WBAI LSB Meeting — February 25, 2010

The ninety ninth WBAI Local Station Board (LSB) meeting was held on Wednesday, February 25, 2010, at The Soho Gallery of Digital Art, 138 Sullivan St. between Prince St. and Houston St. in Manhattan. This is not an official Web page of the LSB.

Everything within a hundred miles of New York City was under a major Winter Storm Warning before, during and after this LSB meeting. As a result of the blizzard the LSB just barely made quorum. And it turned out that the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign, aka “the faction” or just “the FoBs” had a majority at this meeting.

I had a hard time getting there and ended up getting there late. When I arrived, after 8:00 PM, the LSB was still working on the agenda. Because of a special rule passed in 2007, the motion that sets a meeting's agenda has to be voted on after 20 minutes. So this meeting had started very late indeed.

So the FoBs set the agenda for this meeting. Their first priority was a lengthy attack on LSB Chair Mitchel Cohen. Cohen had written about the faction's attempt to make the LSB even more dysfunctional than it already is by bringing a motion that would defer every motion “that would have long-range impact on the station” until the imprisoned Lynne Stewart was briefed on the motion, and then, the motion said, Ms. Stewart would be able to send in her comments and her vote for a future meeting. Of course this would constitute proxy voting and would be illegal under the Pacifica Foundation's bylaws.

Naturally the FoBs would be the ones presenting the issues to her, and everything would take a long time and the LSB would end up arguing about what motions constituted an “important decision”, and any actions taken by the LSB could be challenged owing to the illegal proxy vote allowed. The FoBs really just want to prevent the LSB from doing anything for an entire year. Then they can say that the current majority is not doing things and so tell people to vote for them in the upcoming election. In other words, this is all just their usual dirty politics.

Mitchel Cohen, who's been a Lynne Stewart supporter for years, took the FoBs to task for this. As usual they're saying it's racist to oppose them by speaking out against what they're doing. Since they had a majority they got to make this the first item on the agenda. But removing the Chair requires a two thirds vote, and they knew it, so this was all just another opportunity for them to pose and grandstand.

What I find interesting is that they did not try to put their motion to allow Lynne Stewart to vote by proxy on the agenda at this meeting. They had the majority. They determined the agenda of this meeting by a series of 7 to 4 votes. They could have put their motion on the agenda and passed it. But they didn't even try. This would be very odd behavior indeed if they actually believed that their motion were legal.

Perhaps they realize that if they were to get this motion passed by the WBAI LSB then some higher authority might intervene and rule it illegal and thereby take from them this club which they've been beating the rest of the LSB over the head with for months. Yeah, they're just that cynical.

One ironic thing that happened during this meeting was that this Russell Dale character was calling Mitchel Cohen a racist. This is the same Russell Dale who was banned from WBAI for his insulting behavior towards then interim General Manager Lavarn Williams. Surely Russell Dale's behavior was both racist and sexist and that's why he's banned from entering WBAI's premises.

The motion to remove Mitchel Cohen as Chair failed to achieve a two thirds vote and so failed.

Time was made for the new interim General Manager (iGM) of WBAI Muriel Tillinghast to speak to the LSB for the first time. She gave a speech in which she outlined her life experiences and appealed to people to work together, making Star Trek references that I think some of the faction operatives did not get.

Ms. Tillinghast said that she'd come to New York City in 1971, and had been listening to WBAI ever since. She said that part of the reason why she's stayed in New York City over the years had been because of WBAI.

She noted that she'd started as iGM on February 1^st, and that after she'd been there a week “The bombs began to fall.” She said that she had come to the station as iGM with no idea of how dysfunctional things were, and she said that everything was broken at the station. She said that things had started to improve after that. She noted that the station only has a skeleton Staff to deal with things, especially finances. In spite of all this she said that she thinks that WBAI can survive.

She said that there were too many contending viewpoints and complaints at the station, and that her E-mail is overwhelmed with them. She also said that the station should move to new premises. She said that WBAI began in a different social climate and that that social climate is not coming back.

