Originally posted June 24, 2014

Berkeley-Alarmed by the abrupt removal of community-based programming at their sister station up north, the local station board at KPFK passed a motion on June 18th to prevent program rearrangement at their Los Angeles station. The motion by staff rep Jim Lafferty, ED of the Southern California chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, states “No programs shall be rescheduled or canceled based on how much money they raise, every programmer shall have access to all fund-drive premiums, and programmers shall be allowed to select and add premiums appropriate to their audience to the general list. The iGM shall have a conversation with the programmers to explain the fund drive process and discuss the programmers’ concerns.” It passed by a vote of 10-1-2.

The KPFK local station board is dominated by the same Save KPFA/JUC majority faction which applauded the KPFA removal of the Morning Mix and puts forward “local control” as their mantra, indicating some major splits within the majority faction. The contradiction points to the lack of logic in ongoing Pacifica battles about programming, which tend to focus on “who decides”  rather than establishing consistent measures for how program content should be featured and what metrics of evaluation should be used to make changes. The organization also needs to examine what is often in media outlets called “the wall” between financial planning and decisions about editorial content.

New York station WBAI continues to face a forced antenna relocation after the Empire State Building landlord returned two months worth of payments for the station’s equipment space rental ($100,000). With new FM antenna space coming into the Manhattan market after 1 World Trade Center opened for business, rental prices are expected to drop and it may be possible to extricate WBAI from its enormously expensive agreement with Empire State, which runs until 2020. This is the first good news on the WBAI front for some time. Questions remain about the remaining liability on the existing lease, and replacement costs for WBAI’s fragile and aging transmitter.

The network’s leadership instability continues as it looks to appoint its 4th executive director in the past 4 months. With the current temporary interim leaving the country after the July 4th holiday, no replacement has been named. Members of the board of directors have no idea who the next executive director will be less than two weeks before the transition, introducing some questions as to who exactly is running the organization at the moment.

Pacifica’s election committee was unable to meet on Monday June 23rd as scheduled, due to late payment of the conference call service Ring 2. The $5,000 late payment follows a fund drive cycle in the last six weeks that secured $2.2 million dollars in pledges from the network’s 70,000 donors.

Pacifica’s auditor, Armanino Mckenna, one of the nation’s largest auditing firms, looks to be unable to proceed with an audit of the last fiscal year, which ended over 9 months ago. Fired/rehired CFO Raul Salvador announced at Thursday’s board meeting that less than 1/3 of the required audit prep work had been done at the local stations. The firm’s tax director was reduced to asking for help:“The final due date for the Form 990 for the year ended September 30, 2013 is August 15, 2014. To date, I have received neither financial information nor any other information to use to prepare the exempt organization returns. Will you help us obtain the information we need to prepare complete and accurate returns?”.

Siegel and Yee, the Oakland law firm headed by the former Pacifica National Board member and Oakland mayoral candidate Dan Siegel, has now been retained by the rogue board majority three times without following conflict of interest provisions in the CA Corporations Code. Siegel’s employee Jose Luis Fuentes sits on the board in the seat vacated by Siegel in January of 2014, the 3rd Siegel and Yee attorney to sit on KPFA’s board since 2011. Alan Yee, Siegel’s law partner, recently vetoed a recall petition filed by LA staff members against their staff rep Rodrigo Argueta on the basis that recalls by constituents violate anti-slapp statutes.

If you live in California’s North Bay, this event will be happening this evening:

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.