7-10-09

 
7-10-09
Merced Sun-Star
Loose Lips: Some Scull-duggery down south
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/v-print/story/943924.html
We've always figured Merced doesn't look like much from the top floor of the Ivory Tower. But who knew UC Merced was viewed with the same downcast eyes?
The academic infighting became apparent Thursday when a letter surfaced written by UC San Diego sociology department chair Andrew Scull and a cadre of professors proposing to close our campus.
Merced County needs another set of abandoned buildings like it needs a nuclear waste storage site.
Comparing UC Merced to the Hummer brand, a foundering division of GM, the 23 department chairs proposed closing UCM, UC Santa Cruz or UC Riverside to save their paychecks. And we thought they were in it for the pursuit of knowledge.
Fortunately, that university is putting out such groundbreaking research as this: "High Carbon Dioxide Levels Cause Abnormally Large Fish Ear Bones."
If anything, Merced's campus is a small, economical model that's accessible to people who may otherwise be left without a set of wheels.
Scull's plan is probably headed for the wrecking yard, as the UC system Prez Mark Yudof quickly distanced himself from it and called for a unified approach to dealing with budget cuts.
The proposal touched off a fury of comment on the Sun-Star's Web site, reminding us of the fierce regionalism in this state. Scull was called a few unsavory names online.
Rather than get angry, Lips figures we get even. How about diverting some of the water flowing to SoCal back to the thirsty land on the Westside? Or maybe it's time to split this state in half.
Wait. In that case we'd still be stuck with Sacramento.
Modesto Bee
Modesto puts off annexing islands...Adam Ashton
http://www.modbee.com/local/v-print/story/776789.html
Modesto this week chose to look outside its borders for growth that could bring new commercial and industrial development over the next decade.
That left some asking when the city would take steps to annex the more than 30 underserved, unincorporated pockets within its borders.
One of them was City Councilwoman Kristin Olsen, who urged her colleagues to write a blanket ballot measure that she argued could speed up the annexation of Modesto's county islands.
But a question about cash -- the same hang-up that has stalled improvements to those islands for years -- surfaced, persuading the majority of the council that a ballot measure would be meaningless unless someone could find the money to install sewers, lay sidewalks and upgrade streetlights.
"I wish we could take all 32 of them and get them in the city tomorrow," Mayor Jim Ridenour said about the islands. "None of us have the funding to do this. We're going to have to do them one at a time."
Modesto voters since 1999 have lined up six islands for annexations by approving ballot measures that said they'd favor the city extending sewer lines to those neighborhoods.
Of those areas, only one has advanced to a point where it might be annexed by the end of this year.
That's the Shackelford neighborhood in south Modesto, which benefited from a $2.2 million investment by Stanislaus County that yielded sewer lines.
"The county is committed to getting these islands annexed as fast as economically possible, but they're expensive projects," Stanislaus County Supervisor Jim DeMartini said.
Modesto's unincorporated islands developed over time as a form of affordable housing when the areas sat outside the city limit. That's why they tend to lack sidewalks, sit closer to roads and rely on septic tanks despite their obviously urban surroundings.
It would take a developer financing a new project or big investments from government to produce the kind of public improvements the city considers necessary before it will absorb the islands.
The city and county often hit a stalemate when they talk about the unincorporated pockets.
On one hand, Modesto won't annex the islands until Stanislaus County ponies up cash to bring the neighborhoods up to city development standards. At last count, the city estimated improving the islands would cost $133 million.
"The county's not producing any method to pay for the improvements and every time we turn around, they come up with a new scheme that somehow involves taking all of the tax revenue for the area, which still won't cover it," said Councilwo-man Janice Keating.
On the other hand, the county contends the city's annexation standards are unreasonably high for 60-year-old neighborhoods.
"They cannot require new subdivision standards on subdivisions that were built in World War II," DeMartini said.
Two efforts are taking place outside Modesto to break the impasse. Neither is particularly welcomed by local officials.
