Pacifica National Board votes to waste listener dollars

The Pacifica National Board met in Los Angeles during the last weekend in January 2012, spending the majority of its time in executive session consultations that were closed to the public.

Of the actions reported publicly, there are two concerning KPFA. First, the board  authorized its chair, Summer Reese, to appoint an elections supervisor to run the KPFA recall vote — something that should have happened two months ago. Reese said she’d “try” to do it within two weeks.

Secondly, Pacifica’s board has decided to appeal the court injunction that compelled it to seat SaveKPFA representatives Laura Prives and Dan Siegel last year. Such appeals have a very low likelihood of succeeding. What’s more, Siegel and Prives have already completed the terms the injunction applied to — and been re-elected to the national board — so the issue is now moot. We would call this another bid to disenfranchise KPFA’s duly-elected representatives, but it actually looks like something more petty: a quixotic waste of listeners’ money and SaveKPFA‘s time.

KPFA’s Local Station Board met on February 4, and among other actions, overwhelmingly passed this resolution with bi-partisan support criticizing Pacifica’s board for its money-wasting legal appeal and demanding it reverse course. The vote was 14-2 (the two voting against the measure were Anthony Fest and Janet Kobren). You can listen to the entire 5-hour-long KPFA board meeting here: part 1 | part 2