Berkeley-Only in Berkeley will the network’s troubled board elections come to a close today, with balloting extended to January 4th in Los Angeles, NY and Houston. The election supervisor has decided to close the Northern California elections despite a large number of voters stating they haven’t gotten ballots and that their requests for replacements have gone unanswered. In last nights national board meeting, L. Joy Williams stated she had more than 600 “unread emails”, most of which are likely to be from voters trying to vote. The closing of the balloting under these circumstances runs contrary to California law which upholds the rights of eligible voters to vote and expects organizations to demonstrate a good faith effort to accommodate those who attempt to participate. If even half of the unread emails come from the Berkeley signal area, the quantity could cause a measurable change in the outcome.

Berkeley voters are being told they can come to the station from 10:00am to 9:00pm tonight (1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Berkeley) in order to vote if they have otherwise been unable to. Here are a few of the complaints that have been sent to this publication in the last few days:

“I went in yesterday.  Talked to Nelsy who informed me that I couldn’t get my password or vote at the station. She said my password would be on my email at 9am.  It is now almost noon and still nothing.  I live in East Oakland so went out of my way to go in.  Needless to say I was more than pissed off at having come all that way and still not being able to vote  Not a happy camper”.

 “Why should I bother offering my services as a volunteer in the  phone room?I have done so since 1986. Today, sad to say, I failed to get a ballot (that I deserve) to participate in the ongoing electoral process despite my attempts to reach the LES and the NES; all things considered, non-participation on my part may not be ultimately a bad thing given that the current electoral process is tarnished by the shenanigans one would expect in some Third-World country”

“I ask the same question, as a long time (1957) listener and supporter who also have not received a ballot, in spite of emails to local and national supervisors. The national supervisor responded by asking which station area I lived in, even though I had included my local address in initial email, which I again sent. Wonder how many other supporters have been shut out of this fraudulent election?”

If overwork, which has been cited as the source of the non-responsiveness, is the reason, then it would seem incumbent upon the organization to finish the process of responding to all timely requests prior to closing the balloting period.

Persistent digging by NY board member Steve Brown, a member of the boards national audit committee (which adjourned itself almost immediately at its last meeting) uncovered some updated information on the delayed audit for the year ending September 30, 2014. LA station KPFK’s bank reconciliations are still not done and have been transferred to the national office for completion and further adjustments, and NY station WBAI still has to supply accrued rent expenses and accounts payable for the period ending 9-30-2014. A December 4th meeting was held with auditor Armanino to discuss the state of the audit prep work and when the audit (which was due to the State of California in June of 2015) can actually begin. No public report out from that meeting has yet occurred. The last meeting between Armanino and the board’s audit committee at the end of October can be heard here.

To perhaps no one’s surprise, promises that work hour reductions at LA’s KPFK would end in December have proven to be bogus. A week before two dozen grievances with SAG-AFTRA go into arbitration on December 13th, GM Radford told the station’s staff they would not be restored to full time work in January as previously promised. Radford encouraged employees to quit offering buyouts on a six month installment plan. She blamed the national finance committee for the broken promise after the committee was skeptical that KPFK would produce $550,000 annually in “silent drives” Radford proposed to run for 95 days and raise $6,000 a day via the website, which has no staff overseeing it and has been broken for much of the past two months.

According to KPFK employees who attended the meeting,  they were also told that they could not work from home for “liability reasons”, the station’s “gag rule was fully in effect” and the station needed “better programs” and to make more money between 7pm and 7am. The station programs in the Spanish language from 9pm to midnight every weekday evening. Roy of Hollywood’s overnight programming produces the highest overnight revenues in the 5-station network which usually raises virtually nothing in the midnight to 4am hours. KPFK’s lowest fund drive totals are generally seen on the weekends when daily revenues plunge by 50% or more during fund drives.

Radford also reported to the finance committee that she had asked the Material World Foundation, the philanthrophic vehicle for Beatles widow Olivia Harrison, if KPFK/Pacifica could default on repayment of a remaining $25,000 of a $50,000 grant for music studio refurbishment that was misdirected in June of 2014 by ED Wilkinson for operating expenses. The music studio reconfiguration project pitched to the foundation is not going forward. Radford stated the foundation has not replied.

Mechanical breakdowns continue to run rampant with KPFA’s SSL certificate expiring causing web browsers to issue messages the site was not safe to visit and the increasing bedraggled KPFK website losing its Internet stream from November 25 to December 1, only to have its program archives break again on December 2 for the second time in the last three weeks. KPFK fired its union webmaster in September and has been unable to keep its digital presence in order since.

Former Siegel and Yee associate attorney Jose Luis Fuentes, who replaced his then-boss Dan Siegel on the Pacifica National Board in January of 2014, has the solution to Pacifica’s problems: jettison the executive director position and sell everything off. Fuentes has been aggressively pursuing the Siegel/Brazon faction’s bankruptcy strategy, and spent all of Tuesday nights Pacifica governance committee meeting discussing bylaws amendments to dispense with a paid executive director permanently (the network has only had one for 7 of the last 21 months) and to enable the lame duck board to sell off assets without the permission of the network’s members and donors.

Fuentes’ boss of 12 years, Dan Siegel colluded with Margy Wilkinson when both were board members in 2013 to secretly set up a new foundation under their sole control to recover foundation assets should be they be sold off. Wilkinson then went on to orchestrate the firing of the networks ED, replace her with herself and hire Siegel as the corporate counsel.

Long-time public employee union member and democratic union activist Bob English wrote this detailed piece on labor history at Pacifica, with a special emphasis on his home station in Berkeley to celebrate Joe Hill’s birthday, remember another Hill who started Pacifica Radio, and untangle the threads of the industrial to craft unionism transition that underlies much of the labor turmoil of the last 35 years.

At Berkeley’s KPFA, the initiator of the democratically-elected board effort within Pacifica and the station which first lifted election expenses into the stratosphere by adding privately-paid-for expensive slate mailers by the Berkley wing of the Siegel/Brazon faction (variously called KPFA Forward, Concerned Listeners and Save KPFA), today is the last day to vote. This year’s election outreach by the Siegel/Brazon faction has focused on defending the snatch of a $400,000 bequest to the Pacifica Foundation in the spring of 2015, and apocalyptic emails by senior station staffers that if their preferred slate does not win the election, they will all quit and the world will come to an end, although virtually all of them have been at the station for decades, in several cases approaching half a century.

Pacifica in Exile’s election recommendations for all four stations across the country can be found here. All of the endorsed candidates agree heartily that big changes are needed in the governance system including a comprehensive bylaws rewrite.

On November 8th, KPFA’s satirical Twit Wit Radio once again hauled out the truth serum. You can listen here.

Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at [email protected].

For readers who may wish to do more, any donor to a California-based not for profit organization like Pacifica may file a complaint to the open file at the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the Office of the CA Attorney General. Pacifica’s case number is CT011303. The form and instructions for filing may be downloaded here.

To subscribe to this newsletter, please visit our spanking new website at www.pacificainexile.org

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Started in 1946 by conscientious objector Lew Hill, Pacifica’s storied history includes impounded program tapes for a 1954 on-air discussion of marijuana, broadcasting the Seymour Hersh revelations of the My Lai massacre, bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, going to jail rather than turning over the Patty Hearst tapes to the FBI, and Supreme Court cases including the 1984 decision that noncommercial broadcasters have the constitutional right to editorialize, and the Seven Dirty Words ruling following George Carlin’s incendiary performances on WBAI. Pacifica Foundation Radio operates noncommercial radio stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and syndicates content to over 180 affiliates. It invented listener-supported radio.