In the September 20 meeting of Pacifica’s financial committee, three hours resulted in only a recommendation to create a task force. Along the way, chair of the board Tony Norman gave his diagnosis of the problem: the executive staff won’t implement the ideas of the board of directors. His comments are recorded below and transcribed. 

Transcription: “I disagree with Adriana. I don’t think this is a feel-good measure. I mean, uh, there have been a lot of motions that have been feel-good measures and we adopted them so … it’s good to feel good. I don’t have a problem with adopting feel-good measures but this is not one of the feel-good measures. What I think Nick is getting to the heart of the issue. Even tonight, we’ve heard a lot of wonderful ideas, but the problem gets into implementation. Our general managers and managers are not putting these plans into place and they’re not being pressured to do that. So all the great ideas and motions that the committees pass and the PNB pass mean nothing if our executive officers do not implement these ideas. So I think the heart of what he is trying to get at is that we need a nimble task force, and you have to have buy-in with the executive director and general managers on this task force, so that it can begin implementing the ideas that these committees and boards have already adopted. That’s really a big problem that we’re having: somebody making sure that these things get done. And its not happening on the general manager level or on the general executive level. So at some point, somebody has to implement these proposals. So I think that is what he is trying to get at: setting up a task force and this task force has to be composed of the general managers and the executive director and those sort of people because those are the people who have the authority to make these things a reality. So we can pass all the motions we want on the PNB level and on the committee level, but until our staff and our executive officers implement these things, they are going nowhere. So I support what Nick is saying because I think that’s what we need to work on and hopefully that will get to it, but we have to have the buy-in of the executive director and the general managers, because the bottom line is they are the chief executive officers and they are the ones that make it happen”