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FDIC Federal Register Citations

BANKIOWA

From: Shelly Whited [mailto:shelly.whited@bankiowa.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 1:20 PM
To: Comments
Subject: Streamlined CRA Exam; RIN number 3064-AC50

Shelly Whited
1004 Rebecca Court
Independence, IA 50644

September 16, 2004

Comments to FDIC

Dear Comments to FDIC:

September 10, 2004

Mr. Robert E. Feldman
Executive Secretary
Attention: Comments/Legal ESS
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
550 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20429

Re: RIN Number 3064-AC50: FDIC Proposed Increase in the Threshold for the
Small Bank CRA Streamlined Examination

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am the Compliance and CRA Officer for BankIowa, located in rural Iowa. We have been subject to the large bank CRA exam since January 1, 2002. I would like to start out my comment letter by providing you with the history of our bank. BankIowa has a total of eight branch offices all located in Iowa. Following is the location of our offices and the
population of each town:

Independence, Iowa (MSA – NA) 6,007*
Lamont, Iowa (MSA – NA) 503*
Jesup, Iowa (MSA – NA) 2,210*
Norway, Iowa (MSA 16300) 602*
Cedar Falls, Iowa (MSA 47940) 36,164*
Waterloo, Iowa (MSA 47940) 68,641*
Cedar Rapids, Iowa (NE office and SW office) (MSA 16300) 121,522*
* 2000 Census Bureau www.census.gov

Our assessment area consists of Buchanan, Black Hawk, Linn, and Benton counties, total population of these counties is 366,410*.

We are a $300 million family-owned community bank established in 1921. BankIowa is owned by Fidelity Ban Corporation, a sub-chapter S single bank holding company. The Rudolph A. Leytze family has controlling ownership of the holding company.

I am writing to strongly support the FDIC's proposal to raise the threshold for the streamlined small bank CRA examination to $1 billion without regard to the size of the bank's holding company. This would greatly relieve the regulatory burden imposed on many small banks such as my own under the current regulation, which are required to meet the standards imposed on the nation's largest $1 trillion banks. I understand that this is not an exemption from CRA and that my bank would still have to help meet the credit needs of its entire community and be evaluated by my regulator. However, I believe that this would lower my current regulatory burden of man-hours used for tracking investments, loans and services. In 2003, those of us at BankIowa that are responsible for data entry of CRA loans into the government software and auditing of loan, investment and service tracking, logged our CRA work hours. This time totaled up to the equivalent of 1,000 man-hours. This did not even include the time that lenders and loan support spent on determining if a loan was CRA reportable and compiling the information on such loans, nor did it include time that senior management and our CRA committee spent on reviewing donation requests and accumulating the information needed to document that investments and services met the definitions of CRA in order for us to earn CRA credit.


I do not support the addition of a separate community development criterion to the small bank examination for larger community banks (banks between $250 million and $1 billion in assets). As FDIC examiners know, it has proven extremely difficult for small banks, especially those in rural areas such as our bank, to find appropriate CRA qualified
investments in their communities that meet the definition of “community development.” Many small banks have had to make regional or statewide investments that are extremely unlikely to ever benefit the banks' own communities just to meet the definition of “community development.” That was certainly not the intent of Congress when it enacted CRA. However,
in order for a community bank to survive in rural areas, they have to donate and focus on their communities. There are numerous donation opportunities for us that if not made, would hurt our bank, but don’t qualify for CRA. My point is if you enacted a different criterion for the larger small banks, you are still not accomplishing anything but creating more paper work and regulatory burden. What would be the point of raising the threshold if all you are going to do is create more documentation responsibility, which is no different from what is happening now? Additionally, how are examiners going to compare banks if one bank decides to focus on investments and another comparable bank focuses on services? There are already way too many subjective judgment calls being made by examiners on CRA and this will make it even worse. Instead of creating another criterion for the larger small banks, you need to apply the same (current regiment for banks < $250 million) criterion to all banks that are under $1 billion in assets.

I know that there are many banks that are in the same position as we are. For instance, many local citizens looks to our bank for financial support, educational training and for volunteer hours, including our school system and our senior citizens. Because our school is not located in a low or moderate-income area and because our students are not “primarily” low income, we get no CRA credit for anything we do to help them. We have to take money away from this type of donations request in order to make donations in investments that meet the current definition of “large bank community development.” How is that helping our community? Additionally, I don’t think that pulling “rural areas” into your definition of community development will change what banks are doing. The small community banks are already serving their communities, and if
you remove the unnecessary burden of large bank CRA reporting regiment, we could continue to do more. Community banks have to help their communities, or perish. Let us continue to do this without having to spend hours documenting such activities to ”prove” that we are helping our communities.

I strongly oppose adding a “stream-lined” criterion for banks that would fall between $250 million and $1 billion. For a community bank, community development (CD) lending is not significantly different from the provision of credit to the entire community. The current small bank test considers the institution's overall lending in its community. The addition of a category of CD lending (and services to aid lending and investments as a substitute for lending) fits well within the concept of serving the whole community. A separate test would create an additional regiment and regulatory burden that would erode the benefit of the streamlined exam.

If the FDIC truly believes that it needs to change the definition of "community development" from only focusing on low- and moderate-income area residents to including rural residents, it should do this for all the levels of the CRA test. I think that this change in the definition will go a long way toward eliminating the current distortions in the regulation. We caution the FDIC to provide a definition of "rural" that will not be subject to misuse to favor just affluent residents of rural areas. Additionally, being a heavy Ag lending bank in rural Iowa, including rural areas would clearly help us meet the CRA goal of lending to the entire community. I would also caution you to relook at the “new and innovative” requirements, because there aren’t a whole lot of options that “shake” up Ag lending without posing some risk to our rural banks.

In conclusion, I believe that the FDIC has proposed a major improvement in the CRA regulations by raising the threshold to $1 billion. This much more closely aligns the regulations with the Community Reinvestment Act itself, and I urge the FDIC to adopt its threshold proposal, and eliminate the “in-between” criterion for larger small banks as I have outlined in the recommendations above. I will be happy to discuss these issues further with you, if that would be helpful.

Sincerely,

Shelly Whited
Compliance and CRA Officer
BankIowa
1-800-433-0285
shelly.whited@bankiowa.com

Last Updated 09/21/2004 regs@fdic.gov

Last Updated: August 4, 2024