NAPERVILLE, Ill.-The Illinois CU League has passed an amendment to its bylaws prohibiting volunteers from serving on the league's board.
"The board spent a lot of time and effort debating this issue, and they decided that because of the complexity of the stuff the league does, and our service corporation and the complex business things they do-our service corporation is in 43 different states-the board of directors felt it was time to have people that dealt on a day-to-day basis with the issues of a credit union and what credit unions are doing, rather than the volunteer aspect of it," said Vicki Ponzo, SVP of member services at the Illinois league.
Ponzo said that the issue engendered a lot of debate, but at the end the league decided it was more important to have a board made up of senior management from credit unions rather than volunteers from CU boards.
The amendment is part of a larger change to the league's bylaws, much of which pertains to implementing measures approved in 2009 to reduce the size of the league's board and revise the way directors are elected, moving from chapters into districts and credit union membership sizes.
While the amendment was only recently passed, Ponzo said that it has been a topic of discussion since about 2009. She said that the delay was due in part to extended discussions on the issue, but also because there have not been any bylaw amendments since then. "The board of directors decided to add it to (the other recent bylaw changes) because it was all about the election process, so it was a good time to put that whole piece together," she said.
Ponzo said the Illinois league board has had few volunteer board members in the last several years. "As they retired from their jobs, we never had them replaced with more volunteers; we just didn't have volunteers running for those positions," she said.
But isn't the league banning its owners, that is the representatives of the owners of the CUs that in turn own the league, from having a say in management? Ponzo says that's not the case, as CU senior management and staff are hired by individual credit unions' volunteer boards.
She further said that the move does not go against the democratic and cooperative principles CUs are founded upon. The board, she said, "decided after looking at it that there was too much complexity, too much compliance, too many regulatory issues going on-that they really needed to focus on getting in people that ran the credit unions and understood all the minutiae and day-to-day stuff going on."
'Overwhelming Support'
The league's move can partly be seen as a larger-scale interpretation of a Filene Research Institute white paper released last year. That paper suggested, among other things, that credit unions have grown too sophisticated to be adequately overseen by volunteer boards that may lack the expertise to manage large credit unions (Credit Union Journal, Oct. 8, 2012).
"Credit unions voted overwhelmingly in support of it; we haven't had anybody saying anything negative. It wasn't something that we thought was a big deal," said Ponzo.
