Carolinas Credit Union League's Phantom "Financial H187 Deserts"

   Putting one over on our elected reps?

Had much back-and-forth in the last few days over those "financial deserts" manufactured by the Carolinas Credit Union League (CCUL) [link] to try and convince our Legislature to approve 1) open membership [link] , 2) unfettered commercial lending, and 3) crypto investment opportunities for North Carolina's state chartered credit unions. 

✅ One commenter said about "financial deserts":

❋ Anonymous April 3, 2025 at 11:04 AM Several counties have only 1 or 2 banks. Why is more choice for consumers a bad thing? 

 

✅ Well, the most direct answer to that is under N.C. law, credit unions are not permitted to serve the public. That's been the law since 1915 in North Carolina. And, credit unions weren't created to compete against N.C. banks [link].

 

😄 But let's take a look at the 6 counties served by only one bank:  1) BERTIE - 1 bank, 1 branch, population 16,856; 2) GREENE  - 1 bank, 1 branch, population 20,153; 3) HYDE - 1 bank, 2 branches, population 4,671; 4) MITCHELL - 1 bank, 2 branches, population 14,723; 5) NORTHAMPTON - 1 bank, 1 branch, population 16,503; 6) WASHINGTON - 1 bank, 1 branch, population 10,548.

 😎 In all these counties, you will be extremely hard-pressed to find anyone who lives more than 8 miles from a bank! The "widows and orphans, under-served" schmaltz is a fabrication, a fiction of CCUL.  

Easiest to demonstrate with Greene County because it has a fairly uniform shape. Almost every place in Greene County is within 8 miles of the county seat in Snow Hill. That "blue line" reaches from Snow Hill out @ 8 miles. If you visually "rotate it around", not hard to see that @96% of the County is within the 8 mile circle.  For those few who live "on the borders" of Greene County, all are within 8 miles of the banks in Goldsboro, LaGrange, Kinston, Farmville, Ayden, Stantonsburg, Winterville, even Greenville and Wilson in adjacent counties. Greene County folks have easy access to dozens of banks and branches

😎 Don't believe me? Here try it for yourself [link]. When you get to the GIS Map, click on the ruler up in top/right; then click middle measurement box and select "miles" ; then move your cursor to any spot in Greene County, drop a point, and draw a line; to retry, hit "clear" in the measurement box and select miles again.

Same applies for all of Mitchell County; and, in Bertie County  "folks on the fringe" have near access to banks in Plymouth, Edenton, Ahoskie, Williamston, etc. The outlier folks in Northampton have a short drive to Roanoke Rapids.

Best of all the folks in Hyde and Washington Counties already have a super, long-established, local, state-chartered credit union, WEYCO, to serve them. In fact WEYCO is open to everyone in the following counties - Beaufort, Bertie, Carteret, Chowan, Craven, Hyde, Jones, Martin, Pamlico, Perquimans, Pitt, Tyrrell, and Washington counties. **[the blue seven are Tier 1 counties!]

😎 Why would CCUL seek to undercut the efforts of WEYCO and other N.C. community credit unions with this legislation?

  Poodling for someone! ... definitely "bullish"!