Assemblyman Juan Arambula, I-Fresno, is carrying a bill that would compel cities to annex islands if 25 percent of residents in a given area ask for the change. Andrew White, Arambula's legislative director, said the bill likely would move forward next year. He said the bill would change as its supporters provide more details on how the annexations would be implemented.
Another is a 2005 lawsuit filed by Latino residents in the islands who contend the city and county have discriminated against them by neglecting their neighborhoods.
The city and county won the case in federal court two years ago, but it's awaiting a new ruling from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco.
Modesto Community and Economic Development Director Brent Sinclair on Tuesday advised the City Council that the time might be right to take a comprehensive look at the city's unincorporated pockets. The goal would be to write ballot measures for votes on sewer extensions over the next two years.
"Let's devote time just for this, because there are so many areas and each area is unique," he said.
Indybay.com
Delta Groups Rally Against The Panama Canal North
“The exporting of more water out of the Delta not only dooms agriculture in the Delta, but also dooms one of the largest estuaries on the North American West Coast,” stated Rudy Mussi, Central Delta farmer and Member of the Central Delta Water Agency...Dan Bacher
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/09/18606534.php
Legislators and hundreds of Delta advocates held a rally at the State Capitol in Sacramento on Tuesday to oppose the peripheral canal, a budget-busting and environmentally destructive project that would approximate the Panama Canal in width and length.
"I'm not going to vote for a plan that builds a Panama Canal down the middle of the 15th Assembly District,” exclaimed Assemblymember Joan Buchanan to loud applause from a crowd of recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, Delta farmers, farmworkers, Indian Tribal members, environmentalists and community activists. “I will do all I can to make that the Delta is protected.”
As she spoke, Delta family farmers from North Delta CARES and others held up banners proclaiming “The Peripheral Canal=Panama Canal North,” along with signs saying, “Fewer Water Exports, Not Fewer Delta Fish” and “Give the Delta a Voice!”
Buchanan said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Delta Vision Process calls for "improved conveyance" that will transport 15,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs) from the Sacramento River around the Delta. This is smaller than the proposed 1982 peripheral canal, defeated overwhelmingly by the voters, that was intended to transport 22,000 cfs.
A conveyance to transport 15,000 cfs. would be between 500 and 700 feet wide, requiring a 1300 foot right-of-way, based on an engineering report completed in August 2006 by Washington Group International for the State Water Contractors, “Isolated Facility, Incised Bay-Delta System – Estimate of Construction Costs.”
“That's the width of a 100 lane freeway,” said Buchanan. “The length of the conveyance would be between 47 and 48 miles.”
By comparison, the Panama Canal is between 500 and 1000 feet wide and is 50 miles long.
The rally was held not only to oppose the “Panama Canal North,” but to demand that Delta residents have a voice in ongoing water policy negotiations in the Legislature.
“The message today is quite simple,” said State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis), who opened the rally. “You can’t fix the Delta without the people of the Delta as your partners.”
Wolk stated that changes to the Delta proposed by the Legislature and the Governor’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan and Delta Vision processes could mean increased exposure to pollutants in the waters, increased costs for water and water treatment, reduced farm production, greater loss of commercial fishing and a higher risk of flooding.
The rally took place on the day that a hearing regarding a package of water bills was originally scheduled. However, the hearing, which hundreds were expecting to attend, was cancelled and has not been rescheduled.
The coalition of canal opponents fears that the final package, developed through secret negotiations with no input from Delta residents, would fund the budget-busting canal at a time when California has a $24.3 billion deficit.
Peripheral Canal: A Bad Idea In 1982 and Even Worse Now
“The peripheral canal was a bad idea in 1982 and it’s an even worse idea today,” said Steve Evans, Conservation Director, Friends of the River. “Several court rulings have proven that the government can’t be trusted to operate a Peripheral Canal in a way that benefits the Delta. Instead it will be used to suck most of the fresh water from the Sacramento River for export to southern Central Valley agribusiness and southern California developers.”
Fisheries advocates said the canal must stopped because it will only exacerbate the collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass, threadfin shad, Sacramento splittail and other Delta fish populations.
