Let’s Own This Thing

Slowly, gingerly, Coast Central Credit Union may be moving toward putting the “you” into its planning and policymaking, rather than just using it as an advertising slogan.

Buying a home? Expanding a business? With close to 80,000 member-owners, Coast Central influences where our money goes on the North Coast. Whether you’re a member or not, Coast Central shapes our economy.

The credit union’s annual meeting is coming up at 6 p.m. on Feb. 27 in Eureka, and if you care at all about how our money is used in our own community, please plan to be there.

After some dismal years for transparency, the meeting will be a chance to celebrate small changes, as well as to insist on more progress.

We used to have a credit union that wouldn’t even tell its member-owners how many votes were cast for each candidate in board elections. That has changed.

We used to have a credit union whose annual meetings were held in a small branch lobby, with limited seating and few other accommodations for you, the member-owner. That, too, has changed.

We used to have a credit union which held those meetings without including any time for member comments or questions, instead shunting member input until after adjournment, hiding it from meeting minutes. That hasn’t changed yet, and it’s one important change we can push for this year.

Together, we own this thing — and that includes every one of us who has an account at Coast Central. The top executives work for us. The nine-member board is elected by us. We deserve a credit union that includes us in conversations about our community’s financial future. To be included, please bring your ideas and priorities to the annual meeting, which now will be held in a larger space, the lobby of the Coast Central at 402 F St. in Eureka.

I ran for the Coast Central board last year partly because I’d heard about the annual meeting in 2023, when dozens of angry people showed up demanding to know the vote count in that board election, and demanding that they get responses. Attendees were gaveled into non-existence. Only informal questions and answers were permitted, and only after the meeting had already ended.

That informal approach continued in the 2024 meeting, when the Coast Central board again refused to take questions during the meeting — only afterward.

Here’s why that’s not good enough for our community’s premier financial institution: As an owner, you deserve the convenience of being able to read a full report of what happened at the annual meeting if you weren’t able to attend. That includes meeting minutes that summarize the questions asked by your fellow owners, as well as the answers provided by your elected board or your employees.

Coast Central’s bylaws currently prohibit questions from the floor during meetings. Apparently at some point in the past, the credit union’s board of directors decided they didn’t want to be answerable in that way. Those bylaws deliberately keep owners in the dark.

Coast Central’s board needs to change its bylaws this year to allow questions from the floor and answers during the meeting instead of after.

It also needs to change its repressive election rules, which impose bizarre restrictions on who can say what and in which venues.

Those are some of the issues I campaigned on when I ran for the board last year, and enough people agreed to award me 52.3 percent of the vote. That wasn’t enough to win, because it was a multi-seat election, but perhaps it was enough to nudge the credit union into later releasing vote totals. Or perhaps that was my official complaint to state banking regulators after CEO James Sessa stood up at last year’s meeting and again explained why we shouldn’t be allowed to know vote totals. (It would undermine the board member elected by the fewest votes, he claimed. I had to hold back a snorted, “What, they’re in middle school and will be mean to each other?”)

Change won’t come unless we, the owners, insist on it. We can start by coming to the annual meeting and welcoming new CEO Fred Moore, who sounded far more open to ideas for better elections and member-owner inclusion when I spoke with him.

You might already have your own list of priorities. Maybe they involve Coast Central’s ATM locations, weekend hours, fees, interest rates or dozens of other policies that affect how well the credit union serves us all.

This is our time. Please mark your calendar now for 6 p.m. on Feb. 27 at 402 F St. in Eureka. Bring a friend. Come with polite but firm questions, as well as with appreciation for the things that keep you a Coast Central member.

We own this thing. Let’s make it better.

Carrie Peyton-Dahlberg is a retired journalist and longtime Coast Central member.

This article appears in Step Aside Prop. 47, Proposition 36 Has Arrived.