Eight outraged fellow board members gave dissident treasurer John Sakowicz verbal pummeling at Monday night”s KZYX board of directors meeting at the Redwood Coast Senior Center in Fort Bragg.
The always colorful and controversial Sakowicz did the unthinkable last month for a board member launching a formal campaign to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny the Philo-based radio station its license renewal unless it takes an abrupt change of direction. At this point, it”s unknown if that effort could actually have an impact on whether KZYX gets its license renewed.
“There are many issues of poor corporate governance at Mendocino County Public Broadcasting,” Sakowicz wrote in a 2,700-word letter to the FCC.
“The integrity of board elections greatly concerns me. ? Executive Director John Coate [has] interfered with the elections process by recruiting some people to run for the board with his endorsement while strongly discouraging other people from running for the Board. In other words, Mr. Coate handpicks his own board ? however, the board is charged with oversight over Mr. Coate,” Sakowicz wrote.
Board”s response
Monday, the board expressed outrage at Sakowicz” letter and claims. His FCC letter demands that Coate be fired as a condition of FCC license renewal.
“John Sakowicz has petitioned the FCC to not renew our license based on misinformation, hearsay and inappropriate slurs misrepresenting our general manager. This is completely inappropriate behavior, and in no way supports our station or the responsibility of an elected board member,” said board member Bob Page, managing partner at the Airport Health Club in Santa Rosa.
Page then took on the station”s vociferous critics, who were apparently absent or not well-represented in Monday”s crowd of about 50 people.
“It seems like there is no single accomplishment that the station can do that our detractors approve of. It seems like these KZYX adversaries have only one goal for the management to fail.” Page said.
“Perhaps the 100 members for change should start your own Mendocino station and run it exactly the way you want it KMUD South. The AVA [Anderson Valley Advertiser] could be your first underwriter, you could drop NPR [National Public Radio] and make Doug McKenty the general manager. ? Then you could do it your way and channel positive energy for once,” Page said.
McKenty has been among the leaders for changing the management structure after his “Open Lines” show was suspended when someone uttered the “F” word on the air. The board said Monday a bleep machine has now been purchased and that the show would be coming back with rotating hosts. McKenty was host for seven years.
“I”m warning you from the bottom of my heart as long as I am a board member and beyond, I”m going to stand 100 percent behind our general manager and our three underpaid staff, our hardworking volunteers ? the station is working and almost all of our members tell us so,” said Page.
The speech by Page got perhaps the biggest applause of the night from the crowd.
Board statement
Before the meeting, the other eight board members together issued a statement supporting management and disavowing the anti-renewal effort by Sakowicz.
“As to you Mr. Sakowicz, I am positively dumbfounded by your behavior as a board member,” said board member Meg Courtney, vice mayor of Fort Bragg.
She said Sakowicz had spread “downright lies” in his letters to MCN listservs and the AVA. She listed eight board member policies he had violated.
Board members expressed outrage that Sakowicz apparently leaked confidential emails to the AVA. The Boonville newspaper, often lumped in with Sakowicz during the meeting, actually printed an unflattering investigation into Sakowicz”s resume at one point. It covers the KZYX controversies on a regular basis.
Board members said not only were Sakowicz”s statements false, they violated his legal responsibilities.
“We are the stewards of the station ? We are cheerleaders and good will ambassadors never public detractors or critics,” said board president Eliane Herring, who said Sakowicz” campaign against Coate was based on personal animus.
“We have had enough of the drama, enough of the negativity, enough of the rumor mill and baseless allegations, the hearsay, the fiction and the fantasy. We are tired of being on the defensive when we know the station is thriving. We are tired of hearing about past events, the past is past,” said Herring.
Coate email
Prior to the meeting, Coate had sent out a group email to “reasonable people,” including this newspaper, encouraging them to come to Monday”s meeting.
“There has always been controversy at KZYX and there has always been opposition,” Coast wrote. “But for the past six months this has reached what I think is an unprecedented level because there is a group of people, including one former board member and one sitting board member, who think that my job managing KZYX has been so harmful that some of them have gone so far as to write to the FCC to ask them to not renew our license unless I am removed from my job.
“This thing has turned into an ugly witch hunt and has become very personal. There are a lot of things I have been accused of that are outright falsehoods. I have not responded to the many false things said about me and the KZYX staff because I think that getting down in the mud just gets everyone more dirty. But it has been my experience at KZYX Board meetings that when a number of reasonable people show up, the whole meeting takes a more civilized tone,” Coate said in the email invitation to the meeting.
Sakowicz
As it turned out, there was virtually no criticism of Coate at the meeting. Coate never said a word about the controversy, at least during the first two hours. Board members were all sharply critical of Sakowicz for conduct most described as “lies” or exaggerations. (Some of the board members simply said they agreed with pretty much everything that had been said.)
But none of the board members spelled out what exactly was false in what Sakowicz has said. On the other hand, Sakowicz didn”t challenge the attacks or ask fellow board members to say what they were calling lies.
