California's Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors voted to stop doing business for five years with five banks that recently pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy charges, and Third District Supervisor Ryan Coonerty (pictured at left) encouraged other local governments to do the same.

In a June 2 letter to the board, Coonerty recommended that it change the county's investment policy to ban Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS from doing new business with the county for five years. Coonerty said the board voted unanimously to approve his proposal.

"I was thinking if we were going to build a community center or [award] a contract for the company to build a community center, or to pave the road or to chlorinate the pool, we would never accept a contract from a company that had just pled guilty to federal criminal charges," he told CU Times. "We would never do business with them, those people, regardless of how good their bid was. I just thought, why do we have a different standard for who we put our money with?"