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KOOP's Board of Trustees is completely unresponsive to member concerns

Elsewhere on this site, we provide dozens of examples of serious problems with KOOP's Board of Trustees. But the one issue detailed below is perhaps the best example of why the current Board of Trustees is completely unfit to lead KOOP. It's rather long, but engaging. If you read only one thing on this website, read this page.

 

Here's the story of the madness than ensued when I shared my opinions with the Board of Trustees. It would be funny in parts, if it weren't so sad. Please email me if you have any comments or questions.

 

At a January station meeting, Ricardo Guerrero introduced proposed changes to the Program Committee Election process. The volunteers at the meeting voted on it as a way to communicate with the Board that they were unhappy with the policy the Board had created. The vote was 37-8 (I think) in favor of Ricardo's proposal.

 

I didn't vote for Ricardo's proposal. I wasn't convinced that the Program Committee Election process was that bad and I felt that it was the Board's role to make that policy. Since the election date was so close, I thought it would be better to continue with their process. If it didn't work, it could be changed for the next time.

 

Board ignores the 37-8 motion

I went to the next Board meeting on February 9th and I was really sad about how it went. I was sad for three basic reasons:

• Only 10 minutes or so was given for discussion of the volunteers' concerns. Part of the reason for the limited time was that very near the beginning of the discussion, a Board member introduced a different proposal. A motion had been made to vote on one of the volunteers' suggestions. That motion was ignored and a second motion was made to change the process in a way not related to the volunteers' suggestions. I wasn't sad that another suggestion was being made, I was sad because the Board's agenda said that 20 minutes would be spent discussing the volunteers' proposals and that time was hijacked by this new unrelated proposal.
  
• The new proposal was a major change to the election process. Instead of two positions being elected by a volunteer vote at a station meeting, the two positions would be elected by a mailout vote of the entire membership. In my idea of a cooperative, policy proposals are developed in advance, they are posted and given time for review and then voted on. They are not introduced in one minute, discussed in a confusing and manner for the next 10 minutes, and then voted on the minute after that. I did not necessarily disagree with the proposal itself; I disagreed with the process of introducing it during a time that was set aside for another issue, then voting on it without reasonable time for review.
  
• The most disturbing part of the meeting was when two Board members made statements about how the volunteers' vote was not meaningful. I would not have been sad if they said they disagreed with the volunteers, but in several different ways, they said the volunteers' suggestions were not important. I think all suggestions made by volunteers are important. The Board's dismissive and condescending attitude towards them was very upsetting.

I write an open letter, and a board member yells at me

I wrote an open letter to the Board stating these concerns. I put copies of the letter in each of the Board members' boxes and posted a copy on a station bulletin board. [read the original letter]

 

It was a week or so later and I had heard no response. Someone suggested that I put the letter on the email list since most folks hadn't seen it and the copy on the bulletin board was gone. After this post I received a swift reply from Board member Mac McKaskle. He left a message at my house saying that the information in my letter was wrong and maybe I should try volunteering at KO.OP before I get so cocky and try to tell people how to run things. (I had volunteered over 100 hours at KOOP at the time.)

 

I telephoned the office and Mac was there so I asked to talk to him. He immediately started yelling. He said that I had no right to disrespect the Board like I had, I obviously knew nothing about the station and the letter should have never been written because a five minute phone call to him would have clarified everything, and I had no idea how hard he worked and he wasn't going to have ignorant people trash his work like that. Mac didn't give me the opportunity to speak. I'm not sure I could have put my thoughts together anyway, since he was yelling and cursing and I was shaking when I got off the phone.

 

A board member publicly flames me, without addressing the issues

Jenny Wong asked both of us if we would see a mediator together. We both said yes. I was waiting for more information on that when Mac replied to my open letter on the KOOP email list. [read Mac's reply]

 

The most interesting thing about Mac's reply is that most of his comments didn't respond to the issues in my letter. The one issue he did address was that the proposal he made was only a minor change, and that 'volunteer' wasn't a class of voters at KO.OP. It is not clear what 'class of voters' means. I wasn't able to find an official list of 'classes of voters', but volunteers are listed as a voting category in the by-laws for Community Board elections, so I wasn't sure what his argument meant.

 

Most of his reply was not about the issues in my letter. Much of his reply responded to the proposals made by the volunteers, proposals that I didn't vote for. For example, "the present programming committee rules that you hate were and are for increasing the participation. Why is your number one focus at the station limiting who they can for and who can vote? Why are you so afraid of democracy?" This passionate argument failed to address the fact that my letter did not concern the program committee election process itself. I did NOT vote for the proposals to change the process! My letter concerned only how the Board was handling the process of making the policy.

 

Mac made several arguments against my form of communication. For example, according to Mac, I should have phoned him instead of writing an open letter, I should have expressed my concerns at the meeting instead of walking away and getting upset later, I hadn't done anything before so it is not appropriate now, I didn't write pages of email about other more important issues so why should he listen to me about this one, and I'm the only one who has these opinions so they aren't important.

