Originally posted July 20, 2014

Berkeley- Houston listener representative Hank Lamb has introduced a motion to the Pacifica National Board to remove Margy Wilkinson as the PNB board chair and two-time interim executive director of Pacifica Radio. Lamb excoriated Wilkinson in an email he made public saying she had abused her authority as chair, withheld documents from the board, forced illegitimate votes, and “blackmailed the board”. Lamb also stated “Our majority is surreptitiously holding secret meetings to determine outcomes of official meetings in advance and illegitimately controlling agendas and acting in concert to prevent equal Directors a fair opportunity to have their issues discussed and solutions found”.

Members objecting to the board majority’s chaotic actions over the past six months, which will lead to the network’s dissolution, can sign a petition here. 

Wilkinson declared herself chair after a tie vote of 11-11 on the basis of a mismarked ballot, despite a bylaws requirement that stated the winner of a tie should be selected by lot (drawing straws or flipping a coin). The meeting audio describing the February maneuver can be found here.

Lamb also released a long email thread between rogue majority directors that followed his declaration. The thread, which was not meant for public consumption, confimed much of Lamb’s charges. Among the emails can be found an admission by Chair Wilkinson that no notice was provided on the motion that fired the previous executive director in March. (Wilkinson is worrying that she too, can be removed without notice). PNB treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert assures Wilkinson that “it’s totally different”. Both Wilkinson and Edwards-Tiekert testified under oath in Alameda Superior Court that notice was provided prior to the motion to terminate Reese on March 13th. They are now stating their previous testimony under oath was knowingly untrue.

Here is the exchange:

“On Jul 16, 2014 9:33 PM, “Margy Wilkinson” wrote:

>    Prior notice: We got to remove Summer with a simple majority because…what about prior notice?
>    margy

 From: Brian Edwards-Tiekert
>  To: Margy Wilkinson
>  Cc: Lydia Brazon ; JLF-SY ; Tony Norman ; Jim Brown ; Lawrence ; Rodrigo Argueta ; Cerene Roberts ; AdrianaPNB ; Benito A. Diaz
>  Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 9:54 PM

 totally different situation.
>  -Brian

The full thread can be found here. 

The next Pacifica National Board meeting will be this Thursday, July 24th, at 8:30pm eastern time. It will be streamed live here and audio will be available after the meeting is over. At the meeting on July 17th, after voting narrowly to keep Lamb’s motion to remove Wilkinson off the agenda, the board defeated 4/5 bylaws amendments and adjourned. The only bylaws amendment to meet with the approval of the board was a proposal to add a 2nd bylaws amendment period each year, creating a feedback loop with the board proposing a dozen bylaws amendments and then refusing to support their own proposals. The remaining 7 will be heard at the meeting on the 24th. 

The network continues to have two stations needing FCC relicensure. New York’s WBAI is facing a possible eviction from its tower location on the Empire State Building and is attempting to move its aging equipment to 4 Times Square. The new location would be a tremendous reduction in operational costs that is much needed at WBAI. Houston’s KPFT has a fifth temporary authorization to run at low power expiring in November of 2014 and is unable to relicense until it replaces equipment that can no longer run at full power. An offer to purchase the Houston station was apparently received at the national headquarters recently, but has not been passed on to the national board. LA Director Kim Kaufman is trying to obtain the details of the license sale proposal for KPFT. The vast majority of the network’s members do not favor the sale of any of the 5 Pacifica Radio licenses for cash.

The board majority continues to delay the election postponed from 2013. The March 1 deadline to hire an election supervisor passed 4 1/2 months ago and nominations should have opened in June. Plans to convert to an online voting system to save $50,000 in printing and postage costs cannot be implemented until the board appoints someone to do the job. Former PNB vice-chair Bill Crosier applied for the job months ago and issued detailed plans for how to proceed, but the PNB election committee stated at their last meeting that the applicant pool is not diverse. Local board members elected in 2010, including Wilkinson, would enter their 2nd unelected year if the election does not go forward.

Among the documents Lamb is trying to obtain from the board majority is a workplace investigation completed by a certified workplace investigator in March on numerous complaints about hostile working conditions at the foundation’s headquarters with regard to the supervision of the fired/rehired CFO Salvador. Lamb expresses concern about the “hiding of the CFO investigation, which very obviously has bad news in it for our own decision to rehire”. The results of an 8-hour mediation session in June with the CFO and five accounting employees in the national office has also been concealed from the board of directors. Since the mediation session, 2 of the supervised employees have quit and at least one has gone out on medical leave. The national office has rehired one employee who was previously let go for unauthorized releases of payroll data via email without the encryption of personally identifying information.

Three weeks prior to the deadline for the submission of 2012-2013 fiscal year tax returns, the annual audit has not begun and no financial data has been released since the March board coup. Preliminary data through 12-31-2013 released prior to the board takeover remain the only financial data made available by the network in calender year 2014. The network’s erroneous 2011-2012 tax returns have also not been amended, despite the omission of Schedule B from the 990 form and form 109 from the 199 state filing. A series of excuses have been disseminated by PNB treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert, chair/IED/IED Wilkinson and fired/rehired CFO Salvador, but the varied statements have been inconsistent and have not justified the delays. Among the statements have been:

a. No data was entered into the general ledger after October 2013.

(This is untrue. In the first week of February, all data for all stations except KPFA was in the general ledger through 12-31-2013. Here is the preliminary financial statement issued at that time).

b. No payroll data has been entered since March.

(Payroll data is provided to Pacifica by the payroll vendor Paychex in detailed reports that are sent in after each payroll. An example of a Paychex report can be seen in the slideshow here. The entering of payroll data is a data entry task of copying the numbers from the Paychex report into the general ledger. This is a task that can be completed by a clerical employee in 1-2 days).

c. The budgets are not in the general ledger

(Budgets are plans. There do not need to be budgets in the general ledger to issue statements recording how much was actually earned and how much actually spent).

At KPFA in Berkeley, the unpaid staff organization expressed opposition to a management plan to eliminate volunteer pledge dive rooms and utilize coporate call centers during on-air fund drives and also passed a resolution asking for the reinstatement of the Morning Mix program, which has been replaced by syndicated programming from Los Angeles, which keeps all volunteer-based citizen journalism efforts at KPFA blacklisted off the air from 5:00am to 1:00pm every day.

The Green Party of Alameda County endorsed the statement earlier passed by the San Francisco Green Party. The statement begins:

“Think globally, act locally” is as relevant today as it was in 1915, when Scots biologist, sociologist, and town planner Patrick Geddes wrote Cities in Evolution.  “We need locally produced, locally relevant programming to help us make specific connections between our daily lives and politics and those of the international community and the planet.”.

The full statement can be found here.   

KPFA’s former local station board chair Richard Phelps wrote an article in June laying out concisely some of the history of the programming and labor struggles at the Berkeley station.

A community town hall meeting will be held on August 2nd at the Berkeley Federation of Unitarian Universalists and live-streamed nationwide. 

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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.