City to renew lease on ATM for bank accused of defrauding customers

The City Council will meet in special session at 9 a.m. Friday to renew an agreement to lease an ATM site to Wells Fargo Bank, recently accused of opening two million false accounts for tens of thousands of customers, at a rate more than three times the amount the bank is currently paying for the spot of land on which the money machine is situated.

The ATM renewal is not the main reason this special meeting was called, however. The council also plans to go into executive session to discuss a number of items, including the continuation of the City Manager Scott Sellers’s performance evaluation (at the end of which I expect the council will, at least, try to extend his contract at most likely a higher salary) as well as whether to continue to provide funding for the Chamber of Commerce and, if so, how much to reduce the current amount of that funding. But the main issue to be discussed in executive session is a pending meet and confer agreement with the police officers association, the terms and conditions of which must be agreed upon before Saturday, the start of the new fiscal year.

It is obvious that the city and the association have reached an agreement on a new contract or else the item would not be part of the council’s executive session agenda. In fact, I would argue this special council meeting would not even have been called had not an agreement been reached. Attorneys will use the private session to brief the council on the terms of the agreement after which the council will most likely return from executive session and take action to formally approve the agreement.

For those few who haven’t heard how disastrous the last two weeks have been for Wells Fargo, one only has to look at the above video that shows part of the two hour grilling of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf on Capitol Hill for blatant fraud in regards to opening bogus accounts that has shattered the company's reputation and damaged the banking industry's reputation in general.

According to documents that accompany Friday’s agenda, the city had been leasing Wells Fargo space adjacent to City Hall for an ATM at the rate of $650 a month. The new agreement calls for the chastised financial institution to pay the city $2,154 a month during the upcoming fiscal year with that rate escalating 5 percent annually after that.

You can see the complete agenda for the special meeting here.