Last week marked the arrival of one credit union lobbyist to Washington and the departure of another.
In the first case, Troy Stang, the head of public affairs for the Texas CU League, abandoned his quest for the open seat on the NCUA Board to take a job as chief lobbyist for the Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund.
The fund has been a popular source of credit union funding since its inception almost a decade ago and should be a good fit for Stang, who cut his teeth in the credit union movement working for the Hmong (Vietnamese) FCU in Minnesota.
Stang's hiring also indicates that there is little likelihood that the White House will move to fill the open NCUA Board seat, occupied till May by Dennis Dollar.
That will leave a two-person Board, comprised of Chairman JoAnn Johnson, a Republican, and Deborah Matz, a Democrat.
And leaving the lobbying business last week was Chris Kerecman, who served almost 10 years as chief congressional lobbyist for the California Credit Union League.
Kerecman, who was instrumental in the passage of The Credit Union Membership Access Act and in getting several important pieces of credit union legislation introduced since then, took a job as senior vice president of business and community development for California Credit Union, the $1.2-billion Glendale, Calif., credit union.
Prior to going to the California league in 1995, Kerecman served as the first head of NCUA's office of community development, after working as chief aide to then-NCUA Board member Robert Swan. Before going to Washington to work for Swan, Kerecman worked for the Utah CU League in his home state.
Kerecman is a true-believer and an indefatigable worker for the credit union cause and convinced members of Congress in California to introduce several bills on behalf of credit unions.
Among them were measures to ease the cap on member business lending and the regulatory relief bill for credit unions, now known as CURIA.
His work helped make the California congressional delegation one of the most dependable for the credit union cause.
