The future of the financially strapped iconic Brooklyn radio station is still unclear after a federal district court kicked the issue back to the New York State Supreme Court on Monday. Radio Ink has been told that any stories that the station will be returning to local programming anytime soon are 100% inaccurate.
Earlier this month local WBAI employees filed a lawsuit against The Pacifica Foundation after the corporate office fired employees and ended local programming. WBAI has been bleeding money, unable to raise enough funds to make payroll or pay its rent. Radio Ink has been told that WBAI’s total net deficit is over $6 million, including $2.36 million in accrued rent.
Radio Ink has been told that WBAI staff and supporters seem to “suffer from a mass delusion that WBAI belongs to them, and that Pacifica officers stole it from them. But all the capital assets of WBAI, including the local offices and studios, belong to Pacifica. They refuse to admit what Pacifica audits have shown for years: that WBAI has run up deficits of millions of dollars. The 2017 audit shows WBAI had a deficit of more than $600,000 in fiscal year 2017 and negative net assets of more than $7 million. The station had the largest deficit and least net assets of any of Pacifica’s stations that year. The ‘press conference‘ that WBAI producers and supporters held on the steps of Manhattan City Hall on October 15th doesn’t acknowledge any financial facts.”
Our WBAI source goes on to say while telling the public one thing, the staff refuses to acknowledge what’s really happening. “Ironically, most WBAI producers have been telling listeners on the air for years (during WBAI’s seemingly incessant on-air pledge drives) that listeners must send in enough money or WBAI could go off the air. Well, that finally happened, yet they all seem shocked and indignant. More accurately, WBAI-FM is still on the air without the multi-million dollar annual financial burden of the local staff, studio, and offices in Brooklyn, but with “the best of Pacifica fed from its Berkeley headquarters. The revised Temporary Restraining Order upheld Pacifica’s actions except for laying off local staff–who presumably have come into work with having much work to do besides cashing their paychecks for what little money Pacifica has in its bank account. No amount of chanting in the streets or lawsuits against Pacifica will generate the money needed to put them back on the air. There’s no longer any STL between their former studios in Brooklyn and the WBAI-FM transmitter site at 4 Times Square.”
This seems to me to be an extension of the problems Pacifica & it’s affiliate stations have had for way too many years. Problems financial, problems political.
Does anybody remember the donnybrook when KPFA’a Larry Benski & Nicole Sawaya were fired..?
I don’t think Lou Hill would recognize what his baby has become…
I don’t know how to tell them this…but even non-commercial stations have to pay their bills. And if they can’t be paid, everyone, including the staff, suffers. Your “mission” means nothing to the guy who supplies your power. Convince your listeners you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to run your station by solar or wind power. I am not unsympathetic to them wanting to make the radio they want to make. Only unsympathetic to the fact that they seem oblivious to the fact that they have to get the support of their listeners to sustain the station’s expenses. If that means changing the programming, so be it.