Berkeley– Pacifica has installed a new chief financial officer by the name of Sam Agarwal. The board moved quickly, making Agarwal the signatory for all bank accounts and vendor relationships within days of his arrival. Agarwal’s last full-time CFO position was with San Francisco’s Equal Access, a nonprofit that sets up media projects in developing countries. Equal Access, according to their 2014 annual report, was funded by the US Embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US AID – Office of Transition Initiatives, The US Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, The US Department of State – Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, The US Department of State – Middle East Partnership Initiative, The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

To take just one of these funders, US AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, the organization states its purpose is “In support of US foreign policy, OTI seizes emerging windows of opportunity in the political landscape to promote stability, peace, and democracy by catalyzing local initiatives through adaptive and agile programming”. In U.S. government parlance, this is usually referred to as regime change. Pacifica’s programmers often refer to it as imperialism or colonialism or when they get really excited, the suppression of people’s movements for liberation around the globe.

Agarwal’s first report to the board was somewhat uneventful, but he confirmed that 2014 audit schedules were still not complete and that the audit process for 2014 has still not begun. The 2014 audit is 7 months past its due date and the 2015 audit is due to CPB and the State of California in five months.

At LA’s KPFK, GM Radford;s marching orders for program change have taken down Pacifica’s most successful overnight program, Roy of Hollywood’s venerable Something’s Happening, a much-loved Los Angeles institution which monetized the deep overnight hours for KPFK, a challenge no other network program has achieved. Despite a huge uproar and obvious negative financial implications for the struggling station, Radford proceded to knock off the midnight to 3am portion of the program (the most-listened to part – with Arbitrons often the highest of ANY KPFK program) and handed the time over to unproven new programs including that of her roommate Adam Rice. Radford left untouched the Friday to Sunday overnights, one of KPFK’s financially weakest times, when the station often can’t raise a penny during fund drives, preferring to replace a perceived “political enemy“.

The new programs, apart from Rice’s DJ efforts, which can be heard here: will apparently be hosted by student graduates of Radford’s People’s School of Broadcasting. The curriculum for the 16-week training, which is heavy on advocacy training and light on radio production, can be found here.

Pacifica’s board elections concluded on January 4th. LA’s KPFK, which had been short of quorum, had an extraordinary upsurge on the last day of voting with over 250 people voting online and 30+ staffers, putting them well over the participation requirements. Houston’s KPFT hit their quorum mark earlier and New York’s WBAI is waiting on a count of mail-in ballots that has not been provided by election vendor Simply Voting, which closed-up shop between December 18th and January 4th.

The Pacifica National Board was expecting an election report from supervisor L. Joy Williams at their January 7th meeting, but didn’t receive one, supposedly because the election supervisor was in flight home from California to New York during the meeting. This proved to be not quite the truth as L. Joy’s Twitter account announced her flight date as January 8th, the day after the meeting, with tweets announcing her departure from San Francisco and arrival in NYC on Friday January 8th.

Pacifica’s latest board chair/IED Lydia Brazon has become the president of the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, a Democratic party PAC. The liberal group puts out an annual report card for Democratic party politicians and gave California’s neoliberal Senator Dianne Feinstein a 90% approval rating on their 2014 report card. Brazon’s LA slate for Pacifica’s board (GCRC) consistently and somewhat bizarrely accused their opponents of being “Democrats” and “Liberals”.

Pacific’s mobile application for smartphones and tablets, one of the network’s first tentative steps into 21st century broadcasting, has gone defunct with the network failing to pay for it. This means current users (more than 10,000 people downloaded the app) will be stalled with no more updates and the app has been removed from the iPhone and Google Play app stores.

The increasingly bedraggled KPFK website now announces upcoming programming as “undefined” due to the breakdown of the Copyright Confessor/Sound Exchange reporting system which will make mandatory copyright reports due to SoundExchange at the end of the month difficult for the station to produce. This latest systemic breakdown follows sustained periods of time when the station lost its Internet stream and its program archives.

At WBAI, LSB treasurer and early morning host R. Paul Martin indulged in an AM rant on New Year’s Day reporting similiar copyright reporting problems in New York, election shenanigans and stating “the number of people associated with this radio station who know nothing about radio is huge”. You can hear his comments here.

Court filings from LA Superior Court have revealed the board majority’s conflicted attorney Dan Siegel was hit with $1,920 in court sanctions in December of 2007 for failure to provide evidence during discovery proceedings in Paige vs. Pacifica, the sexual harassment case filed against former KPFK GM Eva Georgia, who resigned in August of 2007 after complaints were filed by four female employees: Molly Paige, Sheri Epstein, Maria Armoudian and Esther Manilla. Three more requests for sanctions against Siegel were filed by Paige’s lawyer for willful violation of court order, refusing to submit to deposition, and obstructing the deposition of a Pacifica employee before Siegel withdrew from the case and Pacifica abuptly settled it in June of 2008 for an undisclosed amount.

Siegel incorporated the “KPFA Foundation” for former board chair Margy Wilkinson in secret in the fall of 2013 and did not disclose it to Pacifica’s board when retained as the foundation’s attorney afterwards as required by the California Bar Association’s Rules of Professional Conduct (3310(c)).

The Siegel/Brazon board majority still hasn’t backed down on their contention that affiliate directors need not be nominated by affiliated stations and asserting both new directors chosen for the 2016 board should be seated despite the process flouting the bylaws in almost every imaginable way: one of their appointees was not nominated by a nonprofit, one was nominated by a station that does not broadcast or distribute Pacifica-produced content, neither has a written affiliation agreement in place, one hasn’t for several years, 30 days advance notice was not provided, no ballots were used, single transferable voting was not used and two were not elected at the same time. The only remedy appears to be a court injunction which can be sought prior to the new board’s projected seating date on January 28th.

Pacifica’s bylaws have this to say about the process:

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Any Foundation “affiliate station” (as defined below) or any association of affiliate stations may nominate one or more candidates for the two Affiliate Director positions on the Board.

For purposes of this Section, an “affiliate station” shall be defined as any non-profit non-commercial broadcaster that broadcasts programming provided or distributed by the Foundation pursuant to a written agreement with the Foundation, including, for example, community radio stations, internet broadcasters or digital broadcasters, as such technology may be developed.

As the first order of business, and given 30 days advance notice, at a Board meeting in December each year, the Directors present and voting (excluding any then current Affiliate or At-Large Directors from the vote) shall establish a protocol for balloting using the Single Transferable Voting method.and shall elect two (2) Affiliate Representative Directors from the nominees submitted by affiliate stations.

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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.