We are members of Pacifica radio stations who endorse our organization’s mission of increasing understanding among groups through dialogue. We recommend that our local station and national board members put our Foundation’s message into practice by using internal discussion and dialog to resolve differences, instead of tactics that rely on external governmental entities such as the courts.
We urge all elected representatives to work for the survival and growth of all of our stations. That means the entire Pacifica network, and not only some parts. We ask that you improve internal communications, and in your January 2021 elections for national board members, consider both the candidates’ knowledge of station and network needs, Pacifica bylaws and policies and their willingness to work towards consensus.
Sitting at a larger table allows for greater inclusion, and in this transformative year, we especially need to align our politics and our actions.
We do not support the hire of consultants at this time to revise our bylaws as those thousands of dollars are urgently needed elsewhere in our network. We do support a systematic review of the Pacifica Bylaws by our national Governance Committee, with broad listener input. We reject the lawsuits and repeated referenda of the “Pacifica Restructuring Project” / “New Day Pacifica” which ignore the overwhelming “No” message from us as members in the previous referendum as recent as March 2020 as those efforts lead to the break up of the network and are draining network resources. Specifically:
We oppose shrinking station listener representation from 3 members to 1.
· That is a recipe for domination. Multiple seats of the same kind/class allow for a greater diversity of perspectives as the current bylaws intend.
We oppose nationalizing and shrinking staff representation by 60%, and dividing the staff into paid and unpaid classes:
· Pacifica’s stations are very different from each other and the input of the people who do the actual work is essential to understanding what policies are needed and how well they translate on the ground.
We oppose forcing our affiliate stations into the “Organization of Affiliates” and reducing their representation on the national board by half:
· Affiliate stations expand the reach of the Pacifica mission. For over 16 years, the PNB has welcomed representation from terrestrial affiliates as large as some Pacifica sister stations to small low power or internet stations. Insight into how other community stations function and serve their listeners is important.
We oppose:
• the diminishing of the Local Station Boards’ oversight,
• the referendum proponents granting themselves multi-year, no-competition, national officer positions, and
• their proposal to add 3 completely undefined, hand-picked “experts.”
The Pacifica National Board has chosen not to challenge this PRP look-alike referendum and has agreed on a timeframe to bring it to a vote. We are letting them know we will vote “No” if the referendum comes into being, and also are letting the “Breakers” know, we will consider their conduct and their desperate and offensive red-baiting in all our future voting decisions including for Local Station Boards.