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Editorial: Steal of the City
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Business New Haven
10/13/2003
By: BNH
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Steal of the City
The 2003 New Haven Colony Historical Society "Seal of the City" award — established 11 years ago to honor a person or institution whose activities or ideas have significantly added to the quality of life, prosperity or general improvement of greater New Haven — was to have been conferred at a New Haven Lawn Club dinner October 27 upon none other than (drum roll, please):
New Haven Savings Bank.
Strange but true.
But wait. In an unexpected fit of common sense, the NHCHS board has decided to postpone the Seal of the City event — and conferring the actual award — until some time in the spring.
NHCHS Director Peter Lamothe told BNH that his board had concluded that "it’s not the right climate" to honor New Haven Savings, particularly in light of the withering criticism the bank has weathered since announcing its plan to convert from mutual to public-stock ownership by circumventing the bank’s putative owners, a/k/a depositors.
Lamothe said the board hasn’t decided whether it will seek to identify a new award-winner, or merely defer giving it to NHSB until after the furor has subsided a bit. The NHCHS is schedule to meet October 16 to consider the matter.
The decision to postpone is a sound one. In fairness to the historical society, the decision to honor NHSB was arrived at months before the current controversy erupted. And the NHCHS is to an extent between a rock and a hard place: on the wrong side of the bank (and the charitable foundation it controls) if it reneges on the award, and on the wrong side of public opinion if it proceeds.
We hope the society will find another "person or institution" more worthy of the Seal of the City than New Haven Savings.
The NHCHS decision can be seen in another light. Adherents to the faith of Jehovah’s Witnesses sever their associations with those who leave or are expelled from the church — even including family members and loved one. This practice is known as "shunning" or "disfellowshipping" the offender.
So to speak, the historical society’s decision not to award the Seal of the City to New Haven Savings — at least not now — could be characterized as a form of community "shunning."
But on its own it is not enough. While Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and the Board of Aldermen (who one October 7 passed a resolution urging the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to reject the bank’s application to waive the requirement of a depositor vote on the conversion) have been explicitly critical of the bank and its management, why, for example, has our voice in Congress, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-3), been heard from on this issue? The failure of conversion opponents to recruit DeLauro to their cause enables NHSB’s PR flaks to position opponents as a few disgruntled local politicians. The stated opposition of DeLauro would be another kettle of fish, entirely.
Meanwhile, another battlefront opened September 26 with the filing of a class-action lawsuit against the bank’s management and directors by a group of depositors (see story, page 8). The suit seeks to halt the conversion and petitions the court for compensatory and punitive damages.
In a related development, on September 29, NHSB officials announced that the name New Haven Savings would itself not survive the new go-go regime. The new, merged bank would be known as NewAlliance Bank, effectively erasing "New Haven" from its identity once and for all.
Kind of like shunning the rest of us, come to think of it.
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