Ms Tillinghast said that she would start the process of evaluating all programming on WBAI shortly. She said that she is going to start with a blank 24 hour grid and have “down and dirty” discussions about programming.

She is also meeting with Paid Staff to define jobs and figure out who's there. She noted that WBAI has had bad finances for ten years.

After this the LSB held the elections for PNB committees.

Results of the LSB elections to PNB committees for 2010

By now it was after ten o'clock, the blizzard was raging right outside, and the guy who owned the art gallery where we were meeting had let us know that we could only stay until eleven o'clock. There was then a motion to change the agenda by having the Treasurer's Report next. This was voted down by a 5 to 6 vote.

The meeting ground on.

Next the faction brought a motion to “Reconstitute the Management Search Committee.” It was 10:18 PM when this act started.

The faction had been fighting the Management Search Committee (MSC) since it was formed. They want to bring back their faction boss, former Program Director Bernard White. For most of a year they disrupted meetings to run out the time and make the meetings adjourn before getting to the forming of the MSC, and they had used various parliamentary maneuvers to delay the forming and populating of the MSC.

At this meeting they brought a motion to repopulate the MSC in a manner completely different from what the LSB had already done. This would also erase all of the work done by the MSC over the past few, tortured months.

Their basis for this was the faction's claim that the current Management Search Committee had been dissolved automatically upon the election of the Fifth WBAI LSB in December 2009. They bolstered this position with an argument and some half assed citations from Roberts Rules of Order that Nia Bediako had put together. As usual the citations were not relevant to the actual Management Search Committee but were about other situations. The faction does this a lot: they'll claim that one thing is something else and then they'll hammer the rules about that something else in an effort to get their way. It didn't work this time.

A point of order was raised that this motion was not necessary since the MSC had not automatically dissolved and it had a membership that did not need wholesale replacement. The Chair ruled in favor of this point of order. A faction operative appealed the chair's ruling. The Chair read an argument which showed that the MSC had not in fact been dissolved. The faction operatives were especially bothered that it was pointed out that when they'd had a majority on the LSB they'd had a MSC of their own that had lasted for years!

Meantime one of the faction operatives had left and one of the non-faction members of the LSB had finally gotten through the blizzard to the meeting and so when the appeal was voted on it came out to a 6-6 tie and this meant that the motion was out of order.

Former Chair Vajra Kilgour jumped up and started shouting that the appeal had failed because it was a tie vote. Other faction operatives, including some in the small audience, joined her. So, since everyone was being allowed to shout out, I joined in and noted that Roberts Rules of Order clearly states that a tie vote for an appeal of the ruling of a Chair is in favor of the Chair's ruling. The reason is that the appeal attempts to overturn a ruling and it takes a majority to do so. I'm sure that Kilgour knew that, she'd quoted Roberts Rules of Order enough times in the 3 years and 4 months that she'd been Chair of the LSB and had had many of her rulings appealed, and she had read that section of Roberts Rules of Order enough to quote points from it before.

Well, the ruling that the Management Search Committee was not dissolved and did not need to be repopulated prevailed. The meeting continued.

In this lovely atmosphere, with the blizzard raging outside, we got to the Treasurer's Report. And, being Treasurer, I got to give it. Here's the report as I wrote it:

So I figured I was done. But there had a been a gap in the text of the report I'd read. I'd wondered about the gap when I'd started to read the report, but there were too many distractions at the meeting to think about it much.

As it turned out the first question was about the rent problem. Oh, that's what I'd left out! I'd put together the report in pieces, working on aspects of it separately and then plugging in the text as I compiled the report. There had been some major distractions while I was putting the report together, with the blizzard worsening, and there had even been a suggestion that the LSB meeting be cancelled. In the midst of this I ran late and closed the word processor in a hurry, letting some unsaved documents just go. Well, one of those unsaved documents that ended up in the bit bucket was the part of the report about the rent problem. Of course the faction operatives were accusatory about this.

So I reported on the WBAI rent arrears at both 120 Wall St. and the Empire State Building and I answered a few other questions.

And then it was 11:00 PM and the meeting ended. It was one of the more bizarre ones. And then we each trudged out into the deepening snow and disappeared into the blizzard.

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

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