Arevalo elected to lead KBBI Board

Thursday night the board of directors for Kachemak Bay Broadcasting Incorporated, licensee of public radio station KBBI AM 890, held its annual membership meeting over Zoom and on the air.
    An executive order by Governor Mike Dunleavy last year allows non-profit corporation boards to meet over video conferencing as a social-distancing accommodation due to Covid-19.
    As explained by General Manager Josh Krohn, the virtual annual meeting was just the latest in a series of disruptions to station operations in the past year because of the global pandemic.
    “After the state of Alaska issued its first guidance on what to expect. We instituted a new cleaning procedures for the station and began making plans for KBBI to be operated with limited staff presence. Administrative staff was instructed to work from home as much as possible using remote tools to access data from the station. We limited staff presence in the building to one or two at a time as needed to cover air shifts, observing distancing guidelines, masking and cleaning workstations when finished,” Krohn said. “On March 18, we informed our volunteers that the building was closed and they would be unable to do their shows live on the air.”
    The pandemic, he said, did create opportunities for new public service programs in response.
    “This prompted the creation of the weekly COVID brief, with guests, from Homer's incident command team, the city of Homer, South Peninsula Hospital, home, or public health department and the Kenai peninsula school district among others providing updates and opportunities for callers to ask them questions,” Krohn said. “We also started Radio Storytime in conjunction with the Homer Public Library to give the littles in our community something to listen for.”
    There was one seat on the board of directors that appeared on the mail-in ballot for this year, belonging to Kyle Schnieder, who ran unopposed.
    “So we sent out 500 household ballots to household members. We needed a 10 percent response rate for this to be valid,” said board member Sarah Richardson. We actually got more than that. So 95 ballots came in 94 were in favor of Kyle and, uh, one could not vote for a Cubs fan.”
    Prior to the public membership meeting, the KBBI board met to conduct its officer elections.
    “Nicole Arevalo he's going to be our new board president. Congratulations. And thank you, Nicole. Kyle Schneider will be vice president, Mel striatum, treasurer, and Kyle (will) fill the secretary position,” Richardson said.
    Several board members made pitches for other interested community members to join them on the board, as its size is flexible and currently stands at its minimum of seven members.