In this somewhat lengthy snippet from a lengthier meeting, Pacifica’s finance committee goes into a bit of a meltdown.
Category Archives: Audio
Selection-KPFK Local Board 6-19-16
Brief snippet from KPFK local station board meeting of June 19th.
The Agreement Not To Decide Anything
A clip from the 5-18 PNB elections committee. The actual conversation about the motion to agree not to decide anything was twice as long, but this is enough the provide the idea. This followed a 45 minute question and answer session with the 2015 election supervisor Joy Williams for her to present her report and that session had already occurred. The sub-committee report referred to had reading time as tested with a stopwatch at about 3 minutes 15 seconds.
Update On Missing Payroll
This clip from Pacifica’s finance committee has CFO Sam Agarwal explaining the delayed payroll on May 15th. The snip also includes some general discussion from the meeting including:
— Payroll update
— WPFW restricted funds
— Proposal regarding programming issues at stations with financial shortfalls
— Major deficiencies in 2015 accounting records. “For the past two years, we don’t know what the balances are that the stations owe to the national offices or what in turn we owe to other entities”
— Whether it is alarmist to invoke the threat of bankruptcy
— Steep drop in WPFW income in 2016
Claim of Mystery Lawsuit at WPFW
The election committee meeting of April 18 ended strangely with WPFW local board member Eric Ramey saying a lawsuit had been filed, weeks ago, against WPFW and presumably the Pacifica Foundation. At least 4 national board members on the call indicated they knew nothing about the matter.
Update: WPFW local station board member Eric Ramey provided this as a follow-up statement in response to requests for documentation.
“I was informed earlier the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is investigating. In addition the justice department will investigate to determine if any FCC violations have occurred. Accordingly I will invoke the 5th and remain silent”.
Update: David Levine, WPFW’s 2015 local election supervisor until the PNB cancelled the DC election, was contacted by telephone and stated he did not sue WPFW, threaten to sue WPFW, cause papers to be served on WPFW’s general manager or trigger any investigation by CPB, FCC or DOJ.
Local station board member Eric Ramey has indicated he is unwilling to speak further on the matter and was chastised by PNB member Nancy Sorden who asked him to consult with her prior to speaking freely in Pacifica’s streamed meetings saying “we’re all on email at the same time we are on the phone”.
She added “Could you agree to staying open to hearing those reminders and cautions and if you are not sure email ahead of time
or during the meeting?”
Meeting With The Auditor – April 4th
Despite the obstructurama put up by the Siegel/Brazon faction, the audit commitee finally managed to speak briefly to the auditor, Grant Lam from Armanino.
The complete audio is preserved below. About 45 minutes in, the jockeying around stops and the auditor actually gets to say something. Continue reading Meeting With The Auditor – April 4th
KPFK’s Friendly Volunteer Coordinator
The public comment session from KPFK’s March 20th local station board meeting. The primary speaker is general manager Leslie Radford’s roommate and the station’s new volunteer coordinator Adam Rice, who is addressing the board during public comment. The final speaker is Safe Harbor host Chrisanne Eastwood who explains that motherfuckers is a vernacular term that means “you guys” or “dude” and is not meant to be derogatory.
Special Programming Gone Wrong
Pacifica’s LA station KPFK’s intended coverage of a community meeting on suspicious activity reports was a hot mess with over ten minutes of chaos broadcast from Santa Barbara to Tijuana with apparently no oversight from anyone. In this 10 minute 45 second clip, Michael Jackson music blasts over the speakers, a fundraising cart runs right over the event the program is trying to cover and a recording of Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports is broadcast simultaneously with two feeds going out over the air at the same time. The debacle is indicative of the station’s decline since Leslie Radford took over as GM in June of 2015. The station does not appear to have enough money to get through April with Radford reporting a bank account balance of only $85,000 less than a month after the station ended a 30-day fund drive with pledges of $602,000.
Kicking The Can
This is a highlights reel from the Pacifica national board meeting of 3/17. It’s a bit lengthy, but easier to absorb than the full 3 hour meeting.
It begins with the board mandating an “email election” to resolve the mess caused by the board’s determination to seat the last place finisher from an election 3 and a half years ago on WBAI’s local board. The board’s interference gives the Siegel/Brazon majority a 50% plurality by refusing the seat the independent candidate who won the seat in the 2015 election.
Independent rep Bill Crosier observes he was disconnected and kept off the call for a 14 minute interval despite calling in 4 times for reinstatement. Crosier finally emailed a public list-serv protesting he was being kept off the call to force his re-admission to the conference call.
The board passed the “WBAI email election” initiative.
Humorously, the board secretary then tried to announce the results of another “email election” done for a national committee and could only produce one winner for the two seats available (the one from the Siegel/Brazon faction). Not a good testimony to the efficacy of “email elections”.
Then the board turned to the financial crisis and the dissolution motions passed on Tuesday at the National finance committee. The meeting broke into dissension with Siegel/Brazonite Jose Luis Fuentes breaking with board treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert over Pacifica’s failures to complete audited financial statements and attempting to send the dissolution motions and all the draft budgets back to the finance committee. He almost succeeded, losing due to one vote changed at the last minute.
Fuentes and chair Tony Norman then got into a conflict over whether Pacifica’s management letters from their auditors are confidential or not. (They always have been considered so and since the board has now decided they are not, they may be publicly released in short order).
Finally the clip contains the votes to a) refer the dissolution motions and budgets back to committee (i.e. reject them), which was narrowly defeated and b) the motion to require a plan for the DC station including liquidation or sale, which passed narrowly on a 6-5 vote with multiple abstentions.
Pay To Vote Or Just Cede Control To Me – KPFA Local Board 2-27
KPFA’s local station board meeting 2-27: the first speaker is Save Kpfa member William Campisi who proposes that national voting rights should be stripped from stations that fall behind on central service payments and then that Pacifica should go into voluntary bankruptcy if it isn’t willing to cede national control to KPFA.
Campisi apparently doesn’t realize that under his plan, his own station KPFA, would have had “its” voting rights stripped from October 2015 to February 2016 when it failed to pay central services due to financial troubles – and for two a half years from January of 2010 to June of 2012 when KPFA was slowly paying back $250,000 in unpaid central service payments to Pacifica in installments.
The second speaker is Save KPFA member and national director Jose-Luis Fuentes who says the other stations in Washington, LA and New York are eyeing KPFA’s fund drive receipts to “subsidize their standard of living”.
Fuentes appears to be unaware that in order to restore CPB funding, Pacifica would have to produce not one, but two, annual audits in the next 88 days, as the FY 2015 audit would be due at the end of June 2016. The $150,000 he quotes for the FY 2014 audit is roughly twice the estimate and twice what an audit for an organization of Pacifica’s size should cost.
The third speaker is UCR-affiliated unpaid staff rep Frank Sterling, who speaks with heart and intelligence and in addition to acknowledging that all of the stations are equally important, brings up the issue of shell corporations being set up to “catch” Pacifica’s assets .