311: Berkeley and Banks, 1999

311.

Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 15, 1999, “ATM fee limits endorsed: Banking industry opposes city’s ‘ridiculous’ ordinance”.

The council was considering an ordinance to outlaw 1991 usage fees for some ATM machines/networks in Berkeley, or the fees for some ATM transactions. It was a vigorous debate and sheds light today on why banks are so little understood and sympathized with in their massive crisis today.

A local banking industry spokesman, Greg Wilhelm of the California Bankers Association, opposed the 1991 proposal in a subsequent interview. A student group, The California Student Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG), portrayed bank policies as, essentially, commercially injurious to California’s smaller financial institutions.

The proposed ordinance was meant to protect the interests of the customer who, for instance, stops in the convenience store to get a soda, has no cash, uses the freestanding ATM there, and is charged an extra few bucks to withdraw his own bank assets. The customer in this case is essentially paying an “intermediary” who maintains the ATM, as well as his own bank, for the transaction.

On February 19, 2009, it’s interesting to revisit the discussions. Berkeley Councilmembers Diane Woolley, Kriss Worthington, Polly Armstrong, Maudelle Shirek, and Linda Maio were all part of the discussion, as was Berkeley’s Mayor Shirley Dean. The most frequent argument of councilmembers was that 1999 banks were misguided or insensitive in their ATM policies, and that they ought to be kind to less-prosperous residents of Berkeley.

It shows the 2009 reader how banks were viewed by San Francisco Bay area residents then. They expected area banks, like Bank of America, to be commercially servile. This is a reasonable expectation to some degree, of course, but at the same time, banks are not charities. They are profit-making businesses, key financial intermediaries inside an economy.

When the attitude displayed in this story begins to surface in a “mass” sense, as the law of the land, you will probably always have things like the massive financial bailouts of 2008 and 2009, the sub-prime crises, foreclosures and more. The financial world cannot, for decades and decades, routinely serve the poor and simultaneously promote a healthy, vigorous economy.

This story reports a typical action of the Berkeley council as it then was, though. At least in those years, the city’s council seemed to back a lot of financial positions that were a waste of city staff’s time. I was waiting for them to pass a resolution at the next meeting that would limit the cost of a cheeseburger on Shattuck Avenue.