 

He had several additional arguments about me personally. For example, according to Mac, I hadn't listened and I wasn't educated about KOOP. Most interestingly was his statement "Several people have told me the reason you wrote this email was that you work for KVRX and are trying to disrupt KOOP during a time of crisis." I was station manager at KVRX when KVRX and KOOP stopped fighting. One of the greatest things I was a part of at KVRX was the END of the bad times between the two stations. Nothing he could have said could have been more wrong or more mean spirited than Mac's accusation.

 

Little support from the Board President

Then President of the Board of Trustees, Teresa Taylor, called me. She said my volunteer work was appreciated. When we met for lunch, I asked her if volunteers could expect to be able to express their opinions to the Board without being yelled at, cursed at and personally attacked. She said no, that that was how some people communicated and we could not tell people how they should communicate.

 

Mac says he's unwilling to talk without yelling or cursing;
Eduardo follows suit

I talked to Mac after the next station meeting. I asked if we could continue our discussion of the letter without him yelling, cursing and attacking me personally. Could we meet and talk about the issues? He said no. He said I couldn't understand because I am heterosexual, and his style of communication is part of his culture and I could not ask him to change that. I said I would rather not meet then. He said I was wrong for writing the letter, then not being willing to talk about it.

 

Eduardo Vera [Community Board Chair and spouse of Board of Trustees President Teresa Taylor] was listening to this conversation. He said he would have written a letter just like Mac's, I had no right to disrespect the Board like I had, and my letter also was making certain segments of the populations uncomfortable with KOOP. I asked what I had said or written that was making people uncomfortable. He would not reply. I asked if he though I was racist. He did not say no, but said "I did not say that". He did say that KOOP was a racist environment. I asked him which people and events made him feel this way. He said, for example, Jenny Wong is racist. Jenny was in the room and I asked her "Did you know that Eduardo thinks you are racist?" Jenny then asked Eduardo why he thought this. Eduardo said "I came into the office once and you asked me what I was doing here." Jenny was very calm. She said that if she asked him that it was because she often asks folks in the office if they need any help. She didn't mean for that to make him uncomfortable.

 

I continued talking with Eduardo. I asked him why stating different opinions than the Board was by definition disrespectful. He would not answer my question. He started to walk away. I followed him and asked again "Is it possible to have different opinions than the Board and not be defined as a disrespectful?" He said "yes" meekly and hurried off.

 

Blown off by even more Board members

I wanted to follow through on the letter as Mac had insisted. I talked to Aida Franco, another Board member. I told her I was willing to meet to talk about the letter. She suggested that we meet before the next Board meeting. I talked to Donna Hoffman, she said she couldn't make it until 6:30. I put a letter in each of the Board member's boxes stating that if they wanted to talk about the letter, I would be at the station at 6:30 before the next Board meeting. Aida called my house and said she would not meet with me if she was going to be the only Board member. I said that the meeting was her idea, why was she changing her mind now? She said she had a policy to not meet with volunteers one on one. I thought that odd for a Board member of a cooperative. I asked how I could ever meet with her if the other Board members couldn't come? She just restated her policy.

 

I was at the station at 6:30 and only Aida was there. We waited. Carol Hayman arrived at about 6:40. I asked if she was here to talk about the letter. She didn't say yes, she just said something like "I'm just here." I supposed that was good enough and we started to talk. I asked if they had any comments about the letter. They said no. I asked what they thought about my ideas. They said nothing. I got more specific and asked what they thought about some of the details. Then they spoke. They both said that I was wasting their time &emdash; they were the Board, they deserved respect, they had work to do and they did not have time to deal with people like me. They said my ideas were the same ideas that people had been bringing to them for six months, and I was only rehashing the same old arguments. (In fact, my arguments had only to do with the one recent Board meeting, nothing any older than that.) Not only did the letter waste their time, they said, but this meeting wasted their time too. Carol Hayman made sure I knew that her coming 20 minutes early made her miss dinner and I that was responsible for that. Carol asked why I thought I was so special, why I couldn't talk about this at the Board meeting like everyone else. When I told them that Mac insisted that I talk more about the letter, Teresa Taylor told me there was no time on the agenda to talk about my letter and the time and place was Aida's idea, they had no comment. In a hostile and accusing tone, one of them asked if I thought that I represented the community. I said my comments are only my own. They then went on to dismiss my comments because they were "obviously" only those of one person.

 

The conversation to this point did not address the issues in the letter, only how bad I sucked for having written it. I tried to get to the issues. I said that in a cooperative, I thought major policy changes should be posted for review for a period of time, not introduced and voted on in the same meeting. Aida said "We post everything for a month before we vote." I said, "No, you didn't. Mac's proposal was a major change and it was made very suddenly without any posting at all." They had no comment.

 

In the end, I said "I hope we get to a point when we can have a conversation like this without being hostile." They could not even agree on that; they had no comment.

 

There is more to this story, but it is more along the same lines. I can't comment about Donna Hoffman; we only talked for a minute about the letter and Gavino had no response at all. Teresa Taylor was respectful when I talked with her, except for her assertion that it's okay for Board members to yell, curse, and attack the personality of volunteer members they disagree with.

 

But as a whole, this Board does not know how to communicate or how to show the most basic respect for their fellow human beings. They are immediately angry and defensive about any ideas other than their own. For this reason and others described on this web site, KO.OP cannot survive this Board.

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