Berkeley – The election to remove the 2002 reforms to the Pacifica Foundation Bylaws and return the foundation to the pre-1999 governance model has been underway since February 18th and will run to March 18th. It is safe to say that many Pacifica members are confused about how to vote. Part of the reason they are confused is that the people they are being asked to install as a permanently self-selecting board majority are silent. The 5 or 6 potential directors remaining (3 or 4 have already withdrawn their names), have refused to utter a public word about how they intend to proceed, what actions they would be considering, and what their beliefs are about how the organization should move forward.

However, there is considerable evidence for what the majority of the members of the Pacifica Restructuring Project would do. This is the small largely Berkeley-based group that wrote these replacement bylaws and hand-picked the silent candidates for new directors. They told us what they wanted to do, years ago.

Continue reading Why We Call Them The Break Up Bylaws →

Berkeley – Award-winning actor, director/producer, activist and long-time Pacifica Radio supporter Danny Glover has issued an appeal to Pacifica members to vote no on the replacement bylaws. Glover’s video can be seen here. Glover has made substantial contributions to Pacifica Radio over the past four decades. 

Continue reading Danny Glover: Do Not Change The Pacifica Bylaws →

Berkeley-At Tuesday’s national finance committee me, board treasurer Chris Cory, a member of the UIR/Save KPFA group  and Anita Simms from NETA, the consulting firm with a $27,000/mo contract for outsourced accounting services, announced that they do not have current income totals for the October to December of 2019 period because KPFA has not provided revenue numbers. You can listen to a brief clip from the meeting audio here.  

In it, national treasurer Cory states: “There’s a few little discrepancies but the major thing that needs to be added to them is that we still don’t have the listener support numbers out of KPFA. So obviously that renders the statement pretty useless. I mean, I could throw the number in. I have a set of internal books that I’m working with. I’ve thrown that number in there just to see what it makes KPFA look like at the end of the year”. 

Continue reading No Property Tax and Blank General Ledgers →

Berkeley – KPFA-FM has not paid property taxes to Alameda County for the last six years for the station’s studio at 1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Berkeley. At six years of consecutive unpaid property taxes, the County Tax Collector may seize the property for public auction and the tax collector has announced their intention to do so.

Here is a copy of the property tax statement for 1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way on file at the Alameda County Assessor’s Office. 

Here is a copy of the January 13 notice of an upcoming public auction of the 1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way property for unpaid property taxes. 

Continue reading KPFA Unpaid Property Tax Bill Hits $486,000; Alameda Tax Collector Schedules Public Auction →

Berkeley – On January 23, an Alameda County, California courtroom decided to allow 600 members to force their late-submitted anti-democratic bylaws proposal to a referendum vote immediately at the expense of Pacifica’s membership. The January 23 decision pauses the results of the last delegate election, which 6,085 members participated in. It delays the seating of national board reps selected by newly-elected delegates and keeps the outgoing national board unwillingly frozen into place for another seven weeks. Each Pacifica member faces a bill of approximately $1.50 each for what will be the third nationwide election in little more than a year. Ballots are expected to go out in mid-February. 

This publication had previously suggested that Pacifica members would be well-advised to simply ignore these bylaws ballots should they receive them. But we are now changing that advice. On further review of this ill-advised proposal, we strongly recommend a loud and decisive “NO” vote. We will talk a bit about why below. 

Continue reading It’s Up To You Now →

Berkeley – When we last wrote, the Pacifica National Board had voted yes on the anti-democratic bylaws proposal so that the local station boards at the five stations would have the opportunity to debate, discuss and issue their referendums on the proposal to replace the network’s bylaws and revert to a self-appointing board majority. The national board’s statement regarding the bylaws proposal submitted by the Pacifica Restructuring Project can be found here. 

Since that time, three of the five local boards have discussed the proposal. On January 8, the local board of WPFW-Washington DC issued a unanimous no vote. On January 8, the local station board of WBAI-New York issued a unanimous no vote. On January 11, the local station board of KPFA – Berkeley, the spiritual home of the Pacifica Restructuring Project and the home base of seven of the nine proponents, voted no by a 4 (yes) – 13 (no) – 4 (abstain) margin. The four yes votes were from PRP members Aki Tanaka and Susan Da Silva, and two station staff members, Phillip Maldari, host of Sunday Show and Tim Lynch, co-host of Dead To The World (a Grateful Dead music show). The local board of KPFK-Los Angeles will vote on January 19. The local board of KPFT-Houston was supposed to vote on January 8, but ended up postponing to a meeting on January 22. 

Continue reading Back To Court →

Berkeley– On December 20, the Pacifica National Board considered the new set of bylaws initiated by the Pacifica Restructuring Project to gut the democratic reforms introduced in 2003. The new set of proposed bylaws, which were written by a small group of people primarily in Berkeley, with a few helpers in Texas and LA, would return the Pacifica network to a majority of self-selected individuals on the board of directors.

Supported by a membership petition signed by 1% of Pacifica’s overall contributing membership, the Pacifica Restructuring Project went to court to force this vote. Their lawsuit (technically an alternative writ of mandate) was filed in Alameda County Superior Court on the auspicious date of October 7th, the same day that former Pacifica IED John Vernile and two directors from Texas, Adrienne LaViolette (who just resigned from the Pacifica National Board) and Bill Crosier, swept into New York City and took WBAI off the air, setting up a month of legal battles that ended on November 6th, when NY State Supreme Court judge Melissa Crane returned WBAI-FM to the air.

Continue reading Bylaws-Palooza →

Berkeley-The full transcript of the November 6th court hearing that reversed the shutdown of WBAI-FM is now available. We recommend giving it a read. The format is not the best, but the majority of the hearing is captured. You can download it here. It is a reasonably compact (by legal standards) 23 pages. In summary;

Continue reading NY Supreme Court Transcript Released →

Berkeley-On November 6, 2019, NY State Supreme Court judge Melissa Crane reinstated in full the October 7 temporary restraining order against the Pacifica Foundation and required the brand new interim ED John Vernile and a portion of the board of directors to stop piping in reruns on WBAI’s transmitter and return the station’s bank accounts, web page and airwaves to the WBAI staff and local board. WBAI began broadcasting at the stroke of midnight this morning. 

Judge Crane also declared the national board meeting of October 20th to be properly noticed and valid and all motions therein passed and binding upon the Foundation per the bylaws. Those motions included:

1. Restoring local control and local content at WBAI-FM

2. Placing interim executive director John Vernile on paid leave

3. Terminating the legal relationship between Foster Garvey and the Pacifica Foundation

4. Terminating the legal relationship between Ford Greene, corporate counsel, and the Pacifica Foundation

5. Removing Sabrina Jacobs as vice chair of the Pacifica National Board

6. Removing Bill Crosier as secretary of the Pacifica National Board

7. Allowing all elected directors to vote on any matters relating to WBAI-FM

Continue reading NY Judge Undoes The Coup →