In the last newsletter I reported that Pacifica's Executive Director, Chief Financial Officer and all 5 station GMs had formed an “Administrative Council” and were complaining about Pacifica National Board (PNB) directors and local Station Board (LSB) members demanding information. The PNB held a special meeting and came up with a solution: a PNB Coordinating Committee will meet bi-weekly to coordinate the information requests and Management will answer the questions.

This meeting started off with the announcement that the meeting would neither be recorded for posterity nor amplified, which helps LSB members and the public attendees hear what's happening. WBAI Management says it cost too much.

We spent quite a bit of time “correcting” the minutes at this meeting. Some “corrections” centered around the paraphrases of public comments in the minutes. My motion that the minutes only record that a public comment session happened and note the time when it happened got rejected.

Agreeing on an agenda took a long time as well. The meeting was more than an hour old when we got to our first order of business.

The Pacifica bylaws Article 8, § 4, mandate that each station have a “Committee of Inclusion” whose function is “to monitor the under- representation of communities in their respective radio station areas.” At this meeting we held the required elections of LSB members to this body. Kathy Goldman, Zara Khan and Patty Heffley were elected to the WBAI Committee of Inclusion, as was PNB member Miguel

At our previous meeting we hadn't finished electing LSB members to the various national committees, so we got around to that. The following LSB members were elected to the respective PNB committees:

Technology Committee: Tiokasin Ghosthorse & Patty Heffley.

Audit Committee: Berthold Reimers & R. Paul Martin.

LSB Treasurer and Finance Committee chair Paul Surovell reported that at the halfway point of FY04 WBAI was in better shape than had been projected. Income was $185,550 higher than budgeted, but spending was also $99,586 higher. He noted that WBAI still had to meet the Pacifica goal of having one month's operating expenses in reserve, about $300,000, by September 30, 2004.

Alex Steinberg, pro tem chair of the Programming Committee reported that two working groups had been formed to explore and evaluate 1) the institutional structure through which programming decisions are made and 2) the criteria by which programming decisions are made.

At 9:45 PM a voice from above, the building's PA system, made it very clear that in 15 minutes the electricity would be turned off and everyone was expected to exit the building. So at 9:50 we ended the meeting.

Management provided a PA system at this meeting. No official recorders though. The Secretary recorded what she could on a MiniDisc while she took minutes.

The chair announced that he'd be stricter in his application of Robert's Rules of Order in an effort to get the meeting to move faster so we could get more done.