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Legal dispute continues with radio station

Staff reports

KTHO has been off the air for more than a month, but the legal dispute continues.

The station’s noteholder, Tom Gillinwater of Huntington Beach-based Paradise Broadcasting, appeared in a Santa Ana courtroom Monday on a civil complaint to retrieve the equipment and Federal Communications Commission-issued license from the former station manager Chris Kidd.

Kidd didn’t appear in court and had filed for his third Chapter 13 bankruptcy status, as a means of “protection,” he said Tuesday. The filing postponed the hearing to Jan. 8.



Gillinwater and Kidd have waged a battle over a $450,000 business deal made five years ago, but Gillinwater said Tuesday that he’s willing to forego collecting on the debt left on a $300,000 financial note.

“I’m not even asking for monetary damages. It’s ridiculous that he wants to play a cat-and-mouse game,” Gillinwater said. “He’s just sitting in some room with a license he can’t use.”



Kidd moved the station equipment out of the Bijou Shopping Center location and into a storage facility, but he still answers the KTHO telephone. He also holds an operator’s license in the hopes of getting the station back on the air again at another location.

“What I want to do in a plan is put the station back on the air and generate revenue. Obviously, it’s going to take money. I can do the work myself and keep costs down,” Kidd said in response to questions of financial capital needed to get a station off the ground. “If I had to do it over again, I would do a lot of things differently.”

As for the station though, he’d keep the same format of primarily news and talk.


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