Berkeley – Ballots mailed for Pacifica’s 2016 board elections from the East Coast on August 15th. Pacifica in Exile’s candidate endorsements for all stations can be found here. You will find online voting instructions inside your printed ballot envelope. The voting period ends on September 30 at 11:59pm in your own time zone. If you donated, but don’t receive a ballot or for any ballot-related question at any station, you can contact King Reilly, a KPFK member who has graciously agreed to assist folks, at [email protected].

For more on our endorsed slates, see the Committee to Strengthen KPFK, Move KPFT Forward, United for Community Radio (KPFA), and WBAI Indy Caucus websites.

At the August 25th Pacifica National Board meeting, the long-delayed report from CFO Sam Agarwal was exactly as grim as expected. You can listen to his report in full here. Agarwal’s report was followed by a blow-up between board chair Tony Norman from WPFW and KPFT listener rep Adriana Casenave, the board’s vice chair. Casenave, who has been bitterly critical of CFO Agarwal, proposed a million dollars in staffing cuts, applicable immediately. Her motion subjected KPFA and KPFK to 20% cuts, and the rest of the units WBAI, WPFW, KPFT, the National Office and Archives, to 10% cuts. In addition, the motion prevented any hires, including replacement of staffers who resign, without sign-off from the IED, the CFO and the entire national board. The motion would have prevented numerous vacancies from being filled, including KPFT’s program director position, KPFK’s business manager position, KPFA’s subscriptions manager position and accounting positions in the national office. After some fireworks between Norman and Casenave (both Siegel/Brazonites), the board voted down the motion with only five votes in support: Casenave, KPFT unpaid staff rep Vinisha Patel-Adams, WPFW unpaid staff rep Jim Brown, KPFA listener rep Janet Kobren, and KPFA listener rep Jose Luis Fuentes. WPFW listener rep Ron Pinchback and affiliate rep Jevon Gammon (now going by the name Themba Tshibanda) changed their votes at the last minute prior to the count: Pinchback from “abstain” to “no” and Tshibanda from “yes” to “no”.

The vote crossed traditional factional lines with all 4 KPFK reps voting no and Save KPFA’s Jose Luis Fuentes breaking with the other two Save KPFA reps, Edwards-Tiekert and Wilkinson. Much to Casenave’s apparent surprise, WBAI rep Cerene Roberts also voted no. The proposal split the WPFW delegation, with Jim Brown voting yes, Nancy Sorden abstaining and Tony Norman and Ron Pinchback voting no. All four minority board members, Grace Aaron, Jan Goodman, Jonathan Alexander and Bill Crosier voted no. Goodman pointed out that her station, KPFK, was desperately in need of a business manager and that not getting financial audits done and forfeiting CPB funding were material reasons for the current financial crisis.

At the board meeting the following week on September 1st, the major order of business was to set up another meeting to discuss WBAI, whose large fixed overhead expenses at the Empire State Building are a $600K a year drain on Pacifica. They are locked in until 2020 on the basis of a 15-year lease signed by the Pacifica National Board in 2006, another Siegel/Brazon majority board. Secretary Janet Kobren said the purpose of the meeting was “to dispel rumors that some on the board wanted to lease, swap or sell WBAI”. Moments later, Save KPFA-affiliated rep Jose Luis Fuentes proposed that lease proposals for other operators to take over WBAI (LMA’s) be independently solicited by ED Brazon prior to the meeting, indicating that it is not a rumor and will not be dispelled. In other business, the board spent close to an hour convening 4 separate votes to agree to pay one $15,000 election-related bill.The board continued to ask, in vain, for written cash flow reports and recovery plans from management at the five stations, with Brazon indicating that “she could ask”. The reports were requested in April. After another grim CFO report, the board set up an underwriting task force to “develop policy”.

CFO Agarwal has presented a comprehensive list of short-term and medium-term actions to avert financial collapse. To date, there has been little to no discussion by the national board or national board committees. His list can be seen here. His written CFO report to the board for September 1 can be seen here. 

A few days later, long-time KPFA staff rep Brian Edwards-Tiekert (2004-2009, 2012-16) resigned as a KPFA delegate, PNB member and national treasurer. Edwards-Tiekert leaves an unfinished FY 2017 budgetary process, with not a single divisional budget passed on to the national board 31 days before the end of the fiscal year. Edwards-Tiekert earlier presided as the local treasurer at KPFA during the 2008-2010 period, when the Berkeley station ran two consecutive operating deficits in excess of $550,000 a year and blew through the entirety of a $1 million dollar cash reserve, painfully saved up from preceding decades. During his tenure as local treasurer, the station manager also hid a $375,000 check in a drawer for 15 months while reporting the funds were in a KPFA money market account. Edwards-Tiekert’s sayanora statement, which can be found here, contains several sound suggestions, but dissassociates itself from the question of why, after two+ years as treasurer with an allied board majority, there has been no implementation, and financial basics like getting audited financial statements and annual budgets prepared, remain undone.

