The forty sixth WBAI Local Station Board (LSB) meeting was held on Monday, June 13, 2006, at 6:30 PM at Local 1199's Bread and Roses Art Gallery, 310 W. 43^rd St. in Manhattan. This is not an official Web page of the LSB.

This meeting was an adjourned meeting which means that the agenda adopted at the previous meeting was still in force. The meeting started over an hour late.

Gosh, it sure was interesting that the agenda that was handed out had some differences from the agenda that had been adopted. Perhaps it was just the faction's usual sloppiness, or maybe some thought that no one would notice. As it turned out, the faction had a two-thirds majority at this meeting so they were able to just change the agenda as they pleased. But at least we made them go by the rules.

Of course faction leader Bob Lederer's patronage position at the expense of Paid Staff at WBAI was still on the agenda, they made sure of that.

The faction voted to set up an Ad Hoc Waivers Committee. They voted to allow an unlimited number of waivers, of course. They also voted down my amendment to not allow databases to be used that have been compiled at station expense, excepting the membership list of course. Voting down my amendment will allow them to use databases of listeners, or even non-listeners, to solicit for getting waivers. This could also allow the faction currently in charge an advantage in that they would have free access to these databases while candidates not on their slate will have to spend a lot of money to send campaign materials to those members via the Elections Supervisors. So the process of rigging the next election has begun.

Ironically, the three members elected to this Ad Hoc Waivers Committee are all Staff, not listeners! They are Vajra Kilgour, Shawn Rhodes and Cerene Roberts. Shawn is not with the faction.

The iGM couldn't be at this meeting because there were two fund raisers for WBAI going on during it, so the faction postponed some of their attacks on her.

The following motion was passed, “That the LSB devote 90 minutes at its next meeting to a broad discussion of station fundraising and how the shortfall will be addressed in the FY 2007 budget. The Interim General Manager, Interim Business Manager and Program Director should be invited to make presentations on this topic.” So maybe we'll see some interesting Q&A at this next meeting.

The Treasurer told us about how all of the WBAI financial data for the past several years is having to be re-entered into computers by hand because the Pacifica National Office allowed the financial records to get corrupted and then didn't have a very good backup of it all. I wonder if that little item is convenient for anyone?

A non-faction LSB member made a motion that the LSB go into executive session at the next meeting to view the comments that were written on the Staff Survey that was part of the Program Director's evaluation process. The faction voted solidly against that. Why? Weren't those comments made for the LSB members to read as a part of the Program Director's evaluation? We are required to evaluate the Program Director. This set of Staff surveys, the second set since the first was not handled properly, is from last November! What's the big secret? It should also be noted that the Chair of the Management Evaluation Committee is the de facto private secretary for the Program Director.

Then we had the Programming Committee report. Only two people had shown up for the Programming Committee meeting on June 12, the day before this LSB meeting, and one more member of that committee was somewhere in the radio station but not in the meeting room. A quorum for this committee is 6 members. The Chair of the Programming Committee had a family emergency and didn't show up for the meeting, so as presiding officer I declared the meeting canceled after waiting a full hour. At the LSB meeting Cerene Roberts declared that there had been a quorum and that she had held a meeting that had set a meeting date for the committee! In fact this was a lie. Ms. Roberts had shown up some time after the meeting had been declared canceled and there had never been a quorum present. It took some days before the confusion caused by her lie was resolved.

The LSB passed a motion opposing Pacifica Executive Director Greg Guma's proposed “must carry” national programs, calling for consultation with station General Managers and Program Directors before implementation. Given the problems that the Pacifica network has had in the past with “must carry” programs I think it's a good idea to go slowly with such proposals.

We then passed the minutes of the December 20, 2005, LSB meeting after I made a bunch of corrections to them. It's amazing to me how the minutes can be so inaccurate about motions I've made when I've given them to the Secretary in writing. But then between the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary they managed to spell one of their own names wrong in this set of minutes.

Here's the page showing the attendance at the LSB meetings.

Here is the newsletter I wrote for the WBAI Staff about the June 13, 2006, LSB meeting

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