Originally posted October 5, 2014
Berkeley-The network’s controversial CFO, Raul Salvador, has not responded to last week’s revelation that he did not, in fact, recently “discover” payments to the network’s profit-sharing pension fund had not been made in 2013, but made that decision himself in a meeting with the third party administrator in the summer of 2013. And he concealed it in the last Pacifica audit which reports the $200,101 accrued for both retirement plans was paid. The whereabouts of the $92,413 said to be paid to the pension plan, but never received, is unknown.
The workplace investigation report done in February after five complaints of a hostile work environment in the national office caused by Salvador, was finally revealed to the board of directors via a director’s inspection by affiliates director Janis Lane-Ewart. No action has been taken by the board. The contents remain embargoed with directors being threatened with censure or expulsion from the board if they discuss the findings. Houston director Hank Lamb complained prior to the inspection that the investigation had “not been handled well, in fact illegally” in his email titled “The Majority Has Got To Be Stopped” in June of 2014.
Salvador was involved in a similar mess at the Cesar Chavez Foundation in 2010, when Cesar Chavez’s son Anthony Chavez sued his brother Paul alleging retaliatory firing, embezzlement and a hostile work environment. Salvador carried out what Anthony Chavez considered a revenge firing against an employee deposed in a sexual harassment case.
In a bizarre decision, the national board at its October 4th meeting appointed Salvador and chair/IED Wilkinson the new pension plan trustees, depriving the plan of any oversight by disinterested trustees.
Members objecting to the board majority’s actions over the past nine months can sign a petition here.
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.
Siegel and Yee attorney Jose Luis Fuentes, apparently concerned about Pacifica’s deteriorating financial condition, put forward a motion to hire an ERISA attorney to help Pacifica “break” or “get out of” union contracts that require two different retirement plans: a 403(b) plan with an employer match of up to 4% of salary and a profit-sharing pension plan with an additional mandatory employer contribution of 2% of annual salary. He was called a “union-buster” by his colleagues and the motion resoundingly defeated.
Later in the meeting, it was announced that all 5 stations were in default on shared network services payments to the national office. The total amount unpaid is $629,00 with KPFA and WBAI leading the deadbeat list. The station by station breakdown follows:
WBAI $156,000
KPFA $150,000
WPFW $134,000
KPFK $100,000
KPFT $89,000
Early fund drive results have not been available, except at KPFK, where the first 2.5 days of the fund drive were lower than average. Prime-time program Uprising, recently syndicated to Berkeley to make money by wiping 5 hours of local programming, averaged $626/hr for the 1st 3 days of LA’s drive.
At that same meeting, board secretary Cerene Roberts peremptorily disposed of 25 pending motions by her colleagues, removing them from the agenda, including the motion to replace Wilkinson as chair due to “abusing her authority, withholding documents from the board, forcing illegitimate votes and blackmailing the board”. That motion had not budged from its position on the agenda for 2 1/2 months after being introduced in July, and has now been removed.
Pacifica’s audit for the 2013 fiscal year (10-1-2012 to 9-30-2013) has still not begun and will not be completed prior to the end of the calender year. PNB treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert conceded in the streamed financial committee meeting that any hypothetical reinstatement of Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding would “not happen quickly”.
The network’s budgeting process continues to be in disarray, with only KPFT in Houston having managed an LSB-approved draft by the beginning of the fiscal year. Both California stations are routing their budgets around their local boards, which will never get a chance to vote or modify their divisional budgets and no budget draft has yet surfaced from the Washington station, WPFW.
The network’s national finance committee spent most of its time at the last meeting threatening the network’s archives divison, despite its success at securing funding from the National Archives in Washington DC, the only Pacifica divison to secure any meaningful outside institutional support. KPFA board treasurer Barbara Whipperman called the archives “a big side busines” and questioned whether the stations should continue to support the archival preservation program. The attack on the archives can be heard here, in a sound clip from the meeting. Treasuer Brian Edwards-Tiekert made some astoundingly false statements in the clip, stating the network has lost $6 million dollars in income since 2008 (it hasn’t – his figures included imaginary grants that did not exist. The real figure is half – $2.5-3 million) and all stations had cut staff by 1/3 (which is true only of WBAI, no other Pacifica station has cut salary/benefit costs by more then 10-15% in the last 5 years).
In LA, the working budget draft proposes an increase of $350,000 in listener support, along with a decline in premium costs of 67%, and an increase in staffing costs of $150,000. The budget draft also does not include the costs for the corporate call center (estimated to be at least $60-75K annually) and mis-states the station’s fulfillment rate (the amount of pledges that are actually paid) as 89% when the historical data is at about 79%.
