By Frank J. Diekmann
It’s not true that the Bravo Network is rushing to introduce a new reality show, “The Real NCUA Board Members of Alexandria.” At least not yet.
NCUA board members have always disagreed with each other, if for no other reason than the fact one is always in the minority politically (currently it’s Republican appointee Mark McWatters). Add to the mix that board members are generally Type A’s (even if more than a few have disguised the Rocky Road personality behind the Vanilla), they are under constant pressure from those wallflowers over in Congress, and the CUs they regulate either need and love them (small CUs) or wish they’d join the ranks of the FSLIC (large CUs).
Usually the dirty laundry between board members is hung behind the closed doors of the “closed doors” meeting. But the laundry is now hanging like a Brooklyn alley way at the turn of the century, and the level of tension now between NCUA Chairman Debbie Matz and board member Mark McWatters is far more than the kind of disagreement one gets in a 2-1 vote. It’s going from the point board member Rick Metsger is serving as a buffer to the point where meetings need Michael Buffer and his “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” prelude to a smackdown. And that’s not really productive for the agency, or for the credit unions it regulates.
But first, some full disclosure and an admission, and a painful one at that. It wasn’t easy to write that previous sentence. Fingers drag across the keyboard. Tears run the risk of short-circuiting the laptop. We writers reach for a drink. And then another. Because what may be bad for credit unions is a gurgling spring for columnists and writers. Writing about credit unions as a columnist can mean a daily, almost always unsatisfying, search for an oasis of entertaining material in what is otherwise an arid desert of ratios and metrics. But then, every once in a great, great while…
Surely you’ve noticed at conferences that when CU trade industry journalists gather they still wear black armbands and close down the hotel bar with one last toast to the Norm D’Amours era at NCUA, when members of the board would call me and tell me “off the record” that another member of the board was “certifiably crazy,” and five minutes later the certifiably crazy one would call and whisper in the phone to make sure I knew that someone on the board was a nutjob—and it wasn’t them.
Sadly, Crazy People & Nutjobs Lacking
To the best of my knowledge (and again, it pains me to write it), no one on the current NCUA board is certifiably crazy nor are they a nutjob. They are intelligent people who care about credit unions, and just disagree over how that care should be administered. That’s exactly the way it should be. Safety and soundness requires safe sounding boards. It’s healthy that there is a dissenting vote, that McWatters questions the legal basis for the two-tiered RBC proposal, and that he questions the size of the NCUA budget increases, as he did in the November 2014 board meeting. In fact, it’s so healthy it is precisely the same advice NCUA gives to the boards of natural-person credit unions; ask questions, have debate, and arrive at an informed decision, not one ram-rodded through a board meeting by a powerful chairman, for instance. Members are better served that way, and so are credit unions.
But unless something unethical or illegal has taken place, the members of natural-person credit unions are not well served by boardroom disagreements being aired in the CU’s lobby. Nor do credit unions benefit from having differences among board members escalate into he/said she/said battles of competing press releases (although I have some suspicions that last week’s statements by Matz and McWatters are aimed as much at each other as they are at heading off any potential official compliant or litigation from the law firm Paul Hastings, which had insisted on a non-disclosure clause when it provided its opinion letter).
This rift needs a step back and some attention now. Otherwise, the production trucks from Bravo Network will be parking outside NCUA’s headquarters. And while anything that doesn’t have the Kardashians in it may make for better TV, it won’t make for better credit unions.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.