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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.
It Would Be Funny If It Weren't So
Sad
An example of the Board
of Trustees' strategy for handling feedback
by Carol
Teixeira
-
- 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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