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

[Erif]

Thank you, Marco, this says it all. I hope that everyone at the meeting 
/listens/.

Best wishes,
Erif.

On 6/28/2015 11:34 PM, Marco McClean wrote:
> (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
>
>
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