Bill Jennings, Chairman/Executive Director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, described the canal and dams proposal as “a legislative dash to the worst environmental disaster in American history” – and noted that the Delta is dying because existing environmental laws are being ignored.
“Discarding prudent legislative deliberation and oversight is likely to lead to wasting tens of billions of dollars constructing a massive white elephant that will destroy Delta fisheries and water quality,” said Jennings. “It will gravely damage the Delta economy, deliver less water than presently exported and cause increased litigation because of legal flaws and bad science.”
“The water exporters look at the Delta as a reservoir, but it is actually a living ecosystem,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). “The life blood of California’s commercial salmon fishery is being drained out of the Delta as the freshwater is exported to San Joaquin Valley agribusiness.”
Farmers from throughout the Delta came in force to the rally. Farmers oppose the canal because increasing salinity caused by the canal would both destroy agriculture on one of the world's most fertile estuaries and devastate fish populations in order to export water to subsidized water to drainage impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.
“The exporting of more water out of the Delta not only dooms agriculture in the Delta, but also dooms one of the largest estuaries on the North American West Coast,” stated Rudy Mussi, Central Delta farmer and Member of the Central Delta Water Agency.
Winnemem Wintu Tribe Fights for the Delta
Mark Franco, headman of the Winnemem Wintu (McCloud River) Tribe, held up a sign proclaiming, “Tribes Support Saving the Delta.” The Winnemem Wintu has been forefront in the battle to save the Delta and stop the peripheral canal. They are strongly opposing a federal plan to raise Shasta Dam that is a linchpin in the plan to export more water out of the Delta through the canal.
“The peripheral canal is a big, stupid idea that doesn’t make any sense from a tribal environmental perspective,” said Franco. “Building a canal to save the Delta is like a doctor inserting an arterial bypass from your shoulder to your hand– it will cause your elbow to die just like taking water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal will cause the Delta to die.”
Robert Johnson, Delta fly fishing enthusiast and founder of Californians Against the Canal, pointed out the absurdity of the state funding the enormously expensive canal and more dams at a time when the state is laying off teachers and nurses and mandating three unpaid furlough days a month for state employees. He urged the state to find sustainable alternatives to meet California's water needs.
“The Peripheral Canal and Sites and Temperance Flat Dams will cost over $40 billion, including interest, and not provide a DROP of additional water,” said Johnson. “How can state legislators allow this secretive, hugely expensive bond measure to be jammed through without rigorous debate exploring the alternative Alternatives that will provide over 10 million acre feet of water for the state – more water than has ever been exported from NorCal?“
Likewise, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, said, “We want real solutions – programs and projects that will capture, recycle, and treat water – programs that are cost effective and environmentally sound – programs that will stop the insanity of moving water from north to south through or around the Delta.
Freddie Morales, a young farmworker from Alpaugh in the San Joaquin Valley, illustrated the irony of corporate agribusiness campaigning to export more water from the Delta when they continually deny clean drinking water to farmworkers in rural communities.
“We need clean drinking water and the water is bad in my community,” he said. “People get sick from it.”
Elected officials who spoke at the rally included Lt. Governor John Garamendi, State Senator Mark DeSaulnier, Assemblymembers Alyson Huber and Mariko Yamada, and Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors representative Mary Piepho, speaking for the assembled County Supervisors from the five Delta counties.
Other speakers included Charlotte Hodde, Water Program Manager of the Planning and Conservation League, Debbie Davis, Legislative Analyst for the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water and Jim Metropulos, Senior Advocate for Sierra Club California.
The Delta’s Voice Must Be Heard!
Canal opponents emphasized that while the Legislature is on the verge of considering a massive and costly restructuring of California’s water laws and water infrastructure, there have been no public hearings even as the Legislative policy committees are set to complete their work.
“A series of secret bills, not yet in official language, are set to be merged and will cover several contentious water issues including governance of the Bay-Delta region, water conservation, new dams and an updated version of the multi-billion dollar Peripheral Canal, which was overwhelming rejected by California voters in 1982,” according to a statement from Restore the Delta.