In Berkeley, donations are predicted to double from last year. The budget draft makes some odd choices, cutting the station’s accounting staff despite serious problems with failing to perform reconciliations since 2012 and failing to book event ticket revenue for more than a year at a time. It also eliminates the music department head who supervises 100+ programmers and 1/2 of the station’s program schedule while retaining 2 department heads for the news department, which prepares 1 hour of program each day and has 4 employees. The draft also calls for significant cuts to investigative magazine Flashpoints, while restoring the Reuters news wire, expressing an institutional preference for corporate wire copy over original reporting.
At KPFA’s September 13th local board meeting, representatives from the Arab Organizing Committee (AROC) and Critical Resistance (CR) showed up to thank the station for the special coverage of the Block The Boat action in August of 2014, coverage that almost didn’t happen. Producer and staff rep Frank Sterling, who saved the broadcast with an appeal to the community for support, made a statement to the board about what happened with the Block The Boat special program. You can listen to it here.
At the same meeting, the Save KPFA majority on the local board voted to recommend six candidates to a hiring pool for the station’s new program director, sight unseen. 20 of the board members did not interview, nor see the resumes, nor know the names or the qualifications of the candidates they recommended to be hired as the station’s program director. The process was objected to by subcommittee member Joy Moore, but she conceded that she had been “out-voted” on the hiring committee. The hiring committee’s tie-breaker vote would have belonged to un-elected chair/IED/IED Wilkinson, who did not recuse herself despite being the direct supervisor of the general manager receiving the recommendations. The process directly violated a PD Hire Process policy authored by national boad member Lydia Brazon and passed by the national board in 2012 in about half-a-dozen different ways.
Two weeks later, KPFA’s general manager announced the inside hiring of a public affairs producer as the new program director, Laura Prives.
KPFA’s Chevon check saga continues. No reason has been provided for not using the station’s Schwab brokerage account, publicized here on the station’s website to handle the stock donation, rather than engaging in a direct transaction with the massive oil company. The $105,000 proceeds weren’t entered into the books and did not appear in the CFO’s financial statements, issued in August 4 months after the receipt of the funds.
KPFA’s unpaid staff, who produce 2/3 of the station’s programming are – in combination with the other 4 stations similar groups of unpaid producers – at over 1,000 strong, one of the largest banks of community media practictioners in the nation. Pacifica, the parent of all public broadcasting in the United States was forward-thinking in more ways than one, and adopted radical workplace practices by unionizing both its paid and unpaid employees together under the auspices of the UE (United Electrical Workers). KPFA’s last UE paid/unpaid contract can be found here. The trailblazing contract included a grievance procedure for both paid and unpaid staff members, leaves of absence for parenthood and caregiving, the right to strike, and childcare subsidies for both paid and unpaid staffers. The breaking of paid/unpaid solidarity was one of the saddest outcomes of the 1995-1999 troubles. At KPFA, the first station to kick the unpaid staff out of the union (WBAI held out for several years), the KPFA’s paid staff’s decision to eliminate the UE union and move to CWA without the unpaid staff in 1995, caused great upheaval and wounds that are yet to heal. Events like the police beating of unpaid staffer Nadra Foster in 2008, and the expulsion of unpaid staffer JR Valrey, who had no recourse to any grievance procedure, continually re-open the old scabs. An unpaid staffer at the time recalled the following:
“Circa 1995, Pacifica management told them {the paid staff} to keep the unpaid staff out of the union as a condition for “good faith” bargaining over wages and benefits. I’m not exaggerating that this was a back room deal with unpaid staff kept in the dark. News leaked to us when a former Apprentice — then in the bargaining unit — blew the whistle. Pissed off unpaid staff of all political persuasions — and on both sides of the current struggle — called an emergency meeting where various responses weighed in — including those who were trying to calm us down with the idea that paid staff had “no choice” despite everyone being unsettled with the secretive manner in which the deal transpired.”
The whistleblowing former apprentice and shop steward was named Samuel Guia, who quit his job after the 16-7 vote to expel the KPFA unpaid staff from the union in 1995. KPFA has an informal Unpaid Staff Organization (UPSO), but it lacks the ability to enforce agreements with management and is subject to arbitrary de-recognition at any time, which last happened in 2007. The organization was not restored until 2009, when ED Grace Aaron did so after a lawsuit filed by then-board members Joe Wanzala, Shahram Aghamir and Tracy Rosenberg after they were hit with bogus harassment charges from then-manager Lemlem Rijio. Their settlement conditions consisted of an apology, the rewriting of Pacifica’s outdated 1995 personnel policy, and the re-recognition of KPFA’s Unpaid Staff Organization.
Meanwhile, Berkeley’s Wellstone Democratic Club, the political home of the “Save KPFA” faction continues with bitter internal squabbles, with KPFA local station board member Mal Burnstein told to “drop the innuendo which you use so well to smear”, “you’re coming pretty close to slander” and “disseminating half truths and lies presented as facts” with regard to former Richmond City Councilman Tony Thurmond’s campaign for the CA Assembly.
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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.