Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation

From: Bjmarquez@aol.com [mailto:Bjmarquez@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 8:27 PM
To: Comments
Subject: Community Reinvestment Act

Mr. Robert Feldman
Executive Secretary
Attention Comments/Legal ESS
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
550 17th Street NW
Washington DC, 20429-9990

Re: RIN 3064-AC50

Dear Mr. Feldman;

The purpose of this letter is to express opposition to your proposal to significantly weaken the Community Reinvestment Act. You are proposing reduced CRA obligations for banks between $250million and $1 billion in assets. The reduced requirements would include modification of testing requirements on the number of investments and services in low and moderate-income areas. The second would allow mid sized banks to reduce their community development activities.

This ruling would apply to all locally headquartered banks in San Diego. It would only exclude the very large national banks. It would create an unequal playing field in the banking industry in this region. It would allow for market domination in major geographical areas of the County for specific products and services. It would exclude ethnic and lower income residents from basic banking services and thereby be in direct violation of the federal Community Reinvestment Act and quite possibly the Fair Housing Act.

We urge you to rescind your intent to reduce CRA related policies toward smaller banks.

Sincerely,

Barbara Marquez O'Neill