Expressing concern that the public and most legislators have not seen the legislative language and the bills are only scheduled for a cursory policy committee hearing instead of allowing for public input, the group called for public hearings where the voices of Delta residents, farmers and fishermen are heard and acted upon in a spirit of openness and transparency.
“Delta communities need to have a major voice in the process,” concluded Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. “Without public hearings, the more than 500,000 Californians who live and work in the Delta are being denied the opportunity to hold a major voice in the process.”
Los Angeles Times
U.S. plans to boost 'critical habitat' acreage to help rare shrew...Louis Sahagun
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2009/07/feds-plan-to-boost-protected-acreage-to-help-rare-shrew.html
Chalk one up for the Buena Vista Lake ornate shrew.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed today to review and redesignate habitat crucial to the survival  of the tiny, nocturnal insect eater with beady eyes and long snout found in only
four places along a 70-mile stretch of the western edge of Kern County, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
Under the Bush administration, the agency in 2004 had proposed 4,649 acres of "critical habitat" for the shrew but reduced it to merely 84 acres a year later, said Ileene Anderson, a spokeswoman for the environmental group.
As a result of a lawsuit filed by the group, the agency agreed to re-propose the 4,649 acres within the next 90 days and issue a designation of critical habitat on or before March 22, 2012.
“This settlement is an important victory for the Buena Vista Lake ornate shrew and California's invaluable wetlands in the arid San Joaquin Valley,” Anderson said in a statement. “The agreement requires that the agency that is supposed to be protecting this rare mammal take a hard look at what is needed — not only to keep this unique animal from extinction but to increase the population to levels that ensure its survival.”
Only a few dozen of the shrews, which were first identified by scientists in 1932, are believed to exist in the wild. About 5% of their historic haunts surrounding Tulare, Buena Vista, Kern and Goose lakes in the southern Central Valley remain intact.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Bills giving Legislature control of UC shelved
Measures sought repeal of historic autonomy...James P. Sweeney, U-T SACRAMENTO BUREAU
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/10/1n10uc232626-bills-giving-legislature-control-uc-s/?education&zIndex=129707
SACRAMENTO – A controversial move to give state lawmakers direct authority for the first time over the University of California has been quietly shelved by the Legislature's Democratic leaders and appears to be all but dead.
“I just don't think it's a good idea,” said Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, a UC alumnus and the most powerful Democrat in a Legislature controlled by Democrats. “The state government has enough trouble, enough challenge managing what we are required now to manage.”
The change, sought in two bills, would seek to repeal the university's historic constitutional autonomy, giving the Legislature unspecified control over the 10-campus system. Its backers in the Legislature have portrayed the UC as an arrogant bureaucracy that continued to boost six-figure salaries and spend lavishly on other expenses while subjecting its 225,000 students to steady increases in fees.
But late last month, Steinberg had Senate Constitutional Amendment 21 pulled back from the Senate Education Committee and returned to the Rules Committee, which he chairs and where it will remain indefinitely.
“I don't think this is the time for us to consider taking over the policy-making function of the University of California,” Steinberg said in an interview.
He added that he is “committed to allowing any ideas to be heard at some point,” but said he did not know when the measure might be released from the Rules Committee.
In the Assembly, the largely identical Assembly Constitutional Amendment 24 has been held in the Assembly Rules Committee since it was introduced six weeks ago.
“I guess the (UC) Regents have pretty powerful friends, that's all I can say,” said Sen. Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat and co-author of SCA 21.
“There's obviously an effort to keep it from moving forward,” said Assemblyman Brian Nestande, a Palm Desert Republican who co-authored ACA 24.
At the UC, officials were not yet ready to celebrate the measures' apparent demise.
“We remain opposed to the idea, but we're not engaged in the day-to-day navigation of the thing through legislative channels,” UC spokesman Peter King said.
Since its inception 141 years ago, the University of California has been governed by a Board of Regents, most of whom are gubernatorial appointees. The Legislature can and has urged UC to take certain actions with the implicit threat that defiance could jeopardize more than $3 billion in state funding.