In a desultory meeting of the national finance committee on August 31, the committee concluded the timeline for the budgetary process was “completely shot”. CFO Agarwal indicated Pacifica’s income statements for 2015 and 2016 would likely have to be revised, as he had discovered numerous double entries for payments of prior year expenses in the 2015 books. Finally, in a very strange moment, board chair Tony Norman was asked by BAI treasurer R. Paul Martin who he was referring to as “Pacifica’s general counsel”. Norman awkwardly answered “the Yee firm”, omitting the name of attorney Dan Siegel. Siegel and Norman served on the board together for a year in 2013. When Martin asked when the national board voted for “the Yee firm” as Pacifica’s general counsel, Norman said that “he could not recall”. The meeting was abruptly adjourned 5 minutes later. You can listen to a summary reel here.

The impact of the financial crisis on the network archival collection continues to be a matter of national discussion. After Josh Sheppard, the chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, went public with his distress and posted a blog about the impending disaster, the latest to weigh in was National Federation of Community Broadcaster’s ED Sally Kane. Kane’s letter can be found here. Kane commented “NFCB believes that privatizing or selling off the Pacifica Radio Archives would be a fundamental betrayal of the values and spirit embodied in these recordings, which have always served an educational purpose and are an inextricable part of the whole story of our nation’s history and experience. NFCB urges Pacifica to act quickly and in the public interest that it has dedicated itself to serving over these many years. The Pacifica Radio Archives are a national treasure and they deserve to be protected and preserved for all of us”. Articles also appeared in Current, OC Weekly and Radio World.

The long-delayed 2014 financial audit, which was due to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the California Attorney General on June 30, 2015, more than a year ago, has still not surfaced, despite rumors that it is finally finished. CFO Agarwal finally clarified that the audit firm was still waiting for a requested financial recovery plan. ED Lydia Brazon, when the issue came up months ago for the first time, retorted that she could produce a financial recovery plan “in a weekend”. Many weekends have since passed, but the missing recovery plan is still delaying the audit. Pacifica’s audit report for the following fiscal year (2015) is also overdue to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the California Attorney General. It was due on June 30, 2016.

Since Lydia Brazon has been interim Executive Director (iED) of Pacifica, the financial, legal, and organizational problems have continued to multiply, and member numbers continue to dwindle. Plans for reversing the acute downward slide are nowhere to be found. Sign the petition to tell the PNB it’s time to let Lydia Brazon go as volunteer iED.

The financial crisis is hitting all of the stations and KPFA staff were so informed by manager Quincy McCoy who sent a memo on August 26th saying he was “running dangerously short on funds to operate the station and that the doors of KPFA could be closed before the holidays”. He described the station as being “on the brink of collapse”. McCoy partially blamed the situation on his own decision to shorten the station on-air fund drives, observing “if a three week fund drive with a goal of $540,000 nets us on average about $288,000, then we don’t have enough funds to pay expenses into the next month”. McCoy promised “huge alterations of the broadcast schedule, lay-offs, cuts etc” and said KPFA may not continue as a “full-time operation”. You can read the full memo here. KPFA is moving their fall fund drive, usually in October, up to September 7th and will not use volunteers for answering phones during this drive, but rely entirely on a call center service. 

McCoy’s bleak communication about KPFA’s financial collapse was at odds with the chirpy slate card sent out by the Berkeley wing of the Siegel/Brazon faction. Only 11 months ago in November of 2015, former ED Wilkinson stated onwww.kpfa.org: “KPFA has made real progress: delivering a major overhaul of its website, launching three new podcasts, ramping up its off-air fundraising initiatives, and shrinking the amount of time it spent in pledge drives by nearly one-third. This can be a model for the rest of the network”.

At LA’s KPFK, arbitration settlement negotiations, after a big loss for GM Radford, continue to drag on. The outline emerging is that a six-figure sum will be required for back pay to union employees whose hours were unilaterally reduced. The preliminary amount seems to be about $140,000, but has not been finalized. Two employees let go in violation of the contract will have to be re-hired, if they wish to return, and severance packages will  be made available to any KPFK union employees who wish to voluntarily leave. Union employees had been told last fall by Radford their union-mandated severance payments would not be available to them if they chose not to accept the hours/pay cuts and instead leave their jobs. Radford’s last report to her local board from August 21 can be found here. In it, she says the settlement with SAG-AFTRA will be announced “in days”. It wasn’t.

PNB director Bill Crosier notified the local board in Houston that Pacifica’s directors and officers liability policy had been cancelled, with an extension for only 60 days, and a bankruptcy/insolvency exemption in effect for those 60 days. The last day the policy provided full coverage was August 11th and it ends altogether on October 11th. Insurance underwriters had been demanding audited financial statements from Pacifica for months.

WBAI general manager Berthold Reimers made a rare on-air appearance at the NY station. His report to the listener can be heard here. 

If you would like to support either or both of the legal complaints filed by Pacifica members, you can visit the Clean Up Pacifica Project for more information. An amended complaint was filed in Yeakey vs Pacifica and can be read here. 

A timeline of the now two year old coup by the Siegel/Brazon faction can be seen here.

For a satirical look at Pacifica’s troubles from the inside and some biting general political commentary, KPFA’s Twit Wit Radio, produced by noted theatrical producer George Coates, is unmatched. Pacifica’s board elections is the topic of both the August 21st and August 28th episodes.

Twit Wit Radio: August 21, 2016

Twit Wit Radio: August 28, 2016

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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.