Opinion ID: 294822
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Administrative Finality

Text: 6 At the outset we note that the action of the Commission in this case certainly jettisoned any idea of administrative finality as a guiding principle. We see no reason why Intervenor Everett Cablevision, Inc., could not and should not have been in the FCC proceeding from the beginning, if it believed it had any interest calling for protection. 7 If on this appeal Petitioner KIRO had been able to make out a stronger case of ultimate injustice to it by the Commission's extraordinary action, this court would be disposed to reverse and reinstate the Commission's original decision of September 1969 on this ground alone. 7 As Commissioner Cox, joined by two other Commissioners, said in his dissent: 8 Everett Cablevision sat out the 3-year proceeding in which KIRO-TV and KVOS-TV litigated their respective rights on its system. Not liking the Commission's resolution of the matter, it now seeks to enter the case for the first time, basing its claims on a map dated June 1956 which it alleges came into its possession from sources unknown and which it says appears to be the official predicted principal community contour map for KVOS-TV.    To allow Everett Cablevision to intervene at this point, in my judgment, is to countenance an abuse of our processes. 8 9 In its recent Community Service, Inc., Frankfort, Kentucky, and Consolidated Television Cable Co. 9 opinion and order handed down 8 July 1970, the Commission demonstrated that it can and does achieve administrative finality when it so desires. This court has also had occasion recently to observe: 10 We do not find in statute or case law any ground for accepting the premise that proceedings before administrative agencies are to be constituted as endurance contests modeled after relay races in which the baton of proceeding is passed on successively from one legally exhausted contestant to a newly arriving legal stranger. 10 11 It is highly likely that what the Commission permitted Everett to do here it would not under its own rules have permitted KVOS, i. e., to file this newly discovered map of its own transmittal power after having had its opportunity for two and one-half years to do so. 11 The Commission attempted to justify its consideration of the KVOS map on rehearing by maintaining that it was merely taking official notice of the contents of its own files and was not receiving any new evidence. We are unable to perceive the significance of such a distinction. The map, whatever its source, whether officially noticed or not, was evidence, and, in the context of this case, it was new evidence. In permitting Everett to arrive as a newcomer three years late and to do what the previous contestant could not have done, the Commission clearly erred. At oral argument this was sought to be justified only on the grounds that the Commission had completely erred in its original decision favoring KIRO, and on the basis of subsequently ascertained facts now was attempting to make what it believes to be a correct and fair decision. Whether this subsequent decision should stand, whether KIRO has been hurt by this admittedly extraordinary procedure, we now examine.