The WLRN studio in Miami.
Miami Herald archives
The future of South Florida’s flagship NPR station is at risk.
That’s according to a letter signed by more than 30 employees — the majority of the staff at WLRN — and sent to the board that manages the station.
The Feb. 22 letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, accuses senior leadership at South Florida Public Media Group (formerly Friends of WLRN) of taking a “belligerent combative stance” in an ongoing legal dispute with the Miami-Dade County School Board, which holds WLRN’s broadcasting license.
Leadership’s approach, the letter says, “has led to an unthinkable scenario being the most likely outcome of the current conflict: South Florida — including all of Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties — could lose its flagship NPR station, a station that has more than 75 years of history in this community.”
WLRN is managed by an independent board of directors and also has internal leadership. WLRN staff called on the board of South Florida Public Media Group to “conduct an immediate and independent review of executive leadership” and to “establish and implement a formal transitional leadership plan,” among other requests. The letter specifically cites concerns about the conduct of board chair Richard Rampell and CEO John LaBonia.
The dispute with the school board stems from South Florida Public Media Group moving to acquire a new radio station in West Palm Beach last year for $6.5 million, with plans to convert it into a public radio station.
Representatives for the school board and the WLRN board met Thursday for a mediation session, according to court records. The outcome of that session has not been publicly disclosed.
On Tuesday, two WLRN staffers told the Herald that LaBonia’s office at the station’s studio in Miami had been cleared out. Reached by text message, LaBonia told the Herald: “As we are still in mediation, I have no comment at this time.”
Sergio Bustos, WLRN’s vice president for news, said staffers were “unaware of any changes in management at this time.”
Members of the Miami-Dade County School Board during a meeting in Miami on March 19, 2025. Pedro Portal pportal@miamiherald.com
Details of the staff letter were first reported by Axios. It was sent three days after an internal town hall at which staff said leadership “reinforced perceptions of defensiveness, lack of accountability, and an unwillingness to meaningfully engage with the realities experienced by employees across departments.”
The contract between South Florida Public Media Group and the school board expires in June 2027. If the school board were to terminate it, or choose not to renew it, WLRN would face an uncertain future.
The station has been tied to the county school system since its inception in 1949. In addition to relying on the district for its broadcasting license, WLRN uses an office building in Miami that is owned by the school board.
When workers raised the possibility of losing the school board license during the town hall, Rampell, the WLRN board chair, “stated that he could not imagine such an outcome and referenced ongoing litigation, declining to elaborate,” according to the staff letter. But the 30-plus staffers who signed the letter say they believe that remains a real possibility.
“This scenario would make the Miami metropolitan area the only major population center in the entire nation without a functioning public radio news station,” the letter said. “In plain terms, those are the stakes.”
‘A growing loss of trust’
The Miami-Dade School Board sued South Florida Public Media Group in September, saying money from WLRN’s endowment was “wrongfully diverted” to buy a station that would compete with WLRN for listeners and that the purchase violated a contract with the school district.
South Florida Public Media Group said at the time that the new station, The Flame 104.7, would “bring vital news and information to an unduplicated audience of more than 800,000 residents — many of whom are currently unserved by robust public media coverage” in Palm Beach County.
READ MORE: Miami-Dade school board sues WLRN’s management over West Palm Beach radio deal
The town hall was called after a smaller group of WLRN staffers wrote an initial letter to the South Florida Public Media Group board in January, saying there was “a growing loss of trust in senior leadership’s governance.”
The more recent letter said that Rampell made incendiary remarks during the town hall about Jose Bueno, the chief of staff to the school district’s superintendent. Rampell said Bueno should be called “Jose Malo,” according to the letter, and described him as “the Superintendent’s Ghislaine Maxwell.”
Rampell also “repeated sexually explicit language in full to the assembled staff” when he referenced a Watergate-era statement in which former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell threatened the publisher of the Washington Post.
The comments “were offensive, derogatory, discriminatory and inflammatory,” the letter said.
Rampell declined to comment to the Herald for this story.
Regarding the comparison to Maxwell, Rampell told Axios last week that Bueno “deserved every bit of that accusation,” saying that Bueno “was nasty to me [and other leadership] and threw a bunch of false accusations at us.”
In a September email, sent one day after the school board authorized its lawsuit, Rampell called Bueno “a petty, small minded, vindictive bureaucrat” and accused him and the school board of perpetuating “a cowardly assault on the free press” by filing the suit.
Rampell concluded the email: “I guess Mark Twain was right when he said that at first God created idiots, that was for practice. Then he created school boards.”
The school district said in a statement Tuesday that Rampell’s comments “are categorically unfounded and deeply offensive.”
“Miami-Dade County Public Schools remains focused on the welfare of our students and the continued excellence of our media programming, and will not engage with rhetoric that serves only to disparage and distract,” the statement said.
On the same day that he emailed Bueno, Rampell also emailed school board member Daniel Espino and called him a “two-faced shamelessly ambitious politician.”
Espino wrote in response that it was “one of the most unprofessional emails I have ever received.”
Attorneys for the school board filed copies of the emails in court.
In a statement to the Herald, the school district said it is “strongly committed to ensuring that the integrity, quality, and good will of WLRN remain strong for our community.”
“Our priority is to protect the employees and resources that support the high-quality journalism and programming that make WLRN a community treasure,” the statement said.
Miami Herald
Aaron Leibowitz covers the city of Miami Beach for the Miami Herald, where he has worked as a local government reporter since 2019. He was part of a team that won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside. He is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.