Janis Lane-Ewart and the Pacifica National Board,

Although I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the Pacifica Personnel Committee Chair, I must hereby resign from the PNB Personnel Committee. I am unable to be part of a committee that reflects another deeply flawed hiring process.  The EEOC looks badly upon organizations that, in their personnel affairs, do not apply the same criteria to all people being considered for employment. The Pacifica Personnel Committee’s current Executive Director Search has been fatally flawed from the beginning and correcting that position would require that the Committee start over and follow correct procedures; and I don’t see that happening.

A few months after the Pacifica Board officially voted to hire Summer Reese; a new Board came in with a slim majority and after some very questionable maneuvers fired Reese. The slim majority then installed the “new” Board Chair (herself under the cloud of a highly irregular Chair election) as Interim Executive Director. Some members of the Personnel Committee rushed to start a “new” ED Search, ignoring the fact that the runner-up to Reese, by one vote, was still available and very interested in the position. It is questionable if a “new” ED Search was in fact needed.

There were two different application paths provided simultaneously. The Interim Executive Director (working outside of the Personnel Committee) placed some ads with job descriptions, deadline dates and lists of “required data” and began recruiting ED candidates, and had the candidates’ personal information be sent to her at the Pacifica National Office. Meanwhile, the official Personnel Committee placed recruitment ads to comply with EEOC guidelines (not knowing of the iED’s placement of ads) that required different criteria such as submitting a cover letter and an essay, had different deadlines and asked for the candidate’s personal information be sent to a different address for the committee’s use only. As the applications from those responding to the different ads came in, there was no way to assure that all incoming apps were included. Although the earlier runner-up, by one vote, had expressed an interest in continuing to be included in any new search; the earlier runner-up was not included.

The new applicants were then evaluated by a survey.  A list of the seven top ranking candidates from the survey results was given to the committee. These were the candidates who received the highest scores on a list of qualifications determined by the committee to be essential for the job. A motion was then passed to add other candidates to the list of semifinalists who had not ranked highly in the survey rankings. Later, a motion was passed to add the original runner-up to Reese, originally excluded from the process, back to the list of semi-finalist.

I have decided that I do not want to be associated with these highly questionable hiring practices, and therefore, I am resigning from the Pacifica Personnel Committee.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard Uzzell, Pacifica Director, KPFT-Houston