The pending amendments, which would go before state voters if passed by a two-thirds vote in each house, were introduced with bipartisan backing at a news conference in May.
The measures would subject the university “to legislative control as may be provided by statute.”
University officials dismissed Yee's legislation as “absurd.” They blame the Legislature for the relentless run-up in student fees. Since 1990, per-student funding from the state – adjusted for inflation and enrollment growth – has fallen 40 percent and the university faces another round of unprecedented cuts, UC President Mark Yudof has said.
To turn the nation's most prestigious public university over to a Legislature widely considered dysfunctional “should be a non-starter,” the university argued.
In recent weeks, some of the state's most powerful business leaders embellished that position in a pointed, three-page letter to legislators.
“We harbor grave concerns about the many unintended consequences that could stem from Sen. Yee's ill-conceived bill,” stated the letter signed by former UC Regents Chairman William Coblentz, former BankAmerica Chairman Richard Rosenberg, former Oakland A's owner Walter Haas, former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, among others.
Legislative control could chill private research funding and contributions from philanthropists who might have reservations about giving to an “institution controlled by politicians,” the letter warned.
“It's unlikely that any of the revolutionary advances in sustainable energy, medicine, agriculture and other sciences developed at UC . . . could have been achieved if the university were subject to the political contention, gridlock and inaction prevalent in California's legislative process,” the letter declared.
Nonetheless, Yee said he is not ready to abandon his legislation, which his aides said has received more than 3,500 letters and e-mails of support.
“The UC Regents continuously violate the public trust and disrespect students and taxpayers,” Yee said. “Californians are saying, 'Enough is enough.' ”
In addition to a group of Republicans and Democrats in both houses, the constitutional amendments are backed by the California Labor Federation and unions that represent UC workers and that have been at odds with the university.
Yee, who enjoys backing from many of the same unions, has introduced several other bills aimed at the UC. One would prohibit executive pay raises during tough budget years. Another would provide legal protection for whistle-blowers who work for the UC.
New York Times
Environmentalists Sue Over Energy Transmission Across Federal Lands...Kate Galbraith, Green Inc...7-
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/environmentalists-sue-over-energy-transmission-across-federal-lands/?pagemode=print
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times The sun rises over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Environmentalists are seeking to block transmission lines from this and other public lands.
A coalition of environmental groups is suing federal agencies in an effort to change the location of corridors to transmit energy across Western lands.
The environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wilderness Society, as well as several Western environmental groups — say that the corridors, which were designated in January by the Bush administration, are convenient for moving electricity generated by coal plants and other fossil fuels, but do little to facilitate the production of renewable energy on public lands.
“These are a product of a fossil fuel past,” said Carl Zichella, the director of Western renewables projects for the Sierra Club, in an interview.
The complaint was filed on Tuesday in a federal district court in San Francisco. It names as defendants several federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior, as well as its subsidiary, the Bureau of Land Management; the Department of Energy; and the Department of Agriculture and its subsidiary, the Forest Service.
Those agencies, the suit charged, created a sprawling, hop-scotch network of 6,000 miles of rights-of-way known as the ‘West-Wide Energy Corridors,’ without considering the environmental impacts of that designation, without analyzing any alternatives to their preferred pathways, without considering numerous federal policies that support renewable energy development, without ensuring the corridors’ consistency with federal and local land use plans, and without consulting other federal agencies or western states and local governments.
Mr. Zichella acknowledged that the Obama administration has been far friendlier toward the environmental groups’ priorities than the Bush administration. Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, is pushing aggressively to develop solar power on public lands.
The lawsuit, Mr. Zichella said, was to “help prioritize one thing to help them meet that goal.”
The environmental groups say that the corridors designated by the Bush administration go through a number of Western treasures, like the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area in California and the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico.
Mr. Zichella said that the Sierra Club was not against transmission as a general rule, but wanted to ensure that the lines served renewable energy, more than fossil fuels.
Also, “We want to build them in the right places to do the least environmental harm,” he said.
