GM out in Riverhead, or on the Dix Hills campus? Do they have working telephones there, or even email? Don't they have any facility set up to monitor the stations? How is it possible that everyone was out of the loop? Should these folks even be allowed to have drivers licenses, much less an FCC license?
And Cohen's letter strikes me as rather disingenuous. The way Eminent Domain works, the government doesn't just come in with a court order, take the station off the air, tear down the towers, and put up their poop elimination plant. The Town of Southampton (according to Cohen's letter to the FCC, not the Town of Riverhead, if I understand this mess correctly) schedules a hearing, hears testimony from the petitioner (presumably the Town management and staff), the land owner (presumably FTC) and any other interested/affected parties. Then the town supervisors vote, on the record, to approve the proposal, deny it, or remand it pending further information.
If the owner (FTC) feels financially shafted and/or that they were denied due process, they have the right to appeal, and/or sue the town in court. The process isn't instantaneous, it takes time to play out, and only once it has all played out is the land seized for the proposed purpose.
Now if the Town truly feels this is an urgent matter, they can do what they should have done in the first place, offer FTC enough money to make it worth their while to sell the land, and assume responsibility for tearing down the towers themselves. But the fact that they put a halt to the process because they needed an Environmental Impact Statement on removing towers, something that you normally do when you propose installing them, not removing them, that makes me even more suspicious. But again, what do I know?
This whole thing just sounds so weird. But ultimately you're right, the college will be much better off without that albatross of a graveyard AM station.
