Urban Unrest

11 August 2006 | Pacifica, Recommendations | Ernesto Aguilar

June 25 marked the kickoff of Pacifica’s election season. And today’s choice is KPFT’s election site, from which aspiring candidates may run for our board of directors.This is a unique moment for all five radio stations; Pacifica’s bylaws state that listeners who either pledge or volunteer at its stations may run for and sit on each local board of directors. Pacifica held its first elections three years ago, following a chaotic period in which a California court ordered Pacifica to organize in a radically different fashion. A recent mid-term election later and Pacifica is now at the end of several three-year terms. Most boards will seat about half of their local station boards during by the end of this year. Check out our bylaws for details.

As you might expect, this process yields a strange cross-section of people, many of whom have never sat on a board, done non-profit fundraising and who may not be clear on the purpose of a board. If you are in a Pacifica signal area and are considering running for the elections, please note that board is tasked by our bylaws with the following tasks:

1. To review and approve that station’s budget and make quarterly reports to the Foundation’s Board of Directors regarding the station’s budget, actual income and expenditures.
2. To screen and select a pool of candidates for the position of General Manager of its respective radio station, from which pool of approved candidates the Executive Director shall hire the station’s General Manager.. The LSB may appoint a special sub-committee for this purpose.
3. To prepare an annual written evaluation of the station’s General Manager.
4. Both the Executive Director and/or an LSB may initiate the process to fire a station General Manager. However, to effectuate it, both the Executive Director and the LSB must agree to fire said General Manager. If the Executive Director and the LSB cannot agree, the decision to terminate or retain said General Manager shall be made by the Board of Directors.
5. To screen and select a pool of candidates for the position of station Program Director, from which pool of approved candidates the station’s General Manager shall hire the station’s Program Director. The LSB may appoint a special sub-committee for this purpose.
6. To prepare an annual written evaluation of the station’s Program Director.
7. To work with station management to ensure that station programming fulfills the purposes of the Foundation and is responsive to the diverse needs of the listeners (demographic) and communities (geographic) served by the station, and that station policies and procedures for making programming decisions and for program evaluation are working in a fair, collaborative and respectful manner to provide quality programming.
8. To conduct “Town Hall” style meetings at least twice a year, devoted to hearing listeners views, needs and concerns.
9. To assist in station fundraising activities.
10. To actively reach out to underrepresented communities to help the station serve a diversity of all races, creeds, colors and nations, classes, genders and sexual orientations, and ages and to help build collaborative relations with organizations working for similar purposes.
11. To perform community needs assessments, or see to it that separate “Community Advisory Committees” are formed to do so.
12. To ensure that the station works diligently towards the goal of diversity in staffing at all levels and maintenance of a discrimination-free atmosphere in the workplace.
13. To exercise all of its powers and duties with care, loyalty, diligence and sound business judgment consistent with the manner in which those terms are generally defined under applicable California law.

I feel it’s important to specifically point out that local boards of directors are not engaged in creating programming, but instead working with management toward a specific mandate related to programming (evaluations; setting quality, community-needs and policies/procedures benchmarks). Last go-round, people chose to run for the board to change programming or management (purging managers is a time-honored Pacifica tradition, after all). Many were frustrated to find that the majority of board work has none of the glamor that programming does. In fact, a lot of the board’s work takes patience and dedication to get done.

I encourage KPFT listeners to run for our elections, but to understand the purpose of directorship. Visit KPFT’s election site for details.

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