The voting for some directors of the Pacifica National Board (PNB) was done over at the March 4th, meeting because one person's nomination had been disallowed at the previous meeting through a parliamentary procedure screwup.

The three listener delegates to the PNB who were voted in at the February 19, meeting were voted in again by the exact same vote totals at this meeting.

The Staff director position was not affected by any of this.

This meeting started out with many corrections to the minutes of the previous meeting, and in the end we didn't approve those minutes. Approval was postponed until the next meeting.

Much of this meeting was taken up with a "Finance Report" from Lonnie Hicks, the CFO of Pacifica.

Characterized by some as a "dog & pony show" this presentation in the darkened room left a lot of questions open.

During the presentation it was noted that several items relating to large expenditures were left blank in Mr. Hicks' visual presentation. When an LSB member tried to ask a follow-up question of Mr. Hicks Pacifica Executive Director Dan Coughlin piped up and reminded Mr. Hicks of their rule that people could only ask one question.

In the weeks since this meeting some of the numbers Mr. Hicks presented have changed by an order of magnitude.

Mr. Hicks' bottom line was that everything was just great financially.

The next item on the agenda was a report from

If you're scratching your head wondering how Mr. Hicks' report that everything's peachy can reconcile with WBAI Management's financial predictions you're not alone. The LSB and the PNB need to get to the bottom of this and get a realistic picture of Pacifica's finances.

After several LSB members commented on the financial reports Mr. Surovell asked Mr. Hicks to provide the LSB with information about exactly how much money WBAI spends per month so that the LSB can competently do its job of approving WBAI's FY 2005 budget. Mr. Hicks assured us all that he'd do that.

The LSB discussed getting air time for a sort of report to the members by the LSB. The following motion was made, “That Shawn [Rhodes] be delegated to contact [WBAI P.A. Director] Kathy Davis about a show date - concurrently an ad hoc committee would be formed to work out details, and present to the board at the March 18th meeting.” The motion passed with 18 yes, 0 no and 5 abstentions.

At 9:57 the LSB moved into executive session. The official announcement said in part, “On March 4, 2004, at the close of the public meeting, the WBAI Local Station Board held a closed meeting ('executive session') to consider an issue predominantly regarding activities of station personnel.”

Page Two of this newsletter