Berkeley – On Thursday, the SAG-AFTRA labor union filed a demand for arbitration with the American Arbitration Association. The union stated to its members their position that Pacifica is in ongoing violation of the collective bargaining agreement. The Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Radio and Television Artists represents approximately 160,000 actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals. Three of Pacifica’s four unionized stations are represented by SAG-AFTRA, one in Berkeley by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the Houston station remains non-unionized. Continue reading SAG-AFTRA Union Takes Pacifica Into Arbitration Alleging Bust of Collective Bargaining Agreement→
Thanks to some detective work, there is an update of sorts on the audit situation.
The payment pulled from KPFA’s bequest fund in July was made to Armanino in the amount of $45,000. Although Pacifica’s lead auditor at Armanino Grant Lam apparently is unaware, Armanino cleared the check.
However the audit has not started. The statement by Grant Lam that no work has been done on the 2014 audit despite it being 60 days past the deadline for both CPB and the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the CA AG Office is correct.
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Pacifica’s fiscal 2014 audit (for the period 10-1-2013 to 9-30-2014) was due to the State of California Registry of Charitable Trusts (which is currently investigating Pacifica for failure to comply with charitable laws) and to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which suspended Pacifica from eligible status for public media funding in June of 2014) was revealed on Tuesday night to have been neither paid for nor started, 11 months after the close of the fiscal year and 56 days after the legal deadline for submission to the State.
Pacifica released a preliminary income statement for the 10 month period from October 1, 2014 to July 31, 2015.
The income statement, presuming the network’s famously bad accounting records can be relied on, shows the station’s Los Angeles unit KPFK-FM, which just placed every employee on half-time and laid off three due to a “dire financial crisis,” with an operating surplus of $182,000 for the year and the largest amount of listener support in the network, over $800,000 more than the nearest competing division, Berkeley’s KPFA.
This sound snippet contains the conversation at the KPFA local station board meeting on August 22nd about the secret incorporation of the KPFA Foundation by Margy Wilkinson at the office of attorney Dan Siegel.
Seems like the best excuse they can come up with for incorporating a new nonprofit to “capture” Pacifica’s licenses is to accuse others of doing (with no evidence) what they just got caught doing.
That’s what scoundrels do. Yell really loudly that everyone else is doing it too.
This sound clip comes from an August 17th KPFK staff meeting and contains a description of the bookkeeping problems at KPFK, including embezzlement and staff reactions to the news.
