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 →

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 →

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? →

Originally posted December 1, 2014

Berkeley-Pacifica’s audit remains on slow-mo after the auditor was pulled off field work and the audit halted due to Pacifica’s inability to produce the required schedules. CFO Salvador blamed East Coast stations WPFW and WBAI for the delay, although last year’s audit was completed months earlier in 2013. Salvador confirmed several of Pacifica’s five stations have left the system-wide Great Plains/Microsoft Dynamics accounting program, saying he had no access to DC’s books and they had “traveled” to California and then Texas. If the stations were using the accounting system, general ledger and AP/AR data would be available from all 5 stations by logging in to the accounting system on a computer. Continue reading Slow Motion →

Originally posted November 15, 2014

Berkeley– More than a little late, and punctuated by an audible “oh shit” by unelected board chair and IED Margy Wilkinson, the Pacifica National Board voted by a narrow 1-vote margin to change the amount of shared service contributions. The new rule, which Wilkinson and Salvador implemented weeks ago without board permission, sets network service payments by the average of the last four years of listener support rather than real-time accounting of actual contributions received this year. As a result of the new policy, stations that experience significant drops in contributions in 2015 may face increased levies at the same time they lose Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. Fund drive tallies for the September/October fund drive cycle showed 4/5 stations experienced between 18% and 25% shortfalls from their original fund drive goals. Continue reading Punishment →

Originally posted November 8, 2014

Berkeley-In this past election cycle, one of the few bright spots was the strong support for lifting the minimum wage. At Pacifica Radio however, things are going in the opposite direction as indicated by an ad for an early AM part-time position at KPFT in Houston – paying $10 an hour. Continue reading $10/Hr To Work In The Media →