Originally posted August 25, 2014

Berkeley-Conflicted attorneys Siegel and Yee are preventing workers at LA station KPFK from going ahead with a recall election for elected staff rep Rodrigo Argueta, whose actions on the PNB have not pleased many of his constituents. Despite a filed petition with the required number of signatures from paid and unpaid staff at KPFK, the law  firm is preventing the recall election on the grounds that Argueta is not accountable for how he votes on the national board. Siegel and Yee’s trumped up letter of retainer as counsel is dated prior to the board discussion and board member Hank Lamb has disputed that the board ever authorized it. 

Annual tax returns for Pacifica (IRS form 990 and state form 199) were filed on August 15th. Copies of the filed tax forms have been, to date, kept from the board of directors, the audit committee, and the finance committee. CFO Salvador, whose filed returns in 2013 were $2 million dollars out of whack with audited financial statements released a month later, has still not amended the last tax returns, although he notified the board verbally he thought it likely the new returns just filed would “need to be amended”.

With no start date scheduled for the audit of the last fiscal year, Pacifica has fallen out of compliance with the Nonprofit Integrity Act (SB1262) which requires any charity with gross revenues of $2 million dollars or more to have available for inspection by the Attorney General and the public audited financial statements no later than nine months after the close of the fiscal year. Nine months after the end of the fiscal year was June 30, 2014. The audit was originally scheduled to begin on March 24th, but was scuttled by the abrupt firing of the executive director and the flight of the accounting office staff after the rehired CFO, who has been the subject of several workplace complaints, returned to the office.

A pending complaint to the CA Attorney General Registry of Charitable Trusts by 8 former board members can be found here (in a slightly updated version). The AG is responsible for California charitable compliance and can be asked to force the Pacifica board to run for re-election. Pacifica members can send a note to the AG here. 

Members objecting to the board majority’s actions over the past six months can sign a petition here.

After a respite in 2013, legal and labor matters appear to be overwhelming Pacifica again, with discovery beginning in the DC-board-members-suing-each-other case Ball vs Hughes, an EEOC complaint in Berkeley (Pacifica recently missed the deadline for mediation), and a Department of Labor hearing over a wage dispute. The national board appears to be receiving sketchy information, if any, on the various legal proceedings and is still waiting for the national office workplace investigation report from March of 2014 to be released by unelected chair Wilkinson.

The national board seems mostly to be occupying itself with kangaroo courts, a long-established tradition of the Siegel/Brazon faction that holds a slim majority on the board. Affiliate director Heather Gray, a board member at WRFG-Radio Free Georgia, and the former communications director at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, wrote this essay after being censured by the board ten days ago at 1 minute to midnight.

Former KPFA local board chair Richard Phelps commented on the Siegel/Brazon affiity for bullying tactics inCensure Without Due Process. 

At KPFK in Los Angeles, a board meeting scheduled to approve the FY/2015 budget for the station failed to meet quorum after some board members refused to attend without being given a copy of the budget to review prior to the meeting. The practice of asking local board members to vote on budget drafts without having time to review them has also been protested by UCR board members at KPFA in Berkeley in 2012 and 2013. The KPFK budget draft, which was provided a few days after the unsuccessful meeting included 2015 Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, which has not been granted nor allocated to the station (nor any of the Pacifica stations).

The Bay Area chapter of the venerable National Lawyer’s Guild, the legal arm of social justice movements across the nation, issued a letter to KPFA in Berkeley expressing great concern about the station’s direction and the recent removal of community-based public affairs programming from the AM drive-time. The letter stated that KPFA “reduced diversity on its airwaves”, “erased local character”, “silenced excellent reporting” and “engaged in viewpoint suppression”. The letter also refers to a lack of support for critical black programming and issues relevant to Black communities”.

In the uproar that followed the scheduling, un-scheduling and then re-scheduling of special event coverage for the Block The Boat demonstration at the Port of Oakland last week, KPFA’s 2.5 hour special, which can be heard here, the issue of managers in the bargaining unit at KPFA surfaced, as news director Aileen Alfandary is reported to have made the final call on permitting the broadcast to go forward. Alfandary also suspended news anchor Anthony Fest two months ago. Managerial responsibilities like suspending programmers and authorizing special broadcasts are generally consigned to management employees like program directors, who are not rank and file union members. The assumption by the news directors of managerial responsibilities while remaining in the union rank and file muddles lines of authority and violates the union contract.

Berkeley-based satirical sound collage Twit-Wit Radio, a 3-minute collaborative spoken word collage produced by noted theatrical director George Coates, continued to spoof the board-induced craziness on July 27th, with snippets of audio drawn from Pacifica’s actual board meetings.

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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.