WBAI LSB Meeting — May 22, 2006

The forty fifth WBAI Local Station Board (LSB) meeting was held on Monday, May 22, 2006, at 6:30 PM at Local1199's Bread and Roses Art Gallery, 310 W. 43rd St. in Manhattan. This is not an official Web page of the LSB.

This meeting started over an hour late. The first order of business was to set the agenda for the meeting. The faction started plugging things in. As it turned out this got away from the Chair, who ended up allowing too many amendments to be pending at once. It started out all right, and then there was a substitute amendment but then there came a confusion of statements which turned out to be amendments and suddenly we had too much stuff going on. The Chair wanted to take up the amendments in the wrong order and that added to the confusion.

During this part of the meeting the Chair once again refused to count the vote of Paul DeRienzo whom the faction maintains has been “suspended.” Besides the fact that the suspension was illegal in the first place the suspension was for six months, and as of this meeting DeRienzo was in the fifteenth month of being suspended!

The usual debate occurred and the faction voted to uphold the Chair's decision to not count DeRienzo's vote or let him speak. During this debate various faction operatives heckled and shouted out of turn at those who wanted to allow DeRienzo to exercise his rights as a member. Michael Warren was especially disruptive, standing up, shouting at other members and trying to bully people into doing what he wanted. Even the Chair, a fellow member of his faction, couldn't bring him to order at times.

One of the items added to the agenda was a motion to set up a waivers committee. This will be how the faction will try to really steal this upcoming election. They've already been compiling databases at station expense to have a ready made, and very large, list of people whom they can make members and get to vote for them. One such list is rumored to be a database of all prisoners in the listening area. Since the faction would have full and unfettered access to this list they would have an advantage over other slates and individual candidates who would have to go through the expense and bother of sending campaign materials to the Elections Supervisor and then having them delivered to a Pacifica mailing house to do the actual mailing. The faction would be able to target mailings to the people on the database. In the last election there were only 14 waivers granted. Will we see a hundred times that number at this next election?

The faction got items on the agenda that will facilitate their attacks on interim General Manager Indra Hardat; they also moved up their agenda item to secure a patronage position for faction leader Bob Lederer at the expense of Paid Staff at WBAI. An attempt to substitute an agenda item supporting all Paid Staff was defeated.

Voting to make the agenda item about supporting all Paid Staff were Carolyn Birden, Mitchell Cohen, Patty Heffley, R. Paul Martin and Shawn Rhodes.

Voting against making the agenda item about supporting all Paid Staff were Lisa Davis, Sarah Flounders, Cheryl Ife Griffin, Ray Laforest, Cerene Roberts, Berta Silva, Paul Surovell, Evan Tobias and Michael Warren.

It was quarter to nine when we finally approved an agenda, and we had to go into a public comment session immediately.

Martin Attarian, that guy who denounces me and other Staff at some of these meetings, actually ran out of breath at this one. He looks like he's getting more and more upset at each meeting. He's going to have an unpleasant cardio-vascular event during one of his rants if he keeps this up!

After the public comment session we set the next meeting date for June, 13, which usurped the meeting date of the LSB's own Programming Committee. We then set new meeting dates for the Programming and Finance Committees.

The agenda had set the executive session to begin a 9:00 PM as a special order of business. But it was only 9:28 PM when the Chair asked the public to leave so that the executive session could start.

Of course I can't talk about the details of an executive session, but I can state that it began at 9:41 PM and ended at 9:58 PM. I can also say that in my opinion it was a total waste of time!

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

Here is the newsletter I wrote for the WBAI Staff about the May 22, 2006, LSB meeting


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