Originally posted February 9, 2015
Berkeley-Pacifica’s expedited executive director search (to replace unelected board chair Margy Wlkinson) hit a snag when the board majority’s favored candidate declined the job, apparently spooked by the upcoming attorney general audit. The search process, which has been marred by consistent charges of corruption including the running of private want ads by Wilkinson directing applications to herself instead of the board-appointed search committee, and restoring candidates to the final pool after they had objectively received lower scores in early interviews than candidates who were eliminated from the final pool. The process finally concluded with a rushed vote only 3 days prior to the expiration of the 2014 boards term of office.
The narrowly-winning candidate then met privately with Wilkinson and CFO Salvador and was reported to have declined the position. Instead of then turning to the second place candidate, who received strong support from many members of the board, and had also received strong support as a candidate in the 2013 executive director search won by former IED Summer Reese, the board of directors is reported to be embarking on a brand new election, apparenty unwilling to abide by the results of the first.
Per Pacifica’s bylaws, executive searches are performed using “Instant Runoff Voting” or IRV, an election system that records ranked preferences and accurately records the strength of relative support for candidates among a group of voters. The point of IRV is to avoid run-off elections by measuring the full extent of a candidate’s support in an initial election by recording second and third place votes as well as first place votes. IRV ballot data can be rerun excluding one or more candidates and will indicate which candidate wins the election in the absence of one or more of the original pool.
The board majority’s action for a “redo”, which they failed to report out to the public as required by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and encouraged by the “sunshine laws” in place in most public institutions constitutes trickery and bad faith in two respects: firstly it violates their stated declaration that the 2014 board would make the hiring decision, something board majority members insisted had been agreed upon by the full board, despite complaints about scheduling a vote within days of the end of their terms.
Secondly, the decison represents a redo as in lets-have-a-new-election-because-we-didn’t-like-the-results-of-the-first-one. The problem being caused by the board majority voting “wrong” by not providing sufficient second place votes for their now-preferred candidate to ensure that candidate would win in the absence of the frontrunner. In other words, they messed up so they want to vote all over again rather than honoring the results of the election they completed a mere 12 days ago.
For Wilkinson, who swore on a stack of bibles that she “won” the chairmanship of the board by breaking an 11-11 tie with a 5th place ranking,, to throw out an IRV election because she doesn’t like the results caused by second place votes, presents more than a bit of hypocrisy.
Pacifica In Exile readers who think the board should abide by the results of their own election can contact the board of directors at [email protected].
Truthout took a look at Pacifica’s situation in this article by Michael Corcoran.
The network’s winter fund drives have been troubled to date, with Houston station KPFT booking only $207K of a $280K goal (a 26% shortfall that does not bode well for the relacement of their dysfunctional transmitter ) and disappointing results in Los Angeles for the first week. Marquee public affiars host Sonali Kolhatkar missed the entire first week of KPFK’s fund drive and almost two weeks of fund drive at Berkeley’s KPFA where the LA program wiped a local public affairs strip off the AM grid. KPFA’s fund drive is at about $375K after the first two weeks working towards a $630K goal. Numbers have not been released yet from East Coast stations WPFW and WBAI.
In California, confusion reigns with three hours of daily simulcasts at 8am, 10am and 6pm directing LA-area pledges to Berkeley where they are credited to KPFK if answered by Cox-Cable-owned call center Telerep, and held if answered by community volunteers at the Berkeley station, with numbers for the LA pledges not available until after the completion of the fund drive. The delay makes it difficult for either station to determine if they are or aren’t making their goals and if not, how short they are.
A vast list of documents is due to California’s attorney general in 10 days for a correspondence audit triggered by the 2014 boards failure to complete an indepedent audit. No audit draft surfaced at either the January 29th or February 5th meetings of the national board, the latest in a long series of broken promises from the CFO, dating back to August of 2013.
Year-end financial statements, finally provided in two different versions at the end of January (see the 1-27 version and the 1-29 version), four months after the end of the fiscal year, showed continuing deficit operations at all five stations, with the largest loss at Berkeley’s KPFA in the Thursday version, with a deficit nearing -$500,000, negative numbers not reached since the Berkeley station spent down its entire $1,000,000 dollar cash reserve in 2009-2010. The statements appear to be riddled with errors, but for what its worth, they show large losses at the DC station WPFW and LA’s KPFK, with surprisingly small deficits at New York’s WBAI, which is currently posting the lowest operating deficit in the network after former ED Reese laid off 75% of the employees after a decade of large operating losses in New York.
KPFA’s Frank Sterling, who came under heavy fire for proposing that the Berkeley station devote 90 minutes on Saturday February 7th to live coverage of the huge “March for New Climate Leadership” in Oakland (Sterling was told to apologize and that he had “crossed the line) produced independent video coverage of the march that can be watched here using U-Stream.
KPFA’s local advisory board is holding an open meeting at Berkeley’s Public Library at 2090 Kittredge Street on February 22, from 1:30 to 3:30pm, to discuss strengthening community ties with the Berkeley radio station. The event is open to all and the CAB describes it as: “This event, sponsored by the KPFA Community Advisory Board is open to the public and is especially for individuals, community groups and social justice activists who want to be involved with KPFA’s free speech radio-media network. We want to explore new possibilities for KPFA live streaming, outreach interviews, Twitter, and other radio-media resources. We want to support the dissemination of people’s stories, perspectives, and thinking to foster effective coverage about local events as well as our responses to national and global actions such as those we witness in Ferguson, New York and Cleveland.Join us in building a KPFA Community and Staff Network, addressing issues of democratization and justice in our lives, in our communities and for the planet”.
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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.