Rep. Wants 'Minority Assistance' Office in CFPA

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is urging members of the Congressional Black Caucus to withhold their votes on the financial reform bill unless it contains a provision establishing an office of minority assistance within the new Consumer Finance Protection Agency. "If they expect us to vote for it, we've got to be in it, and I'm prepared to do whatever is necessary to make sure we are," Rep. Waters told a mortgage industry diversity conference. The senior-most woman in the House and the senior-most African American, Rep. Waters described situations where minorities are being excluded from participating in the real estate recovery. Minority contractors are not being hired in sufficient numbers to rehab foreclosed properties and minority realty brokers are being denied listings to sell them, she said at the Mortgage Lending Industry Strategic Markets and Diversity Conference at the Gaylord National Resort on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. "It's unfair, unjust and I'm going to make it right," she said. "I'm focused like a laser beam on this issue." The 10-term Congresswoman from South Central Los Angeles said every federal regulator should have a minority assistance office. "Whether it's the Treasury or the FDIC or the Fed, minorities are not there in the numbers they should be," she said. Rep. Waters, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity and is often described as the most powerful woman in politics today, also told the meeting that she is so "disappointed" with the inability of mortgage servicers to modify troubled borrowers' loans that she believes the entire servicing business is in need of reform.