[Kzyxtalk] For KZYX&Z's public inspection file.

[Marco McClean]

On 6/29/2015 12:29 PM, Stuart Campbell wrote:
> "Public Comment" is an agenda item, and it is a time on the agenda for 
> those in the audience--those present, as I said--to speak. Why must a 
> Board member or former Board member read your statement, something for 
> which there is no precedent during the "Public Comment" period during 
> which you want it done?

     You say, why must you; I say why not? I told you what I want. It 
takes up no more time than if I were to read it myself, you refuse out 
of spite, and I call that typical, because it is.

> If this is important enough for you to have read at this meeting, I 
> would encourage you to find someone other than a Board member to read 
> it during public comment. Or come to the meeting yourself.
> We are not trying to control or prevent communication. That's your 
> characterization, one I do not accept.

     You don't accept it? I see. Then, when on the air schedule is the 
regular unfettered discussion of station business? Why are board 
meetings not on the air? Why is there no open forum on the website? Why 
have you for so long played goalie to prevent emailed information from 
reaching the board?

>
> The law does not require us to put your emailed request to have 
> something read at the Board meeting into the public file.

*    The FCC requires that anything sent to the station intended for the 
public inspection file go into the public inspection file. I'm sending 
this to you, Stuart, a representative of the station, and specifically 
instructing you to place this and the following correspondence into 
KZYX&Z's public inspection file. It should take you ten seconds to 
print, and ten seconds to put it in the file next time you're at the 
station.**
*
--------

Subject: My comment for the public comment period of the Monday, June 
29, 2013 MCPB board meeting in Willits.

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

-----

Stuart Campbell replied:

I'm sorry Marco, but public comment has always been an opportunity for 
those present to speak. We have no provision for reading statements by 
proxy during that agenda item. If you can find someone on your own to 
use their time to read your statement, that is, of course, yours & their 
choice.

That being said, Director John Sakowicz had asked for an agenda item to 
discuss stripping staff members of their salaries, and it is on the 
agenda as an item from a Board member. So, it would appear that your 
idea will be brought up.

Stuart Campbell
MCPB Board President

------

And I wrote:

     This is exactly what I'm talking about, Stuart. "No provision 
during that agenda item"? Is there no public comment time unrelated to a 
specific agenda item? You're sitting right there in plain sight. Three 
minutes is three minutes. And my "idea", in this case, is not to "strip 
staff members of their salaries" but to remove goldbrickers from the 
trough and get the real workers paid. Meetings are too few and far 
between, and this week I'm on a job a four-hour round trip from Willits, 
and people sympathetic to good radio and good governance have their own 
bits to bring up in their allotted three minutes of squeak time. I /am/ 
getting someone to read my comment: someone on the board; if not you 
then another, and if each of you refuses, wow.
     Stuart, you've already prevented the public and membership from 
communicating out of your control via the public resource of the air, 
nor via any kind of open forum on the website, and you play information 
goalie to prevent free communication between the public and the board 
via email, and you and your cabal have actively prevented my excellent 
literacy-project show from ever being on KZYX at all, so...

     All right, you've always been like that, you'll continue being like 
that; it's who you are.*Put what I wrote, and what I write, into the 
station's public inspection file.* That, anyway, is an explicitly 
spelled-out law.


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