A Banker Goes to City Hall

A Banker Goes to City Hall

By Francis X. Gilpin

Associate Editor

It took Robert P. Brown hardly any time at all to see that his first job in the savings and loan industry wouldn't last long.

A certified public accountant, Brown was hired as internal auditor for a Largo S&L at the height of the industry's fast-and-loose 1980s frenzy. "I was there about a year before I saw the writing on the wall that they weren't too long for this world," says Brown.

The clincher was a trip to Houston, where the Largo S&L had multimillion-dollar exposure on two Texas condominium loans.

"Both projects were boarded up. One of the projects looked like a penitentiary," says Brown. "There was no doubt in my mind they were going to lose their shirt on those two projects. And they were lead lenders."

Fast forward 20 years to Plant City.

Now executive vice president and treasurer of Sunshine State Federal Savings and Loan Association, Brown will be using his sharp eye to do more than review the $185-million-asset thrift's financials. Brown is Plant City's newest city commissioner.

The gregarious 46-year-old appears to be the epitome of a prudent small-town banker. From the conservative S&L where he has worked for the past two decades, he will bring a business approach to city hall.

"I think Robert will do a fine job," says his boss, J. Floyd Hall, president and chief executive of Sunshine State Federal. "He's got a good financial mind. He's a compassionate person. He's good with people."

A federal takeover of Brown's previous employer in Largo provided the coda to an early lesson in how not to operate a savings institution.

"Back then, that wasn't unique to them," Brown says of the government seizing S&Ls in the 1980s. "They just didn't stick to their knitting. They didn't do what they were chartered to do. I compare that to Sunshine State Federal. Sunshine State Federal has always tried to be a community financial institution that just serves our local community."

His service to Plant City will extend to local politics for the next three years when he takes office in May.

Earlier this month, Brown defeated Liesta Woodward Sykes, a management consultant to the state's child welfare agency, to win a Plant City commissioner seat.

The names of bankers are a rare sight on election ballots and rarer still on rosters of elected officials. Just two of Florida's 160 state legislators, for example, list their profession as banking, according to the business lobby Associated Industries of Florida.

Bankers don't have much free time after business and family commitments, says Brown.

"Even the state Legislature, you can't do that if you have a real job," he says. "I know lawyers can do that pretty well because they can get their partners to cover for them. But banking? I don't know. We've got real jobs back here."

A former chairman of the Greater Plant City Chamber of Commerce, Brown got a taste of the public sector as an original gubernatorial appointee to the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. But he resisted entreaties to run for public office because he didn't want to give up family time.

But, when veteran Plant City Commissioner Mike Sparkman announced that he was stepping down, Brown decided to go for it in January. His daughter started college last year.

His wife, Wendy S. Brown, a high school English teacher, shared campaign manager duties with a retired neighbor. "There were only a couple of times that I said: 'Honey, you're my wife, not my drill instructor,'" Robert Brown jokes.

The toughest part of electioneering was asking people for money. "That was out of my comfort zone," he says.

Still, he didn't do badly at it. Brown raised $10,635, including a $100 donation from former Florida House Speaker Johnnie Byrd.

Although Brown captured 56% of the April 5 vote, he was under-whelmed by his margin of victory. "From looking at the poll results, there's some areas of the city that I really didn't get into too much and you can tell from the outcome," he says.

Brown, who lives in the city's sprawling Walden Lake development, concentrated on the vote-rich upscale neighborhood. He claims the African-American Sykes focused on Plant City's minority neighborhoods.

In between, about 6,000 of the city's 16,000 registered voters were largely ignored in the older sections of Plant City. "Neither of us worked that," says Brown. "And you can tell there was so much apathy, probably because nobody went out and asked them" for their votes.

Sykes disputes that, saying she campaigned or leafleted in most sections of Plant City.

"I didn't have to focus on the black community because I'm a product of that community," Sykes says. "I don't think Robert took me very seriously at first. I think at the end he was running a little scared."

In any event, Brown hopes to bridge the racial and economic divide between a white Republican banker and Plant City neighborhoods that might feel neglected. "That's something that I recognize I'm going to have to work on a little harder in the future," says Brown,

Brown also looks forward to managing the growth of Plant City, not just helping to finance it.

Plant City, on the eastern edge of Hillsborough County, is transforming from a strawberry-farming hamlet to a prosperous Interstate 4 bedroom community for Tampa and Orlando. The municipality has roughly doubled in population since 1980 to an estimated 32,000 residents in 2004.

"Plant City is going to grow," says Brown. "Now, in the end, do you want it to grow uncontrolled and look like Brandon? Or do you want it to grow in a controlled fashion and still maintain the Plant City feel?"

Brown answers his own question by declaring support for raising Plant City's development-impact fees on builders and developers. Even if the fees are increased to the levels of surrounding governments, Brown says the revenue covers just 30% of the transportation needs created by new retail districts, office parks, and subdivisions.

His impact-fee stance notwithstanding, Brown describes himself as a Reagan-style conservative who wants Plant City government to operate like a business as much as possible.

Brown has done both at Sunshine State Federal. He is proud of the Plant City S&L's strong balance sheet. Its total risk-based capital ratio is 18.75%, well above the 10% mark that federal regulators consider to be well capitalized.

"Just using what I have now, literally, I could double in size and still meet the minimum capital requirements," says Brown. "Who would want to? That's not our style. But we could."

The thrift has earned more than $1 million in each of the past two years, but returns on assets and equity have been unspectacular. ROE declined slightly in 2004, to 5.15%.

Then again, the 50-year-old mutual thrift has no stockholders to satisfy. Brown says Sunshine State Federal is one of only three mutual thrifts left in Florida that are essentially owned by depositors.

The board of directors and depositors aren't clamoring for a stock conversion, according to Brown. "The only motivation for going to stock ownership is insider - I hesitate to say greed - but desire to get at a benefit for the insiders," he says.

"If you were to choose to go public, you'd be hard-pressed to keep it independent for a very long period of time because we have a lot of cash and a lot of liquidity. We'd be a primary acquisition target."

Brown thinks he would be out of a job within two years under the scenario. In the more likely event that Sunshine State Federal stands pat, Brown will probably succeed Hall as president and CEO.

"The community, in all of these thrift conversions that later got bought out by the bigger banks or another big thrift, loses their community financial institution," he says. "They lose the people that are putting ads in or giving people time to go practice for a local theater production or coaching basketball or baseball or soccer teams."