Sakowicz, when he got his turn to speak, lacked his usual bass bluster familiar on his radio show. The strongest words he mustered were for Coate”s clashes with former KZYX news reporter Christina Aanestad.
“You are not god, you don”t dismiss someone with the wave of your hand,” Sakowicz told Coate, adding she and other qualified candidates should have been given another chance to work for the station when the news job opened up again recently.
He has said Coate should have advertised the news position when Paul Lambert left.
Lambert, who is now running for the board as a Coate supporter, announced on his last news show of 2013 that two news people had been hired. That prompted a posting by one of those news people Michael Kisslinger that the announcement had taken him by surprise. He had thought word of the new crew was supposed to be withheld until a later date, indicating the hiring was done behind closed doors.
The Philo-based station went from two fulltime news positions to two reporter/contractors under Coate. When he arrived, the two reporters, plus the rest of the staff, were working fulltime and more covering the horrific fires of 2008. Fulltime news departments at radio stations have been proven to be lifesavers in such disasters time and time again.
Finances
Sakowicz said he “was not a coward” and was there to “face the music.” He challenged Coate”s financials at the same time the rest of the board was celebrating a dramatic turnaround of the station”s bottom line and improvements to the infrastructure.
Coate faced a huge pile of unpaid bills when he arrived in 2008. Nobody argues that the red ink has been traded for black under his term.
Coate”s right hand in the management is Mary Aigner, a woman who has done all jobs at the station and outlasted numerous general managers.
The KZYX management team faces challenges different from the folksy, locally programmed KMUD. From the coast to the Ukiah Valley, the station must cover areas widely divided by both mountains and culture.
Furious and acrimonious brouhahas were happening at the station long before the arrival of Coate in 2008 and Sakowicz about a year later.
Coate, coming from innovative work at SF Gate, clearly operates with a corporate teambuilding strategy.
Sakowicz, a figure with an impressive resume from Wall Street to the nonprofit world, arrived in the area already controversial and has gotten more so, despite a tightly run show on business which has deeply explored important issues such as problems with the county pension fund. Sakowicz”s weekly show, “All About Money, was praised Monday evening by personally critical board members. The show attracts national political and business figures.
Coate guides with a strong philosophical hand and creative flourish, having recorded his own songs during pledge drives and doing everything from repairs to phone work. One board member pointed out that some of the same style criticism could be leveled at either of the two Johns.
As Page pointed out, KMUD devotes much more time to local programming, while KZYX relies heavily on NPR, a sore point with critics, as Page correctly pointed out. Some locals, including the late Antonia Lamb, have left the KZYX community for KMUD, as Page suggested critics do.
Board candidates
It was clear that Sakowicz”s desire to fire Coate wasn”t going anywhere on Monday, or anytime soon. Three people are running for board seats as critics of Coate, facing off with his supporters, which would still leave a substantial majority backing Coate.
Sheila Dawn Tracy was one of the few critics who spoke and she spent her first minute thanking the board for making improvements, such as a new website feature that allows members to write the board directly. A former reporter for the station, she said those communication improvements likely came about because of the critics.
“I take offense at Mr Pages” comments and Mrs. Herrings” comments lumping all the people who are critics into one category, saying we all think alike and we all approve of each others” tactics. We do not. We are different people and we speak differently,” said Tracy.
Tracy asked why KMUD prints the individual salaries of its employees but KZYX does not in its budget. The information about top managers” salaries is supposed to be disclosed in filings by nonprofits.
Some speakers at the meeting seemed more bemused by the hot tone of the board member speeches than being in one camp or another.
“When I listen to the discussion tonight it makes me think of the political malaise we find ourselves in, it makes me think of the economic decline of the area. One of the things is people often turn inward in hard times,” said Cal Winslow of Caspar. “If any part of what is being said is true tonight ? That”s not dissent, it”s a mode of behavior that makes genuine debate and dissent impossible.”
Sometimes such acrimony can only end when the parties go their separate ways, he suggested.
FCC license
But what about the FCC license? The station has two.
Herring explained that the KZYZ (inland) license was renewed last fall. She said the public comment period for the KZYX license had also come and gone when the station heard that Sakowicz had sent his letter.
An investigation by this newspaper has found that FCC renewals are now routine, unless objections are raised.
Objections can legally be made any time before the license is actually reissued, Sakowicz”s letter implies.
It”s unclear if the attacks by Sakowicz has had any impact on the license. He also encouraged others to object to the license renewal.
Outraged, the board did not use the opportunity of the big crowd to present any kind of future vision or map forward. (This reporter and some others left after the first break at the two-hour mark.)
Some positive suggestions were made by the audience that the board liked such as bringing back some programming for young people and using Facebook as well as the station”s webpage to communicate. The crowd was very gray, with almost everyone appearing 50 or over.
A report on the license renewal process and the salary disclosure issue will be contained in a future story.
