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Board of Trustees elected through questionable process
Board of Trustees elected through questionable process
It's not just that board of trustees members have been abusing their power. They also obtained their power through dubious means.
Here's how the election process works: Community Organizations elect 10 of the 20 seats on the Community Board, and the remaining seats are elected by paid supporters and volunteer members. The Community Board then elects the Board of Trustees.
Controlling the Community Organizations
The first problem is that it's the Board of Trustees who determines which groups are accepted as Community Organizations for the purposes of voting. So the board can choose to accept only those organizations who they think will support them, those organizations then elect half of the Community Board (CB), and then the CB can choose to re-elect the same Board of Trustees members or elect new members who support their interests or a particular agenda or ideology.Historically, the majority of Community Organizations have never taken a very active role in the station, and for the most part have been courted solely to cast a vote for whichever candidates the courter supports. Since Community Organizations choose half of the possible seats, those persons who do the most aggressive courting will most likely be able to control not only the election of the CB, but also the election of the Board of Trustees. In the 1997 election less than 30 Community Organizations even voted in the CB election, and most of these were courted by the people who now run the station.
Springboarding CB members onto the BoT
As we mentioned, the Community Board (CB) elects the Board of Trustees (BoT). The CB is supposedly selected for their wisdom in choosing new BoT members. But what happened during the 1997 election was that the CB elected three of its own members to the BoT! This was obviously an incredible abuse of their power and the trust that the membership placed in them when they elected them to the CB.Those three CB members "promoted" to the BoT were Teresa Taylor, Mac McKaskle and Donna Hoffman. And if you thought that the process couldn't be even more questionable, consider that one of the "promoted", Teresa Taylor, is married to CB chair Eduardo Vera.
When is a Community Board not a Community Board?
Wait, it gets even better. The CB is supposed to be elected by community organizations and the membership. But by "promoting" three of its members to the BoT, that left three vacancies on the CB. So the remaining members of the Community Board voted to appoint members of their choosing directly to the CB -- clearly violating the spirit of the idea that the CB is supposed to be chosen by community organizations and KOOP members, not by people in positions of power at the station.The remaining CB members appointed Paul Odekirk, Tony Truong, and Raul Alvarez directly to the CB - the first two of whom were very clearly supporters of Eduardo. All three were also programmers at the station. The "Community" Board thus had more programmers than it did people representing the community from outside the station!
Changing the rules to keep "undesirables" off the board
So Eduardo helped his cohorts elected to the BoT through questionable means, and had their CB positions filled with his supporters. But did he stop there? Not at all. He wanted to ensure that the BoT was stacked with as many of his supporters as possible. The bylaws state there must be at least two persons of the minority gender on the BoT, which would require another male since there were already 3 women and 1 man (Mac) on the BoT. There were two candidates left for the last male seat: Ricardo Guerrero and Gerald Thomason. But Eduardo didn't want either Ricardo or Gerald on the BoT, so he proposed that the CB ignore the bylaws and seat 5 women and 1 man. When that failed, he pushed through a proposal to extend the application period for the BoT. However, nobody was told that the application period had been extended. Low and behold, the second male appointed to the BoT by the CB was Gavino Fernandez who was likely recruited by Eduardo to apply for this last BoT seat. Gavino's appointment was a surprise to everyone, and sadly Gavino might actually have been a good Trustee if he had actually attended BoT meetings. However, Gavino has attended probably only 3 or 4 voting BoT meetings in over a year.
When the smoke cleared, a tiny handful of Community Organizations had elected the Community Board, the Community Board "promoted" three of their members (including the chair's wife) to the Board, and Eduardo had managed to save the last seat on the board for one of his supporters. This is not democracy in action. This is not how a cooperative should elect its leadership. It's time to start over with a democratically-elected board, and restructuring to make certain that this kind of power-grabbing cannot happen in the future.