Both the LSB Chair and Vice-Chair couldn't make it to this meeting so the LSB elected me to chair this one. Oh, what joy.

One LSB member decided to make a motion to excuse the absence of the Chair. This prompted another LSB member to make an amendment to excuse the absences of her slate-mates. I had to rule part of that amendment out of order. One of the people named had missed 9 meetings in a row; the bylaws say you lose your membership after missing 3 in a row. My ruling was upheld on appeal.

The faction currently in charge played a little deceptive game with this, claiming that the LSB had voted to remove a member, which wasn't true.

The LSB Finance Committee was scheduled to have a long report in order to start off the process whereby the LSB would approve the WBAI budget for Fiscal Year 2005 (FY05), which begins on October 1. Unfortunately, with all the delays, it took us an hour and 15 minutes to excuse everyone and approve the agenda. We never got to this report.

The LSB voted again to have an unwieldy public comment session scattered throughout the meeting; this delayed things further.

A motion on waivers was made. This was essentially the same motion that had failed in a previous meeting, but this time there were a lot of amendments to it. After about two hours a motion was passed that set up a Waivers Subcommittee and set a cap of about 100 waivers for this election. As is the case with most compromises, no one was completely satisfied with this solution.

After the last meeting, a California lawyer and long time Pacifica activist had come up with a reading of the bylaws that allowed the member who had missed 9 meetings in a row to be excused.

Everyone who wasn't at the meeting got excused and the agenda was approved in 37 minutes.

The Waivers Subcommittee reported that they'd sent out 384 letters soliciting waiver requests, put information about requesting waivers on wbai.org and had already received 6 phone requests for waivers.

The faction currently in charge made another motion to make the waivers unlimited. It was an obviously flawed motion, but it did allow faction members to posture about it. The motion failed.

The subject of a General Manager Search Subcommittee (GMSS) was brought up at this meeting.

One listener delegate proposed a GMSS of 6 listener delegates (a delegate is an LSB member) and 3 Staff. In my opinion this is too few Staff.

I proposed an alternative GMSS of 4 listener delegates, 2 Staff delegates, 1 Paid Staff and 1 Unpaid Staff to be elected in an open election.

Another proposal was made to just have it be 3 Paid Staff, 3 Unpaid Staff and 3 listener delegates.

As the person who invented the 3-3-3 formula years ago I do not believe that it will have a hope of being adopted. Some faction members, intent on being able to choose the next GM themselves, want to try to force this on the LSB, they've also been doing a lot of posturing about it. The bylaws say this task is part of the LSB's job. This entire set of motions was postponed. When this finally comes up to a vote I think we'll have good representation on the GMSS by Staff.

This meeting was dedicated to the budget proposal. And after only an hour and 10 minutes we actually got to the topic of the budget. It had been widely publicized that portions of this LSB meeting would be held in executive session due to