New Member Allegedly Kept From Meeting

The chairman of the Pacific Symphony board of directors phoned a new board member and told him not to attend a crucial meeting at which the board ousted Pacific Symphony founding conductor Keith Clark by a single vote, Clark’s supporters have charged.

Dr. John Basile, a Newport Beach neurosurgeon, says he was called by chairman Michael N. Gilano at 2:45 p.m. Feb. 22, just hours before the vote. Basile says Gilano pointedly told him not to attend the meeting. Gilano acknowledges the call but insists that Basile misunderstood it.

Gilano said this week that he called Basile to say that the 64-year-old doctor had been accepted by a majority of the board for membership but that his finances had not been sufficiently “examined” by Gilano under “a new bylaw”--and that therefore, Basile was not yet a member.

Gilano further said that even if Basile had come to the meeting, board leaders would have opposed his voting because the issue of Clark’s removal was too important for a new member.

Gilano, who is head of the nominating committee, was among those who wanted Clark out. In an interview, he said he was aware that Basile, who had recently moved to Orange County from Connecticut, had been acquainted with Clark and Clark’s New York agent.

A petition has been presented to the board signed by 35 orchestra members protesting Clark’s ouster as “questionable.” The author of the petition, violist Charles Adams, said reports of the phone call to Basile were a key reason for his use of that word.

“What we had here was a revolution, not evolution the way some people want everybody in Orange County to believe,” Adams said last week.

Clark, who founded the Pacific Symphony 10 years ago, will step down at the end of next season. He has not publicly commented on the affair.

Regarding the call, Basile said:

“I was told that I was elected in January to the board and that I was a director. I was told I was supposed to be there at the (Feb. 22) meeting and I had planned on going. Michael Gilano called and said I should not go because I was not accepted. He said you were nominated at the (January) meeting and you will be approved, but not to come to the (February) meeting.

“Then, in a second phone call a few days later (after the vote against renewing Clark’s contract), he called to tell me that I should have been invited (to the February meeting). He indicated to me that he did not tell me that I should not go that night.

“I told him: ‘Mr. Gilano, I will state to anyone who asks me that you called me and said I was not an approved director and I was not to go.’ ”

H. Henry Hirsch, a Garden Grove businessman who nominated Basile to the board and who is open in his support of Clark, said that the board accepted Basile in its January meeting.

“I brought him up to the board and said he was a very qualified gentleman and that I had one reservation. There was a question of money. I said he was very heavily committed at this point to the Metropolitan Opera in New York because he had just recently moved here and that he would not be contributing right away. . . .

“He is deeply committed to music. I said we need a guy like him and all those on the board say, aye, and they did, and that was January. So, he should have come to the February meeting.”

But Gilano said the vote Hirsch described was merely a “nominating” step that triggered a process in which the chairman of the nominating committee would inquire into the applicant’s qualifications. Gilano said this inquiry was important because Hirsch had raised doubts about Basile’s ability to donate.

“We have an unwritten policy that board members have to give or get $10,000 per annum, and one of the board members voting for this man . . . said that there may not have been the $10,000 available from John.”

Gilano said he has not donated $10,000 to the board. “I’ve put in $2,500 and have made a pledge for $7,500,” he said.

He said that about half the 30 board members have each given more than $1,000.

Raymond J. Ikola, a board member who is a Newport Beach attorney and a Clark supporter, said that he knows of no such rule as the one Gilano mentioned.

“There was no question in my mind that we elected (Basile) to the board,” Ikola said. “The process is that the person votes to invite him and he is invited, and if he accepts, he is a member of the board. That has been the process for some time.”