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Credit union must hold new election

Jeff Cox

Iowa City Press-Citizen

January 17, 2007

[Note: This material is copyright by the Press-Citizen, and is reproduced here as a matter of "fair use" for non-commercial, educational purposes only. Any other use may require the prior approval of the Iowa City Press-Citizen.]

The Iowa Division of Credit Unions has authorized the University of Iowa Community Credit Union to proceed with its name change on the basis of a vote of its members held last October. The Credit Union board should nonetheless consider holding another member election before proceeding with this change. A credit union is not a bank, but a democratically controlled financial institution with a board that is accountable to all of its members.

The election in October might have been technically within the rules, but it was blatantly unfair. All members of the credit union were told that they must show up at a public meeting at six o’clock in order to vote.

There are conflicting accounts of how this election was conducted, but everyone agrees that by the time the debate was occurring at the members’ meeting, the ballot box was already full of votes cast by an unknown number of credit union members who were informed in private that they could vote early without attending the mandatory meeting.

If the credit union board allows this result to stand, based as it was on an obviously unfair set of rules, they are failing to uphold the most important of all of their duties as elected board members.

Jeff Cox
Iowa City