It's been over a month now, since the SECU Board approved new bylaw amendments, designed to further crush SECU member participation and governance rights in their credit union.
How do you know? A check of the official SECU Board minutes would be a good place to start [link]. Our CEO was asked politely - well in advance, as required - at the 2025 SECU Annual Meeting about the amendments [link]. A masquerade of goggledy-gook was offered in a prepared response to the 3 million SECU members.
The SECU Advisory Board system - the members' first line of defense for leadership accountability - was called upon to seek a legitimate answer [link]. But the charade continues.
What's truly appalling is that the rest of the credit union world already knows what the SECU leadership refuses to admit to 3 million SECU members. Take a look:
✔ "Just A Member" blog: "In a January 2024 blog, I described NCUA’s approval of bylaw changes for Navy and Pentagon FCU’s that effectively eliminated the ability of member-owners to nominate directors for board openings. (link) "
"In the post Who is Responsible for Credit Union Democracy, I summarized these changes: The two largest FCU’s quietly changed the required number of signatures for member nominations for the board. In both situations the change removed the 500-signature standard bylaw and replaced it with a percentage of members. For Navy this new signature requirement was 26,000 and for PenFed 5,800 based on their latest reported member counts. Now the trifecta for the three largest credit unions is complete." [link - read the whole piece]
👺 So, now you too know. The underlying question for all SECU members should be: Is trickery the cause of such poor treatment of member-owners by the SECU leadership?
"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." - James Baldwin
