Originally posted September 7, 2014

Berkeley-At Thursday night’s PNB meeting, the national board approved on somewhat nebulous terms a loan to Pacifica Foundation Radio of $156,000 from Southern California real estate magnate Aris Anagnos, the employer of board member Lydia Brazon. The reason for the loan was the payment of employee taxes for severance checks for 19 employees laid off from NY station WBAI in July of 2013. The loan is against WBAI’s future revenues, with $25,000 payments due after every station fund drive for the next year. The loan would cancel out for the next year a significant part of the potential cost savings from the hoped-for relocation of WBAI’s transmitter and antenna from its prohibitively expensive spot atop the Empire State Building.

The loan was apparently necessitated by the foundation spending down a $150,000 donation received in July from the family of Joe Toyashima. Requests to the board of directors about how the donation was spent weren’t answered, but the foundation’s financial priorities (replacing failing equipment in Texas and New York, back taxes, relocating NY’s antenna, and settling two lawsuits from creditors in Alameda Superior Court – Robert Half International and Pacifica Reporters Against Censorship-FSRN) do not appear to have been addressed with the funds.

 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. Pacifica members can send a note to the AG here. 

The board meeting began with DC board member Benito Diaz trying to target his former ally Luzette King, with a disciplinary letter. Diaz and King were supportive of each other in 2012-2013, when both worked actively to remove then-WPFW-manager, John Hughes, over programming changes disliked by the station’s staff, and to prevent the move of the DC station into a Silver Spring, MD building. Diaz joined a lawsuit against Pacifica (Ball vs Hughes) that is entering discovery and is currently requesting ten million dollars from Pacifica to “restore WPFW’s financial well-being” and the removal of delegates Tony Norman (vice-chair of the PNB), Pete Tucker and Campbell Johnson. The Diaz motion was tabled, but the ensuing 2 hours continued in a contentious and accusatory manner, with several board members berating each other at length. The audio archive can be found here. 

The Foundation continues to struggle with messy financial statements and an audit that has not begun, 11 months after the end of the last fiscal year. It is becoming apparent the network does not use one integrated accounting system any longer, but is running multiple sets of books, including a Quickbooks system in New York. At a NY local finance committee, the general manager talked of “scanning and emailing checks to the national office to be posted,” and Berkeley station KPFA appears to be doing the same with a $105,000 check copy found on a printer/scanner that did not appear in the network’s books, despite being deposited in May. Keeping multiple sets of books and not entering all transactions into a general ledger in real-time is a risk factor for errors and mis-statements.

The audit situation continues to be described to network members and board audit and finance committees in somewhat deceptive terms. National treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert reported on August 2nd that “none of the schedules needed for Pacifica’s auditors to begin work have been compiled. Pacifica’s CFO is hoping to complete that work shortly, and have the audit completed in August”. Auditor Armanino has stated the audit will take a minimum of 8 weeks after the receipt of prepatory schedules – making “a completed audit in August” (or September or October) factually impossible.

3 weeks before the end of the fiscal year, divisional and overall budgets aren’t done. KPFK in Los Angeles appears to be in a state of confusion, scheduling local board review of a draft budget that contained hundreds of thousands in grant funding the station was notified it would not receive ten months ago. KPFK’s finance committee rep Lydia Brazon received the notification on December 5, 2013, but seemingly did not tell the station the draft budget was wrong.

At the board’s audit committee meeting last week, a Houston rep Maria Elena Castellanos brought up (somewhat out of context), attempts to dissolve the network, which she wished to talk about, although the audit committee did not accomodate her. Here is what she said before being shut down: “I wanted to make it very clear that there is a motion afoot and it’s been brought up repeatedly during my two year tenure as an elected delegate, or a year and a half tenure and even before that, that KPFT break off from the Pacifica family and base that upon the development of a different non-profit corporation”.

Members objecting to the break-up of the radio network can sign a petition here.

For those interested in the long view, this 1994 interview with former Pacifica board chair Peter Franck provides some long-term perspective about the Pacifica wars.

A brief correction from the last edition:  When local activists blocked the Zim Piraeus from unloading the majority of their freight at the Port of Oakland to protest Israeli massacres in Gaza City, KPFA board operator, apprenticeship program coordinator and LSB staff rep Frank Sterling wanted Pacifica’s Berkeley station KPFA to be there chronicling the port blockade in real time. Sterling’s proposal to produce the coverage, which finally aired the morning before the 4-day community/labor blockade began, underwent a difficult internal battle at the station,Sterling went public with his distress in a heartfelt email where he said KPFA was breaking his heart, and after emails from the community flooded the station, the decision was reversed. The Save KPFA-affiliated local board member who berated Sterling’s appeal to the community as “not a good career move” in a Facebook discussion group was Kate Gowen, not Mark Hernandez.

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.