CNN Money
Bad loans are only one part of the problem; disastrous investments and risky funding sources have also helped to bring about the latest batch of bank failures...David Ellis
http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/10/news/companies/banks_failures/
index.htm?postversion=2009071012
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- On just about every Friday afternoon, bank regulators announce the latest batch of bank failures...they've shuttered 52 so far this year and the pace could well pick up.
Behind these causalities is a dangerous mix of risky funding techniques and loans to local businesses that simply went bad.
Most of the banks that have failed so far this year were ultimately done in by the large number of loans they issued to local residential and commercial real estate developers, who in turn were hit by the flagging economy.
For example, when Nevada's Silver State Bank failed last September approximately two-thirds of its entire loan portfolio consisted of real estate development and commercial construction loans.
Other banks simply succumbed to broader economic factors that were beyond their control. When milk prices suffered a steep decline earlier this year, many Colorado dairy producers found themselves unable to make good on their loan obligations, which only further squeezed ailing lender New Frontier. Regulators closed the Greeley, Colo.-based bank in April.
And with the commercial real estate market and small business sectors still struggling, some experts worry that the lenders that service them will be hit particularly hard in the months ahead.
"We are seeing more stress on the commercial real estate side than at the end of last year," said Karen Dorway, president and director of research at the bank rating and research firm Bauer Financial.
Lots of liquidity
But it has not just been aggressive or ill-timed loans that have ruined many banks to date. The risky manner in which they funded their operations have also hit banks hard.
Many experts cite the industry practice commonly referred to as using "hot money," or brokered deposits.
These deposits come from other institutions looking to park their funds where they can get a nice return on their investment.
Banks, particularly ones that are looking to grow, like them because they are an easy way to get funds, which they can in turn use to issue more loans. But relying on hot money can be risky. It's an expensive source of funding and a volatile one, as brokers move their money from bank to bank seeking out the best returns for their customers.
Consider the case of Franklin Bank, a Houston-based lender that was seized by regulators last November. A report published this week by the FDIC's Office of Inspector General pointed out that the firm relied primarily brokered deposits in the months leading up to its failure.
Regulators have also become increasingly wary of banks' reliance on a similar practice in which banks take cash advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank system, a group of 12 government-sponsored banks that was created during the Great Depression to spur lending in small communities.
The practice, which is another way that banks can get funding to make more loans, has been trending higher in recent years. Last year, for example, the number of these advances issued to all U.S. banks and thrifts stood at $788 billion, up 45% from 2004 levels. And during the first three months of 2009 alone, banks have secured $697 billion in advances.
While relying on such money is commonplace in the banking industry, what worries regulators is that some lenders have become too reliant on these borrowed funds to maintain their everyday operations. In recent reports on several failed lenders, the agency's Office of Inspector General has also noted the advances have weighed on the bank's earnings.
Some risky bets
Organizations that represent small banks maintain, however, that most community lenders -- which make up about 90% of the 8,200 banks and thrifts across the country -- are quite secure and continue to be a key source of credit for borrowers across the country.
But like their peers on Wall Street, some got tangled up in the deadly and complex financial instruments that felled banking giants.
Five Illinois-based lenders that were seized last week by regulators, for example, lost their footing after investing in collateralized debt obligations, those notorious investment products that became infamous last year after prompting billions of dollars in writedowns at firms like Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Merrill Lynch.
Recent reports have also suggested that same group of lenders, including Rock River Bank and First National Bank of Danville, also wagered on trust-preferred securities, another complex investment product used commonly throughout the industry as a means for banks to raise capital.
Many investors were lured in by the attractive dividends that these pooled securities offered. But as the housing market and the broader economy deteriorated, those payments dried up, prompting investors, including the five banks in Illinois, to take a hit, notes Bobby Schwartz, a partner at the law firm Smith, Gambrell & Rusell, whose practice has focused on representing financial institutions in the Southeast.
"It may hurt, but most financial institutions were not concentrated in this type of investment," he said. These investments weren't fatal for most community banks.
"In many of the cases," said Bauer's Karen Dorway, "it really has gone back to the loans."