Berkeley– On December 20, the Pacifica National Board considered the new set of bylaws initiated by the Pacifica Restructuring Project to gut the democratic reforms introduced in 2003. The new set of proposed bylaws, which were written by a small group of people primarily in Berkeley, with a few helpers in Texas and LA, would return the Pacifica network to a majority of self-selected individuals on the board of directors.
Supported by a membership petition signed by 1% of Pacifica’s overall contributing membership, the Pacifica Restructuring Project went to court to force this vote. Their lawsuit (technically an alternative writ of mandate) was filed in Alameda County Superior Court on the auspicious date of October 7th, the same day that former Pacifica IED John Vernile and two directors from Texas, Adrienne LaViolette (who just resigned from the Pacifica National Board) and Bill Crosier, swept into New York City and took WBAI off the air, setting up a month of legal battles that ended on November 6th, when NY State Supreme Court judge Melissa Crane returned WBAI-FM to the air.
In one of the weirder moments in our lengthy history of chronicling Pacifica Foundation weirdness, the national directors pursuing the bylaws lawsuit failed to inform their colleagues they were suing them in Alameda Superior Court, despite hours and hours of board emails and telephone calls in the month of October. This left it up to this publication on October 20, acting on a tip from a member of the public, to formally tell the Pacifica board of directors they were being sued by some of themselves and had a court appearance the following morning.
The so-called “secret lawsuit” demanded a number of things, including an election without paper ballots, and an election without any quorum number at all (the minimum number of people who have to vote in order for the vote to be binding), but had to settle for just a 30-day extension on the standard bylaws amendment process. That 30-day extension expires on February 1, 2020. After a 45-day notice period, the national board held the required vote. National board members expressed broad discontent with the provisions of the proposed new bylaws and even more discontent with the tactics employed by the Pacifica Restructuring Project, but voted “yes” in order to allow Pacifica’s delegates, the 100 people elected to serve on local, but not national boards, to weigh in on the proposed changes. You can read the statement from your national directors here. The delegates are deeply impacted by this proposal as some who were elected just a month ago, after spending several months campaigning, face being immediately removed from their seats under this new proposal. This negates both their efforts and their desire to serve and reverses the votes of the 6,085 Pacifica members who chose delegates just a few months ago. One of the strange aspects of this bylaws amendment proposal is that it allows a numerical majority of 10% of the membership (or as little as 5.1%) to undo the votes of 13% of the membership. Which doesn’t seem quite right.
The current state of play on bylaws-palooza is that as a result of the national board vote of 13-1-3 to approve the bylaws proposal, the local station boards (composed of your elected delegates) will also consider the proposals in the month of January, leaving a very short period of time in the latter half of January for a potential membership election. It’s unfortunate that this rushed process is going forward. Something as serious as restating the foundation bylaws and ending the democratic experiment deserves the extensive debate and discussion a year-long process would have permitted. Possibly, 2020 or 2021 will allow for a more comprehensive process that will address the streamlining needed without throwing the baby out with the bathwater or trying to slip something through without vetting and the dialogue needed to gain broader support.
In other news, we did promise some financial news and some positive suggestions. While once again, circumstances have limited the amount of space available, we wanted to take a minute to address one simple matter. Preliminary financial statements for the fiscal year that ended 9-30-2019 show almost $2 million dollars in estate gifts to the network, primarily to WBAI, KPFA and KPFK. These bequests from listeners who have passed away are windfall money, unpredictable, and supplementary to station operating budgets. As Pacifica faces the need to repay the loan that bailed the network out of the remainder of the disastrous Empire State contract, millions of windfall dollars is great news. However, it seems that of this almost two million dollars, a mere $300,000 or 15% went towards repaying the loan that many are afraid will lead to apocalypse. All of that $300,000 came from NY-area bequests. Not a penny of the California bequest funds of almost $1.4 million went towards removing the California studio buildings from their loan collateral status.
This seemed wildly irresponsible to us, so we wanted to know how it happened. With the majority of the funds, which were received at KPFA in Berkeley ($1.026 million), the receipt of these windfall funds was not reported to Pacifica’s expensive outsourced accounting firm NETA, or to the national board of directors, until 9 months after they had been received. After they had been spent. We know this because NETA issued a cash flow report in September of 2019 which didn’t include these funds, a report that we published here at Pacifica in Exile. Here it is again and here is the November report which abruptly added in those funds to November 2018, December 2018 and June of 2019.
Our recommendation, which is simple enough and has been said often enough, is that the Pacifica Foundation is one single not for profit organization, not 5 competitive fiefdoms. Decisions about the use of resources by a nonprofit are made by two things – a) written donor restrictions that accompany charitable gifts and b) by the nonprofit board of directors in the interests of the overall welfare of the nonprofit organization and in the furtherance of its mission.
So we recommend going forward that charitable gifts from bequests and estates be processed by the Pacifica national office under the supervision of the board of directors, and that all applicable donor restrictions be communicated, and that until the loan is paid back, the policy of Pacifica must be to utilize the majority of financial windfalls to repay the loan principal as soon as possible. We hope policy similar to this will be developed and implemented for 2020. The intent of the lender was for Pacifica to recover from the terrible Empire State lease and the collateral awful decision to plow millions of dollars into its own program, Democracy Now, and move forward from these decisions in the early 2000’s that prevented Pacifica from establishing much financial security.
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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-sponsored radio.