Three members of KPFA’s local station board, Chair Christina Huggins, Andrea Turner, Donald Goldmacher and their lawyer, traveled down to Los Angeles on Tuesday, violating California’s COVID19 shelter in place order, to try to convince a court to place Pacifica’s assets into a receivership and remove control of the Foundation from its members. Update: There is a 4th plaintiff, former KPFA LSB member Craig Alderson. The attorney is Stephen Jaffe, an SF employment lawyer and unsuccessful congressional candidate). Their effort was unsuccessful and their emergency request was denied by the court.

Their filing, apparently an error-riddled 800 page tome, was not available on the LA County Superior Court site as of the time of this newsletter, but was said to have asserted incorrectly that Pacifica’s buildings were about to be foreclosed upon and that the fiscal year 2017 audit had not been completed. (It was completed some time ago). The judge denied the request in a brief hearing of less than 30 minutes duration and castigated the plaintiffs for procedural irregularities. 

Among the procedural irregularities was the failure to serve the lawsuit. The plaintiff’s attorney merely called a few officers of the board on the telephone at 8:00 am the day before the hearing. 

Berkeley-What happens when members of KPFA’s local board attempt to obstruct the same local progressive political victories that the station lauds on air? Ahmad Anderson, a Save KPFA-UIR affiliated member of the board from 2015-2020 ran for a city council seat in the nearby city of Richmond, running against the city’s former mayor and co-founder of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, Gayle McLaughlin. Anderson’s primary funders, according to campaign finance records included the Richmond Police Officers Association, the California Apartment Association (the landlord lobbyists), a real estate dark money PAC, several local developers including Mariner Square, Eastshore Properties, Richmond Development LLC, the city’s waste management vendor and a shipping company Levin Richmond Terminal Corp that is currently suing the City to overturn an ordinance preventing the shipping of coal and petroleum via the Port of Richmond. As if that isn’t enough, Richmond’s mayor Tom Butt released a newsletter highlighting his hand-picked slate of  three “pro-business” and “pro-police” candidates, including Anderson, who will stop “radical social policies”. Butt is not subtle; he implores his readers to:

Please help keep the Richmond Progressive Alliance from taking over Richmond.  

What The 2nd Version of New Bad Bylaws Would Do

Berkeley – We promised you an analysis of what the latest set of bad replacement bylaws would change – and here it is. Rather than doing away with democratic representation altogether, this revised proposal from the same group of people merely suspends democracy for 3 years and then reinstates it with majority rule requirements that completely shut out minority groups and interests from any representation in Pacifica governance. 

Aren’t You Dying To Vote on Another Set of Bad Replacement Bylaws?

Berkeley – With so much of importance going on in the world right now, about the last thing in the world we want to do is trouble you with Pacifica’s internal shenanigans. And we understand that you reallydon’t want to focus on this right now. And you shouldn’t have to. Pacifica and its board members should be lasar-focused on providing you the alternative information you want to help make sense of the world. Sadly, some of them aren’t. They are focused on themselves and their power dynamics. 

But here’s the good news. You don’t have to focus on it. This is literally an email requesting you to do absolutely nothing. All you have to do is not sign a new bylaws petition asking you to force yet another bylaws election. Corrections made after the last disaster that was rejected overwhelmingly have raised the threshold for a bylaws petition from 1% to 5% of the members. You can literally save Pacifica $100,000 dollars and save yourself from poring over 58 pages of new bylaws. Yes, hard as it may be to believe, these new proposed bylaws are even longer than the existing ones.

Berkeley – Law firm Foster Garvey has revealed that $80,000 was secretly wired from Berkeley radio station KPFA’s operating account in October of 2019 to the law firm that was defending the failed WBAI shutdown. The amount represents approximately one out of every five dollars donated in KPFA’s September/October fall fund drive. 

Berkeley – As the world faces a global pandemic on a scale that hasn’t been seen since 1918, Pacifica also faces recovering from a divisive bylaws battle that ended with an overwhelming 2-1 victory for the democratic reforms implemented in 2002. 

With a severe economic depression looming, it is important that all sides come together after the listeners and workers had their say at the ballot box. A start on that was made with the seating of the 2020 Pacifica National Board, which occurred on Thursday night. And pandemic stimulus relief may be available to aid Pacifica through the significant financial challenges to come. 

The costs of the special election demanded by the Pacifica Restructuring Project could not have come at a worse time. $100,000 will have to be yanked out of the operating costs of the 5 stations to pay for the election contractors, secure voting vendors, and the legal costs of responding to 4 different court actions in Alameda Superior Court. We hope the 1,000 people who signed the replacement bylaws petition will take seriously the $100.00 bill that each of them created, and to the extent possible, make an attempt to pay for it. Donations can be submitted here. 

Berkeley – Voting closed in Pacifica Radio’s bylaws referendum on March 19, 2020, after a month-long balloting period. When the results were released on the afternoon of Monday March 23, 22% of listener-members and 50% of staff had voted, which is approximately twice the number of voters in delegate elections. They voted overwhelmingly by a 2-1 margin to reject the bylaws proposal. 

Here are the numbers released by election staff. 

Listener Members

9,713 voters. 6,340 voted no. 3,273 voted yes. 101 abstained (sent in a blank ballot).  66% – 34%

Staff Members

512 voters. 331 voted no. 177 voted yes. 4 abstained (sent in a blank ballot)  65% – 35%

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.

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. 

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”.