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Vote SaveKPFA in the Local Station Board election
SaveKPFA
is supporting 7 extremely well-qualified candidates for KPFA's Local Station Board - Margy Wilkinson, Sasha Futran, Barbara Whipperman, William Campisi,
David Lynch, Leland Thompson
&
Yuri Gottesman. |
READ MORE at
www.SaveKPFA.org.
ENDORSERS INCLUDE
:
KPFA hosts Mitch Jeserich, Larry Bensky, Sasha Lilley, Brian Edwards-Tiekert, Philip Maldari, Aileen Alfandary, Richard Wolinsky and Kris Welch; professors Rashid Khalidi, Dana Frank and Barbara Epstein; veteran civil rights activist Dr. Raye Richardson; filmmaker Donald Goldmacher; authors Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, David Bacon, Steve Early, Conn Hallinan and Bill Ayers; FSM movement leader Lynne Hollander Savio; Berkeley City Council member Max Anderson; community leaders Blanche Richardson, Dan Siegel and Mike Eisenscher; KPFA music programmers David Gans, Bonnie Simmons, Lewis Sawyer and Derk Richardson; and many more. |
SEE SaveKPFA's
ENDORSER LIST
If you are a subscriber, your ballot should arrive
THIS WEEK. If you do not get a ballot, contact the Local Election Supervisor at
kpfa-les@pacifica.org or phone: (510) 629-1458, and please cc
votesavekpfa@gmail.com.
An inside look at Pacifica from KPFA's Brian Edwards-Tiekert
"
What's at stake is the survival of KPFA as we know it," writes UpFront host Brian Edwards-Tiekert, who also serves as Pacifica's treasurer, in an open letter. "
Pacifica, the nonprofit that KPFA is a part of, is teetering on the brink. Years of mismanagement at a national level has reduced stations that were once alternative media icons to shadows of their formers selves, struggling to keep from going dark altogether."
 Edwards-Tiekert
urges listeners to vote for all 7 SaveKPFA candidates named above. We reprint his important letter here: "Five years ago, it looked like KPFA was headed the same way. The old regime at Pacifica had just purged KPFA's biggest fundraiser, The Morning Show. They had hired the country's top union-busting law firm, Jackson Lewis, to fight us.
But SaveKPFA led the charge to change Pacifica's leadership, and prevailed.
"Since then, we've recovered our financial stability - KPFA is now the only station in Pacifica that doesn't have any debt. We've put a locally-hired management team in place at KPFA for the first time in years. KPFA's rolled out popular new programs like Sonali Kolhatkar's Uprising and the program I work on, UpFront - both of which drew dramatically increased pledges. Meanwhile, KPFA's new managers led an overhaul of KPFA's website, have started experimenting in the growing world of podcasting, and, thanks to some windfall income and off-air fundraising initiatives, even started shrinking the amount of time KPFA spends in fund drives.
"That's why I hope you'll vote to keep SaveKPFA in the majority on KPFA's Local Station Board.
"The opposing slate, United for Community Radio, consists almost entirely of new faces. But the actions of the slate's incumbents speak volumes.
"When Pacifica fired the entire staff of The Morning Show, they supported it. When Pacifica hired the nation's most notorious union-busting law firm to fight us, they publicly defended it. When Pacifica's disgraced former executive barricaded herself in her office for two months after being fired, they helped maintain the barricades -
and block KPFA's elected board members from access to financial records.
One of their candidates for this year - Janet Kobren - even joined a frivolous lawsuit against Pacifica while sitting on its board (the lawsuit was tossed out of court).
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| Brian Edwards-Tiekert with Aimee Allison on the Morning Show, circa 2010 |
"Does that mean everyone running on their ticket supports more of the same? Not necessarily. There are a lot of new faces in the election this year. But the first thing they'll do once they're on KPFA's Local Board is vote to send their veteran slate-mates to the Pacifica National Board, where the real power lies. And those slate-mates will make their worst decisions behind closed doors in Executive Session meetings, where there's very little accountability.
"The last time they were in control of Pacifica, they hired one of their board allies as executive director
-- and gave her the highest salary anyone's ever made here. They ran a near-record deficit, and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to consultants, temp agencies, and law firms - debt Pacifica's still paying down today. They bungled basic compliance work and lost Pacifica nearly $1 million per year in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They skipped two years' worth of contributions to our pension fund, in violation of our union contracts. They withheld money from employee paychecks that they never deposited with the IRS. And they left Free Speech Radio News -once our flagship daily newscast - unpaid for so long that they forced it off the air.
