F. Weller Meyer, America's Community Bankers' incoming chairman, is one of the most active members of the Washington trade group.
He serves on no fewer than nine of its committees - including those for strategic planning, audit, and government-sponsored-enterprise policy - while still finding the time to run the $1.2 billion-asset Acacia Federal Savings Bank in Falls Church, Va.
As chairman, though, Mr. Meyer said he plans to narrow his focus to three overarching goals: reducing banks' regulatory burden, reining in credit unions, and promoting more involvement among ACB's member bankers.
Mr. Meyer, Acacia's president and chief executive officer, will officially take over as ACB's chairman today at the group's annual convention, held this year in Orlando.
At the top of his agenda is regulatory relief, a subject that the usually mild-mannered Mr. Meyer discusses with passion. Calling increased regulation "a threat to our industry," he said community bankers have "reached a tipping point."
In recent years, he said, lawmakers and regulators have piled new laws and regulations on top of old ones, "without taking anything away."
"We're simply drowning in minutiae," he said.
A case in point: Mr. Meyer said Acacia's auditors have informed him that the thrift's 2005 audit will take them 1,200 hours to complete, including about 100 hours devoted to complying with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
As a privately held company, Acacia is not subject to Section 404, but Mr. Meyer said its auditor, which he did not name, told him that it was going to audit Acacia as if it were subject to the provision, since it would be too difficult to construct a separate methodology for nonpublic clients.
The extra 100 hours of work will cost Acacia about $15,000, Mr. Meyer said.
"That was an expensive eye-opener for me," he said.
Mr. Meyer's point was echoed by Mark E. Macomber, ACB's incoming first vice chairman.
"If we could get regulation down to a manageable amount, the money we would save would be like opening a new branch for free," he said. "There are banks that have literally rolled up the shop and sold the business for no other reason than the cost of regulation."
The House of Representatives is working on a broad-based regulatory-relief bill, HR 3505, that America's Community Bankers is backing. Similar legislation introduced in the last Congress died, and to spare the current bill from the same fate, Mr. Meyer promises to campaign to get more bankers active with ACB.
He said he is confident more involvement will give that bill and the rest of the group's legislative program a boost.
"If we're going to be successful, we've got to be engaged," he said. "Real change is going to come from the bottom up. Bankers have to get actively involved."
Credit unions have been a concern at ACB for several years.
Outgoing chairman Harry P. Doherty made combating credit unions a priority during his year at the helm. And under William W. Zuppe, who preceded Mr. Doherty as chairman, ACB joined with its rivals, the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, to create an inter-group coordination council designed to synchronize the industry's efforts against credit unions.
Now, in the wake of the National Credit Union Administration's unsuccessful bid this summer to block two Texas credit unions from converting to mutual savings banks, Mr. Meyer said he would press for unrestricted charter choice for credit unions interested in converting to mutual savings banks, as well as an income tax for large community-chartered credit unions.
Mr. Meyer said he wants the NCUA, the credit union industry's federal regulator, to keep out of the conversion process.
"That's not the role of government," he said. "They should leave it to the community and the members. The recent situations in Texas were a bald-faced attempt to prevent members from exercising their will."
Taxation, he said, was simply a matter of fairness.
"What do the big community-charter credit unions do that makes them unique?" he asked. "If there's no common bond, the tax exemption is not fair. We need to be telling people that."
Mr. Macomber, the president and CEO of the $162 million-asset Litchfield Bancorp in Litchfield, Conn., said that "big, $1 billion credit unions do everything my bank does except pay taxes."
Acacia is a subsidiary of Ameritas Acacia Cos., a large financial services and insurance firm headquartered in Lincoln, Neb.
When Mr. Meyer took over the thrift in 1987, it was close to failure; its capital had dwindled to $1.2 million and it was losing $200,000 a month.
His solution was forthright. He slashed expenses by closing a number of mortgage production offices his predecessor had opened in cities as far away as Denver, and scaled back an underperforming network of automated teller machines, which he termed "a huge resources eater."
The success of his cost-cutting initiative convinced the parent company to inject $3 million of fresh capital, and less than two years after Mr. Meyer became CEO the thrift was making money again. At the end of 2004, Acacia had $82.5 million of capital and a profit of $8.3 million.
Mr. Meyer said he has kept one budget policy in place over the years to remind himself of how tough things were.
"When I started, we used to use yellow sticky pads for all kinds of things," he said. "Well, those are relatively expensive, so I cut them out and said we'd paper-clip a little piece of paper when we needed to leave a note or a memo. To this day, as an organization, we do not buy yellow sticky pads."
