Originally posted February 25, 2015
Berkeley-Pacifica Radio sent “something” to the California Attorney General last week, but exactly what was sent has been concealed from the board of directors, at least those of them not affiliated with the rogue majority. Despite repeated requests for a copy of the jump drive sent to the AG’s office, IED/chair Wilkinson has failed to provide it more than a week after the deadline, and says she will not be able to get copies to board members until next week. This would be a problem for board members if omissions and errors are found in the documents as the board of directors is collectively responsible for the contents sent. Among the documents sent was not the long-delayed audit of the year ended 9-30-2013, which remains undone after 17 months. Auditor Armanino has declined to sign an engagement letter with Pacifica for the next fiscal year, which ended on 9-30-2014.
The board of directors may lose their liability (D&O) insurance on March 10, 2015 after an emergency extension last fall, unless the completed independent audit for the year ending 9-30-2013 is filed with the insurance provider. Under certain circumstances, lack of directors and officers insurance can allow directors to be personally liable for employment and derivative legal actions should Pacifica become insolvent and no longer able to indemnify board members with the nonprofit’s revenues.
The audit committee meeting scheduled for February 24th was canceled.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant funding will require independent auditors reports for both the year that ended 9-30-2013 and the year that ended 9-30-2014 be filed with the agency by April 15, 2015 (with an extension). A second extension would require the consent of the agency and is considered unlikely.
Pacifica’s troubled executive director search, featuring a rushed vote, then a redo vote, and then a ballot misdirected onto the Internet, ended with a whine, with several members of the board of trustees boycotting the vote, some with an announcement, and others silently by not participating. As many as a third of the trustees may have chosen not to participate at all. For those who did state their reasons for declining to participate, their letter can be found here. It is not known if others who also boycotted did so for the stated reasons or for other reasons.
The letter to Ms. Wilkinson states: “We understand that you and your faction on the board were disappointed with the results of the prior election for Executive Director. But the mere fact that you did not like the results of an official election is no justification for setting aside those results and deciding to hold a new election in hopes of an outcome more to your liking. This is improper and an abuse of your power as chair”.
The latest executive director results have not been publicly released. For the board officers, the low level of participation resulted in Wilkinson once again being chosen as chair without majority support as she received 11 votes, not a majority on the 22-person board. Lydia Brazon is the vice-chair, Janet Kobren is the secretary. Several of the board members are no longer elected delegates who can legitimately sit on the board as their 3-year terms expired in December of 2013. Pacifica’s bylaws prevent representatives from extending their terms without ratification from the membership. Two of the three officers elected last week are no longer members of the board of directors as their elected terms have expired.
The election supervisor Pacifica hired in January has not publicly addressed the board nor the board’s election committee in the two months since her Jan 1 hire.
Uprising Radio host Sonali Kolhatkar wrote to KPFK management in August of 2014 expressing concern that board chair/IED Wilkinson and CFO Salvador would steal the funds raised for Uprising Radio to broadcast on Free Speech TV. Her email, which can be found here, refers to reports of other restricted funds being mishandled in 2014 and begs for reassurance that Uprising funds would not be taken.
Pacifica’s IED Wilkinson and CFO Salvador informed the board of directors that financial pressures on Pacifica’s national office have increased due to the discovery of an unpaid legal bill for $90,000. The bill that was discovered later turned out to be the bill for Pacifica’s defense against former WBAI program director Bernard White’s 2011 lawsuit for racial discrimination after his 2009 termination. White’s lawsuit was summarily dismissed in 2012. The characterization of the bill as “discovered” is incorrect as Wilkinson received a full legal expenses summary listing all expenses by case and firm and the balances due on them, as a member of the board in December of 2013, which she appears to have failed to review at the time or in the year following. The assertion the bill was “unknown”, was repeated numerous times, and continues the pattern of providing distorted information to members of the board of directors. In the interests of transparency, here is the legal bills breakdown given to the board of directors in December of 2013. It summarizes $750,000 in legal bills from 2010 to 2013, of which about $600,000 was accrued in the flurry of lawsuits between 2010-2012 directed at then ED Arlene Engelhardt from the Justice and Unity caucus in New York and the Save KPFA faction in Berkeley.
In yet another of the board’s ongoing discussions over the past ten years about accepting some underwriting announcements to assist with declining listener support, board member Benito Diaz from Washington DC ranted about “rogue general managers” and the need for the board to “take control” before the “cat got out of the box”.
Former KPFA news department volunteer Matthew Lasar, who wrote two books about Pacifica Radio, printed an article in this week’s Nation magazine calling for the “creative destruction” of the Pacifica Radio network. Lasar, a former endorser of the Save KPFA faction who withdrew his endorsement a few years ago, dresses up former IED and board majority attorney Dan Siegel’s call for “organizational Darwinism” in the glossy disruption language of the tech industry to reframe a network breakup as an innovative solution to Pacifica’s problems. The article says nothing about the FCC challenges inherent in such a plan (neither WBAI nor KPFT has successfully completed their license renewals), where the network’s financial liabilities would be housed, and who would own the “new nonprofits” that he imagines springing up out of thin air to operate the five stations, not to mention the bylaws requirements that prevent the sale or transfer of licenses without the permission of the organization’s members, which were put into place after former board member Micheal Palmer accidentally released an email in 1999 stating there was “support in certain quarters” for selling off the New York or Berkeley licenses.
Truthout took a better look at Pacifica’s situation in this article by Michael Corcoran.
KPFA’s local advisory board held 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 Community Advisory board reported a large turnout and calls for more local public affairs coverage at the Berkeley station, especially during broadcast prime time. The station recently wiped an hour-long strip of early AM local public affairs coverage and replaced it with a syndicated program from Los Angeles.
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