True Effort to Boost Minority Loans or Good PR?
Fifth Third Bank announced its $9 billion pledge Aug. 17 to provide more affordable loans to minority and low-income consumers.
The bank said its goal was to increase business and homeownership in some low economic neighborhoods.
That declaration comes on the heels of some unfavorable publicity that the bank has received over two separate incidents.
Fifth Third, Cincinnati's largest bank, has made plans to move 1,300 employees from its location on Fountain Square Plaza to the former U.S. Shoe building in Madisonville. Although the bank will have 700 positions open up at that location, developers involved in sprucing up the downtown business district are not happy that jobs are leaving the area.
Fifth Third also has had to deal with its own negative appearance as a result of its efforts to recover money the bank mistakenly deposited in the account of Clyde Reed.
Reed died of a stroke five days after he was released from jail where he served a three-week sentence for theft and bank fraud -- charges that stemmed from him taking the money the bank deposited in his account. He was released because a federal grand jury would not indict him on those charges.
Fifth Third deposited more than $180,000 into Reed's account. Reed was expecting an inheritance from a relative.His sister told reporters that after double-checking with the bank that the money was indeed his, Reed gave more than $13,000 to his sister and prepaid $3,030 for his funeral. The bank realized its blunder in July and began trying to get the money back. But after Reed's death, Fifth Third officials backed off and said they would not try to recover the funeral expenses and the funds Reed gave to his sister.
Was Fifth Third's announcement of the $9 billion community-lending commitment an effort to turn around the bank's unpopular image?
Stacie Yee, Fifth Third public relations specialist, said the announcement of the bank's plan was not an attempt to combat bad publicity.
"This has been in the works for three months," Yee said.
She said that the bank had not had any "negative backlash" from its announcement of a partial move out of the downtown area.
As for the bank's error of depositing money into Reed's account, it was an unfortunate situation, Yee said.
"This may have helped, but it wasn't launched to combat perception problems," Yee said.
County Communications Problem Solved
Hamilton County Commissioners finally have caved in and decided to pay -- at least partially -- for the county's new communication system.
The county has unsuccessfully asked the voters three times for money through special levies to pay for a new system for police, fire and ambulance services. Commissioners, while campaigning for the votes, said the county could in no way pay for the necessary communication system. Each time, voters rejected the tax levies, and opponents argued that the county had enough money for the system in its general fund, which the county denied.
Now, commissioners have said that the county will scrape together $30 million to pay for the system's infrastructure. That means the county will pay for the computers, towers and hardware needed to operate the system. This, commissioners said, is a scaled-back system compared to the $63.7 million system they would have installed with a successful levy. Hamilton County Commissioner Bob Bedinghaus told reporters that commissioners previously did not lie to voters about not having the money to fund the new communication system.
Maybe not. But wouldn't it have been more accurate to tell the voters that there was enough money for a less-extensive yet adequate system?
Bedinghaus said that the options commissioners were pursuing now either did not exist at the time of the campaign or were inferior to what they wanted to accomplish with the levy money.
"We agreed from the beginning, four or five years ago, that this would be a regional solution," Bedinghaus said.
What the county now is "stretching" to pay for is only a piece of the project, he said. When the county was asking taxpayers to foot the bill, Bedinghaus said the new system would have included Cincinnati, Norwood and 46 other jurisdictions.
"Now, we are looking at 40 users, and even those users will pay for their own radios," Bedinghaus said.
Bedinghaus said the commissioners thought that a new communication system was a regional issue and that the county's role was to act as a "conduit."
"This is a very complicated issue, and we were not going to bury our heads in the sand," he said.
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