"I'll be frank: things are really dicey for the Pacifica network right now.
I don't know if it will pull through, or in what kind of shape. But I do know that our chances are better if KPFA stays strong, and that means keeping a SaveKPFA majority on KPFA's Local Station Board. Here's what you can do:
"Help get out the vote
.
KPFA elections have low turnout, and tend to be decided by relatively small margins-which is why your actions are so important. Please:
- Pass this email on to people you know who might be KPFA members.
- Go to www.savekpfa.org to learn more about the SaveKPFA candidates.
- Most importantly, return your ballot now so you don't forget. Pacifica is not allowing any in-person ballot drop-offs this year - you have to mail it. Your ballot has to arrive at the ballot-counting location by December 4 - so send it now.
"In solidarity,
Brian Edwards-Tiekert
Co-Host, KPFA's UpFront | Former Co-Host, The Morning Show
Staff Representative, KPFA Local Station Board and Pacifica National Board"
Changing course at KPFA
 The challenges facing our network are great, but when we look over
SaveKPFA's
recent accomplishments, there is cause for hope.
For years, under
previous leadership at Pacifica, KPFA responded to every financial shock it experienced - the loss of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the elimination of KPFA's biggest fundraiser,
the Morning Show, etc. - by increasing the length and frequency of its pledge drives. That meant long, frequent fund drives that tended to drive listeners away, and eventually produced a downward spiral of shrinking audience and diminishing returns.
Last fall, KPFA finally got a locally-hired permanent management team in place. Almost immediately, general manager
Quincy McCoy and program director
Laura Prives went to work on changing the way KPFA raises money and had the shortest fund drives in years. How did they do it? Read
How KPFA shrank its fund drives.
Move on KPFA
Most of the other parts of the five-station Pacifica Radio network are in varying degrees of financial distress.
It showed at a recent meeting of the Pacifica National Board (PNB) when, in a surprise move, the PNB grabbed a $400,000 bequest that KPFA received 7 months prior, and redirected it to the Pacifica National Office.
At issue: the bequest document was unspecific about what part of the Pacifica Foundation the $400,000 should go to, but all the correspondence from the estate named KPFA, and was sent to KPFA addresses.
Confused? "The Pacifica Foundation" is the legal name for KPFA and four other radio stations, because they're all owned by the same nonprofit corporation.
After getting notice of the impending bequest, Pacifica's management communicated with the estate, looked up the deceased donor's giving history (she'd regularly given money to KPFA -- and no other part of Pacifica -- for years), and determined the money should be allocated to KPFA.
But seven months later, in a closed-door meeting called on short notice, the Pacifica board reversed that decision, passing a motion that moved the $400,000 to Pacifica's National Office. (The discussion itself was mostly a moot point, as KPFA had already transferred the $400,000 - and more - to other stations in the network as bailouts and loans, so there is little immediate impact from the decision).
Two of the SaveKPFA members on the board, Margy Wilkinson and Brian Edwards-Tiekert, voted against the move. The third, Jose Luis Fuentes, was unable to attend the short-notice meeting. The sole representative from KPFA who voted to take the $400,000 (and also to keep the debate secret), was Janet Kobren - running on the United for Community Radio slate in the election currently underway. (Members of her slate have long championed replacing unionized staff at KPFA with volunteer-produced programming).
Changing leadership at the network
On October 14, Pacifica executive director John Proffitt stepped down after serving for less than five months. He gave no reason for cutting short his tenure with Pacifica. Pacifica National Board chair Lydia Brazon, who represents KPFK in Los Angeles, is now serving, unpaid, as interim executive director. Per a resolution of Pacifica's board, this arrangement will last no longer than January 2016, when Brazon reaches her term limit on the board.
In Pacifica matters, a grain (or a ton) of salt may be helpful
Many of you have reported receiving far-out, conspiracy-laden and frankly laughable bulletins from various quarters in Pacifica Radio land. Please remember that back in 2011, United for Community Radio's Tracy Rosenberg was censured by KPFA's Local Station Board
for misappropriating KPFA's official subscriber list
and using it for her own partisan purposes. If you receive such emails and never signed up for them, contact her provider, Salsa Labs at
feedback@salsalabs.com
to make a complaint. Let us know what response you get.
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