Just who is ShoreBank?

To The Eagle:

In the orgy of breast-beating and finger-pointing that followed 9/11, many officials and agencies were accused of the sin of "not connecting the dots" to outline a trail of conspiracy that seemed fairly obvious viewed from atop the rubble. The lengthy plea in last week's Eagle from Mr. Berdes, CEO of the euphoniously named ShoreBank Enterprise Cascadia prompts an advance exercise in dot connection.

In 1973, several social activists and bankers raised funds and bought a failing bank in Chicago known as South Shore Bank, and started campaigning for minority lending program legislation. This resulted in the Community Reinvestment Act which has been identified, three decades later, as the source of the sub-prime mortgage scandal that sparked our current economic woes. Then followed a period of merging and morphing so that by the early 80s, they were known as ShoreBank Corporation with several spin-offs such as ShoreBank Neighborhood Institute and ShoreBank Development and expanded their business to Arkansas working with a guy named Clinton.

When Bill went to Washington D.C. and expanded the community reinvestment idea, they rode along and came up with ShoreBank Cleveland and ShoreBank Detroit and a host of non bank affiliates that helped to create the earthly paradises now extant in those locations. Around this time, they also picked up Ecotrust, an enviro outfit in the Pacific Northwest, merged with Indecorp, a minority owned bank holding company, morphed into ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific, and then in 2007 merged with Cascadia Loan Fund and assumed its present identity. So Mr. Berdes is absolutely correct when he states that this is not a bank. All of these spin-offs are officially non bank affiliates and non-profit affiliates, meaning they operate under different, looser financial regulations outside the scope of the FDIC.

One more dot to connect: the parent corporation, ShoreBank is alive and well in Portland with a branch in Ilwaco and its CEO David Williams sits on the board of the Columbia Land Trust, the Grays River dike busters, as treasurer. Nuff said?

Howard Brawn

Puget Island