This meeting was held in Jamaica, Queens. It started almost an hour and a half late, partly because it was so hard to get to and partly because of misleading directions from the person who'd chosen the site. That person also took the chance to berate everyone else for not getting there as early as she had.

Neither the LSB Chair nor Vice Chair showed up and so an election was held for a Chair pro tem of the meeting. I was elected to chair this meeting.

We had no security guards, and we had no audio. This meeting was held in a junior high school auditorium. The acoustics were awful and it was difficult for anyone to hear what was going on. In addition to the usual disrupters from the faction currently in charge at WBAI we also had one jerk who hollered throughout the entire meeting - until a faction member gave him the word to stop.

Because we had to leave the meeting space by 9:30 this meeting only lasted for 98 minutes.

Still, we approved 6 sets of meeting minutes.

During these deliberations the LSB finally decided that trying to put the fine details of the public comments in the minutes only leads to disputes. A motion was passed that the details of public comments would not be in the minutes of meetings but would be made available as a transcript or audio if requested. I'd made the same motion back in March, glad the idea caught on.

The LSB voted to have meetings on November 30, December 15, and January 5. Then we had a sometimes raucous public comment session before our time at the meeting space ran out.

This teleconference Pacifica National Board (PNB) meeting voted to pass on a suggestion to the PNB Programming Committee that all 5 Pacifica stations implement a policy that “a minimum of 5%

They also passed a motion referring to the Committees of Inclusion “the creation of a racially/nationally diverse collective of producers from various community radio stations” to produce national programming on race and nationality issues.

I was unable to attend this meeting, however I've spoken to some Staff people who were there.

Management reported that the cash flow from the recent marathon was wonderful and that layoffs weren't even on the horizon at this time.

The Program Director issued a memo saying that WBAI has increased our audience by 40% over the past year and that Arbitron says our weekly listenership is 370,000. He also noted that “the cost of keeping WBAI fully operational continues to escalate.” (Yes, an out of control patronage system will do that.) The Program Director says that there are going to be a number of programming changes at WBAI and that, “These changes will affect day, evening as well as our overnight schedule.”

Management said that these proposed program changes were going to be presented to the Program Council within two weeks. The Program Council hasn't met since July when Management completely disregarded a decision they made and plugged a program into the schedule in violation of the agreement that created the Program Council.