It was announced last night that personnel reduction notices will be issued at KPFA and $250,000 in layoffs will be implemented in the next 30 days.
No notification was given to the local or national boards of the massive layoffs (13% of the total payroll), which succeed five new hires made in the past 8 months. Continue reading Quarter Million Dollars in Layoffs at KPFA in 15 Days
by Bill Crosier
I agree with Hank {Lamb} and Brian {Shiratsuki} that we should all welcome the AG audit and the corrective changes that will hopefully come from it. I also agree with Brian {Shiratsuki} and Nalini {Lazsciewicz} and others who have commented on how our bylaws, despite good intentions by a lot of people, have been a miserable failure in producing functional boards. Of course, people who like things the way they are now will be afraid of what the AG may find or what the AG may do, and are undoubtedly thinking about how they can convince the AG to leave Pacifica alone and let them continue fiddling while Rome burns. Continue reading The Attorney General Audit And The Real Emergency
Former PNB Treasurer Tracy Rosenberg sent the enclosed note to the Pacifica National Board this morning, after the Save KPFA propaganda rag announced that KPFA, already not having paid network services for the past six weeks, does not have enough money to pay its bills for the next month, after two fund drives collected $1.2 million dollars in pledges in the last 94 days, Continue reading Where Did KPFA’s Money Go?
Originally posted December 27, 2014
Berkeley-In response to a March 2014 complaint from 8 former board members who served on the Pacifica National Board between 2008 and 2013, the Registry of Charitable Trusts, the division of the California AG that supervises California nonprofit organizations, has launched a comprehensive audit of Pacifica Radio’s accounting and compliance functions. The scope of the initial document request is broad and encompasses most financial records from the past five years of operations. (see list below). Continue reading California Attorney General Launches Audit of Pacifica Radio
As an explanatory vote, Hank Lamb’s attempt received 5 votes in support besides his own. Four of them were from the minority faction (Uzzell, Coleman, Birden, Gray). One was from the board majority (Reyes). The other two minority faction members present abstained (Reiter and Kaufman). The other majority board members present voted no (Edwards-Tiekert, Wilkinson, Brazon, Argueta, Diaz, Brown, Roberts and Casenave). Here are Hank Lamb’s comments:
Continue reading To all Pacifica Members, the US Public and all Pacifica Staff and volunteers:
From Richard Uzzell, Pacifica Board of Directors, KPFT Listener Rep. Announced publicly on December 23, 2014
The Pacifica Board of Directors was informed today by IED, Margy Wilkinson of a December 17, 2014 letter (sent almost a week earlier) from California Deputy Attorney General, Julianne Mossler, “for Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General.” This was the first that the Board (as a whole) was informed of this letter the California Attorney General and the action it is taking toward the Pacifica Foundation Radio.
Continue reading California Attorney General To Audit Pacifica
Originally posted December 17, 2014
Berkeley-A listener representative from Houston has resigned from the Pacifica personnel committee in disgust, citing severely flawed hiring practices. Richard Uzzell submitted his letter of resignation, which can be found here. In the letter, he provided two examples. The first statement is that board chair and current interim executive director Margy Wilkinson (who is not on the search/personnel committee) ran separate private ads for the executive director position. She directed the application materials to herself at the national office, instead of to the search committee. The private ads had different deadlines and requested different materials from the applicants than ads run by the personnel committee, which was the only body authorized to collect candidate materials. The second statement was that after the committee developed a survey for candidates to be scored numerically on a list of qualifications for the position, members of the rogue board majority, upset that a favored candidate or candidates had not scored high enough, narrowly passed a motion to include several applications with low scores in the semi-finalist pool, including some not even ranked in the top half of the 25 applications. Continue reading Corruption in Executive Director Hiring Process
*Note: Readers are encouraged to donate to the Pacifica stations during the current set of fund drives, including KPFA. This post is provided here for two reasons
a) To document that the blizzard of Save KPFA propaganda about the Berkeley station being financially stable and in the black, always meeting its fund drive goals and an example for the rest of the network about how to be professional was always deceptive and the station has been living paycheck to paycheck for a very long time, as many UCR and PDGG board members have tried to point out for years and at various times, to ameliorate.
Posted by Thomas Payne on the Bay Area Independent Media Independent Center on December 8, 2014
https://www.
As riots erupt across the nation and in Berkeley – the home of KPFA – and is covered by every news outlet including MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the web but not on KPFA, we need to ask is KPFA irrelevant?
KPFA seems unable to cover breaking news or be a station that truly represents our community, and instead seems more interested in creating the illusion of being a community radio station by hiring a new marketing service to sell the concepts of community and authenticity.
Where was KPFA when riots were erupting in Ferguson, NYC, Oakland and Berkeley? Nowhere to be seen.
Originally posted December 6, 2014
Berkeley-Pacifica unelected board chair Wilkinson did hire a national election supervisor on December 1st. She went all the way down memory lane and hired L. Joy Williams, the very first local election supervisor at WBAI back in 2003. The only problem being that in Ms. William’s first go-round at Pacifica, she required the appointment of a co-election supervisor and vacated the position in the middle of the vote count, leading to the appointment of Phil Botwinick as the supervisor so the election could be finished. Botwinick filed this election report at the completion of his term. In his report he states: Continue reading Not Again! Why Can’t Pacifica Stop Trying To Censor Its Staff?
