In 2000 I received a Warning Notice from Riley Hollingsworth that I
believed to be legally deficient under Part 97 as not stating an actual
Rules violation, so I responded to it and told Mr. Hollingsworth I was
going to ignore his Warning Notice, and that he should designate my
case for a hearing before an ALJ if he wished to pursue it. He never
did.
Then in January of this year I applied for a vanity callsign, but my
application was "red-flagged" and "offllined for Enforcement Bureau
review". This got me wondering how long the Commission can sit on an
application while neither granting it nor designating it for a hearing.
So I spoke to several Commission staff members, former staff members
who now work in private industry and communications lawyers in
Washington, D.C. They have many contacts within the Commission and are
quite familiar with Hollingsworth's tactics and strategies. They said
unanimously that Hollingsworth is NEVER going to designate an amateur
case for a hearing before an ALJ. They didn't want to go into the
precise reasons why not, so I won't speculate as to what the reasons
might be. But they all seemed quite adamant about it. They all seemed
to be saying, "I can't tell you how I know this, but trust me, it is
true."
If this is true, which I believe it is from all the evidence available
to me, it means that Hollingsworth has reduced himself to the role of
pure bluffer, and everybody is becoming aware of it. Therefore, all
you have to do to defeat a Warning Notice, an N.A.L. or a notice of
revocation is to reply to it, denying the allegations and asking for a
hearing, and you will hear nothing further from Riley. And if he tries
to deny renewal of your license, all you need to do is reply to the
Notice of Non-Renewal, asking for a hearing, and you will be permitted
to continue operating until an ALJ finally decides your case. Which
will be forever, because Riley is not going to designate the case for a
hearing in the first place.
It seems to me that Riley needs to be more honest and candid with his
fellow hams. If he doesn't intend to ever take any cases to hearing,
he should simply admit it, and admit that his power is reduced,
essentially, to "jawboning". At least that way he would retain a
modicum of credibility. As things are now, he is losing all his
credibility and pretty soon nobody is going to take him seriously at
all.