Originally posted June 28, 2014

Berkeley-The continued shuttling of the Pacifica Network’s legal business to the law firm of board member Jose Luis Fuentes has incited the rage of Texas listener rep Hank Lamb. Siegel and Yee, the law firm run by Oakland mayoral candidate Dan Siegel, his partner Alan Yee – the campaign treasurer for Oakland mayoral candidate Jean Quan – and former Oakland City Council member and failed 2012 candidate for Oakland City Attorney Jane Brunner,  has taken on 3 legal matters for Pacifica since the March 25th resignation of corporate counsel Terry Gross. None of them have been voted on by a majority of the currently-seated board of directors as required by California Corporations Code Section 5233, when a public benefit corporation enters into a contract which financially benefits a member of the board of directors.

Lamb’s long rant by email, which he sent to all of his colleagues on the board as well as a Pacifica discussion list-serv with 100+ members, can be found in its entirety here.  In it, Lamb refers to the “bullshit” he is being told by officers of the board and puts the current board majority “on notice” that they have lost him as a member. Lamb goes on to state: “This will end in court. The majority, at this point, has got to be stopped. They are no longer a majority and not representative of Pacifica in any way, as far as making decisions in huddles or outside PNB meetings and it had better stop. I am ready to pay any price to get things on the table, public and righted.”

The filing by Siegel and Yee sent in on Pacifica’s behalf in the case Pacifica Reporters Against Censorship (Free Speech Radio News) vs Pacifica Foundation Radio – apparently without the knowledge of many of the members of the board – claims the contractual agreement between Pacifica and the independent news production, which Pacifica defaulted on after not getting Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, isn’t “authorized”. Pacifica contracted for the daily half hour newscast for more than a decade and provided it to all five Pacifica stations as well as 180 affiliate stations who paid Pacifica for access to the program via the Audioport distribution system.

The abrupt removal of community-based programming in the AM hours at Berkeley station KPFA continues to generate negative reactions throughout the Bay Area. Noted author and long-time Pacifica supporter Michael Parenti wrote “I believe it is of the utmost importance to keep the Morning Mix at its morning drive time  in order to give it the largest possible audience.” Cazadero-based listener-sponsor Lani Ka’ahumanu asked to have her name removed as an endorser of “Save KPFA” and wrote “Quite frankly I’m not only disappointed, I’m upset. For a community station to disappear important community people and their programing in one fell swoop shows a basic lack of respect for everyone concerned including listeners.” Noted actor, director and long-time Pacifica supporter Danny Glover mentioned he listened to Morning Mix programs when at home in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Green Party passed this lengthy resolution at their June 25th meeting expressing their conviction that local coverage will suffer from the ill-considered change forced through by the board majority.

Here’s an excerpt: “This may not be of concern to KPFA’s wealthier subscribers who never have and never will have to live next to an oil refinery, a crude-by-rail transit line, an oil storage tank, or any of the radioactive and otherwise toxic sites that the U.S. Navy abandoned all around San Francisco Bay. They may never have to face any number of other injustices in their daily lives, but if KPFA is to foster real community within the fm signal area it claims to serve, in accordance with its mission, it must consider these injustices to some as injustices to all. It must not exclude them from the station’s early morning hours.”

A petition to reverse the saturation of drive time with syndicated programming is located here. 

 Pacifica has not made any announcement who the 4th executive director in the last 3 and 1/2 months will be, 4 working days before the departure of the current occupant to New Zealand. Payroll and benefits administrator Weiling Thai is the latest employee to join the exodus from the national office, started by controller Maria Gaite who quit several weeks ago.

Pacifica’s national finance committee issued a plea on June 10th for financial statements/data, but nothing has been released 3 weeks later. The committee meeting on June 24th was canceled along with a scheduled meeting of the audit committee. Berkeley station KPFA has released no financial data since February. The annual audit has no scheduled date to begin. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting extension filed by Reese and administrative manager Tamika Miller the day after Reese’s termination has expired. Annual financial reports are due to CPB in March and payments are made to stations in May and November of each year. Pacifica has missed all of the filing deadlines for 2014 funding.

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. Specifications have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission to move the broadcasting equipment to the Conde Nast building at 4 Times Square. Questions remain about the remaining liability on the existing lease, and replacement costs for WBAI’s fragile and aging transmitter.

The next hearing in PDGG vs Pacifica has been kicked over to August 14th.

A petition to prevent the rumored break-up of the network can be found here. 

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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.