OTTUMWA — It’s not the news Iowa Public Radio or area listeners wanted to hear — there’s another delay in getting the second Ottumwa station on the air.

Repeated delays have pushed the station’s sign-on back since the March launch of KUNZ. That event brought Ottumwa the IPR classical radio programming which has, with the exception of two outages, been on the air ever since.

Fixing those outages took less time than getting the issues around KDWI, which will carry the more traditional IPR programming. The initial attempt to get the station on-air fell short when the signal strength came in under what the Federal Communications Commission license required.

IPR initially thought the issue was another one with a quick fix and hoped to have the station broadcasting within a couple months. But the path has been slower than hoped.

The network finished the electronic interference studies in early June and began work on a tower modification study. Those steps allowed IPR to file final paperwork for the station July 17. They projected a mid-September sign-on at that time.

That seemed reasonable. The application is pretty routine. What IPR didn’t anticipate was being in line behind 145 other applications. The network thinks it will take another two months for the FCC to wade through that paperwork.

If all goes as is now planned, the station should go on the air sometime in November.

Wapello County Supervisor Steve Siegel lobbied hard to bring IPR to Ottumwa, and he said the current delays really do not compare to the fight just to get permission to create the stations.

“We’ve been waiting 10, 12 years just to get to this point,” he said.

Still, Siegel admits it is frustrating to be this close to the second station only to hear of delays. It’s out of local officials’ control and, to a great extent, out of IPR’s control.

Siegel sent an e-mail to Wayne Jarvis, IPR’s director of network operations, on Wednesday. He hadn’t heard back yet at lunchtime, but expected he would by the end of the day.

Jarvis did not respond to the Courier’s attempts to reach him Wednesday.

There is one more avenue Siegel said he might try. He wasn’t sure if the FCC delays were due to a lack of staffing or just bureaucratic shuffling, but he hoped a call to U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin’s office might help cut the red tape.

But for now, KUNZ remains Ottumwa’s primary option for public radio.

Matt Milner can be reached at (641) 683-5359 or via e-mail at mwmilner@mchsi.com