BOARD OF KPFK ASKED TO RESIGN

KPFK-FM(90.7), the free-form Pacifica Foundation station whose internecine factionalism led it to the brink of bankruptcy a year ago, is about to undergo yet another metamorphosis.

At a four-hour Monday-night meeting, the 30-member advisory board that oversees the station’s programming and management was asked to tender a mass resignation by Pacifica Foundation Chairman John O’Dell.

According to station manager Susan Anderson, O’Dell’s request was the result of a yearlong study of KPFK’s perennial problems. Though it has a loyal core audience of several thousand listener/subscribers, the station’s general listenership has steadily declined in recent years.

“We didn’t tell them ahead of time,” Anderson said of the mass resignation request, explaining that O’Dell and Pacifica Executive Director Sharon Maeda wanted “the element of surprise” when they asked the board to quit. O’Dell traveled to Los Angeles from his Washington office to ask for the mass resignation.

During the course of the meeting, two of the board members did resign and leave, Anderson said. Most remained in the meeting room of the Universal City studios of KPFK and listened to O’Dell’s plans to revamp the station.

Some threatened legal action to counter what they perceived as a forced mass resignation, Anderson said.

“They actually have been, I feel, a drag on the station,” Anderson said.

Since Anderson took over as manager a year ago, Draconian budget cutting coupled with better accounting procedures have actually put the station in the black. Anderson said the $750,000-a-year operating budget now includes 12 full-time staff members compared to only four when she arrived.

The only outstanding major debt the station will have by the end of 1986 will be its mortgage, she said.

“In 1986, Pacifica will actually have a surplus,” Anderson said. “We can get a station in the Midwest if we want to.”

The Washington-based Pacifica Foundation operates KPFK and four other public-radio stations located in Houston, San Francisco, New York City and Washington.

Next month, Anderson will leave the station to become national media director for People for the American Way, a Washington-based civil liberties lobbying organization.

In her stead, a triumvirate of managers are being imported by Pacifica to run the station temporarily. The three will continue to attempt to broaden the station’s subscriber base, chiefly through better training of the station’s volunteer programmers and better programs.

Programs with proven audiences and quality, such as KPFK’s Saturday-morning folk-music show with host John Davis and the long-running “Car Show” on Saturday afternoons, will remain on the air. Hosts of other more esoteric shows, however, will be asked to resign just as the local advisory board was, Anderson said.

“Some (programs) can go by-by and nobody’ll notice,” she said.

She said she has “about 1,000” proposals on her desk for new programs and some of them will be part of the new KPFK.

“We don’t want to be National Public Radio and we don’t want to be American Public Radio,” Anderson said. “We just want Pacifica to be important again. KPFK could become relevant again.”