[Kzyxtalk] My comment for the public comment period of the Monday, June 29 MCPB board meeting in Willits.

[Marco McClean]

(Here's what I just sent to the boardmembers of MCPB.)

Please print this email out and bring it to the Monday, June 29 MCPB 
board meeting in Willits.

My public comment:

"I can't make it to the meeting this time. So when you get to the public 
comment period I want a board member to read my public comment aloud 
into the record. Any board member or former board member will do. It 
takes three minutes.

"MCPB spent $575,000 over the last twelve months. KNYO spent $12,000 in 
the same time. KMEC spent $19,000. The difference between operating KNYO 
at 87 watts and operating KZYX&Z at a total of about 5,000 watts is 
about fifteen dollars a day in electricity. KZYX is spending twenty 
times what it needs to, even figuring in the NPR show dues. And KNYO and 
KMEC have some valuable features that KZYX lacks, like, for example, 
downtown performance-space studios on the street in Fort Bragg and Ukiah 
and an easily configurable remote studio system that doesn't require 
anyone to babysit the main studio; remote broadcasts are controlled by 
the remote broadcaster with one click to go on the air and one click 
when his or her show is over. Any airperson can have a durable, 
portable, high-quality remote studio for two or three hundred dollars 
and be up and running in ten minutes. Those are only a couple of 
examples; there are more. So when angry people defend the status quo and 
KZYX's hemorrhaging of half a million dollars every year on the grounds 
that KZYX really needs to blow through that kind of money to keep the 
shows on the air, that's just not true; they have it all wrong. You're 
doing everything in the most complicated, byzantine, oppressive way 
possible, just as you've been doing for the past twenty-five years, and 
the only reason KZYX didn't fail financially every year of its existence 
--including this year-- is you've been bailed out by the annual CPB 
grant. By anybody's measure, and in any business, that's appallingly bad 
corporate management. That's banana-republic-government-quality management.

"I know you have a hard time seeing that, for the same reason people 
swear by expensive alternative placebo medical products and procedures. 
You've already invested so much faith and money --in the case of KZYX, 
other people's money-- and you just naturally have to defend it so you 
don't feel like a fool. And anyone pointing out what's wrong with that 
becomes a threat to your authority, because if everyone can see what's 
wrong, then you not only feel like a fool, you look like one, too. It's 
just human nature to get huffy and blame everybody else for the 
consequences of your own actions. I understand.

"So John Coate's going, now. If you must have an imperial manager and 
pay him $60,000 a year to hang around the station and do the lazy 
afternoon per month of crucial tasks that keep the station legal, that 
person might as well be doing a real radio station manager's work, which 
at KZYX would include the positions of David Steffen and Mary Aigner, 
and so you can let them go. That single suggestion, if you follow it, 
saves you $800,000 over the next ten years, and I have other suggestions 
that will save you even more money. I recommend you use that fountain of 
money to pay the airpeople, the ones listeners turn on their radios to 
hear in the first place.

(signed) Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com